Conner's Blog

It’s been a while since I made a pizza at home. In fact, it’s been so long that I had to lookup the dough recipe. Tonight, I remedied this and whipped up a tasty pie. I made a change to my dough and used stone ground flour. It added a bit of depth to the crust and I think I’ll use it again.

I topped this pizza with an onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning blend, a bunch of mushrooms, pineapple, and some whole milk mozzarella. I baked it and once done topped it with spinach. I wasn’t overly happy with how the spinach cooked up, but it was still better than baking the spinach on the pizza.

Looking at the photo it’s obvious I’m still getting used to my new lens.

It’s still asparagus season which means every time I walk into the Wedge or go to the Farmers Market I’m tempted to buy a bundle of green.  My first bunch was turned into a delicious stir fry type dinner, steamed it, and added it to an omelet.  The question was what to do with the second bundle.

Monday was a brutal day and I decided I needed pizza.  I wasn’t really in the mood for anything traditional though so I went over what was in my fridge.  I had bacon, chicken, peppers, and asparagus which sounded like a pretty good combo.  So after mixing up a batch of pizza dough and setting it to rise, I ran off to The Wedge for a few necessary ingredients.  I added mushrooms, fresh mozzarella, and feta to my ingredients.

After getting home, I started chopping up some of the veggies and cooking the chicken.  I’m slowly becoming obsessed with the chicken from The Wedge.  I buy the bone in breasts and they are not only huge, but incredibly tasty.

After doing a bit of knife work, it was time to roll out the dough.  This went pretty well and nothing is quite as nice as crust topped with sauce.

Add toppings:  Asparagus, onion, chicken, bacon, bannana peppers, and mushrooms.

Next I topped with cheese, a combo of fresh mozzarella, crumbled feta, and grated parmesean.

This is where disaster struck.  I didn’t take any photos as I was too busy trying to solve my mistake. I had put the dough on my work surface to top, but made the mistake of not putting down flour or corn meal.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the appropriate tools to scrape the dough off the work surface so moving the pizza onto my baking stone was a disaster.  I had toppings on the floor, the counter and cooking on the pre-heated pizza stone.  It turned the beautiful looking pizza you see above into something from a pizza horror film.

Of course it was still tasty, and I did have two crusts available so I redeemed myself with the next pizza.

Just looking at that makes me hungry for the leftovers sitting in my lunch bag.

I’ve been having a hard time talking myself into grocery shopping lately, and my cupboards and fridge show it.  Last night I decided I wanted pizza, so I whipped up a batch of pizza dough and stuck it in the oven to rise while I ran to the store.  On the way there, I started going over my options, I already had some pizza sauce from a previous pizza evening and had some Colby and Monterrey jack cheese, but not much mozzarella.  After a bit of pondering I decided to try to make taco pizza.

When I got home, I pulled the dough out of the oven and it was almost ready to roll out.   While I was waiting on the dough, I browned some burger and added taco seasoning.  To top the pizza, I mixed pizza sauce and taco sauce together, about 1 part to 1 part.  After putting the sauce on the crust I mixed some of the taco meat with some re-fried beans, I stopped the pizza with the taco/bean mixture and then some diced onions and finished with Monterrey and Colby cheeses.  After baking for 12 minutes, it came out looking wonderful.  I garnished with lettuce and tomato and served it with sour cream.

I was happy with how it turned out.  I really need to get myself a pizza stone though.  I find myself making homemade pizza every 1-2 weeks, and crust baked on a baking sheet just isn’t quite right.

Taco Pizza

• Your favorite pizza dough (I use the recipe from the Joy of Cooking)
• 1/3 or 1/4 cup pizza sauce
• 1/3 or 1/4 cup taco sauce
• Taco Meat
• Re-fried Beans
• Diced Onions
• Cheese (Any cheese you would use on tacos will work well here)
• Shredded Lettuce
• Diced Tomatoes

Prepare and roll out your pizza crust.  Mix the Taco and Pizza sauces together and top crust with sauce.  Combine Taco Meat and Re-fried beans and top pizza with mixture.  Top with a handful of diced onions and your choice of cheese.  Bake according to your pizza crust directions. Once you have removed it from the oven top with lettuce and diced tomato.  Serve with sour cream and salsa.

A list of things I’ve accomplished or done but failed to write about in the last few weeks

• Baked Bagels
• Baked pretzels
• Made meatloaf
• Made homemade ravioli
• Setup my server as a router
• Setup Jinzora so I can stream my music
• Setup a dhcp server and DNS caching server
• Baked whole wheat bread (though this was a failure)
• Homemade pizza on homemade crust
• Baked bread sticks
• Photo walked around the Lake of the Isles
• Ate way to much at theGranite City breakfast buffet
• Accidentally deleted most of the photos I took this year and finally setup a backup system so I never do something stupid like that again

Some of these weren’t exactly blog worthy, but I really need to get better at photographing and writing about things I do.  Especially the cooking, I love reading what other people are making for dinner, and should really share my own adventures.