Homemade Pizza!

Day 107: Recipes 22 and 23

I have like a zillion blogs on my google reader (correction: I just checked, and it's only 102) on all sorts of topics, including celebrity gossip, home organization, finance, Mormon feminism, and (of course) cooking. This recipe didn't come from one of my cooking blogs - it actually came from one of the finance ones!

Homemade pizza sounded like, fun, so we decided to give it a shot! I'm counting it as two recipes, because one is the dough, and the other is the pizza we came up with. (Give me a break - I have less than a quarter of the recipes I'm supposed to at this point!)



Pizza Dough (modified from The Simple Dollar)

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
1 cup water
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt
Italian seasoning
oregano

Warm up the water, (you should still be able to touch it - too hot and it can do bad things to the yeast) then toss everything into a bowl and mix it up. I do it with our stand mixer. (OMG, I love our stand mixer!)

After it's pretty mixed, knead it with your hands. Then cover it with a towel, and leave it in a warm spot to rise for about an hour.

After an hour, knead it again, and then stretch it out on a pan. (We use a cookie sheet, because our pizza stone is in Texas.) Sometimes I let it rise for a bit again.

Then - and this is the important part - pre-bake the dough. Stick in a pre-heated oven for about 6 minutes. Pop any bubbles that come up.

Now we do the rest of the pizza part.

Sausage, Mushroom, Onion, and Red Bell Pepper Pizza
(serves 4-5)

pizza dough (store bought, or see above)
olive oil
pizza sauce
sausage
mushrooms
onion
red bell peppers
mozzarella cheese
oregano

Put a little bit of olive oil in a pan, and then lightly saute the sausage, mushrooms, onions and red bell peppers.

You have your pre-baked pizza dough, right? Spread the pizza sauce on top.

Now... layer. We put a bit of cheese, a bit of toppings, a bit more cheese, and then more toppings. Sprinkle the oregano on top. You can do it in whichever order you want.

Bake in a preheated oven of 400 degrees for about 15-20 minutes.

Eat. (Though I recommend letting it cool first.)

Survey says...
I try to make things healthier with whole wheat, but I don't think it worked so well in this recipe. We're going to play around with the dough some.

But the rest of the pizza was good. We're going to try to make this a weekly thing!

Pollo Rosa Maria knockoff and Alfredo sauce

Day 1: Recipes 1 & 2

I figured I might as well get ahead on the first day, so tonight we had a chicken dish and pasta alfredo. The chicken dish is meant to be similar to Carrabba's Pollo Rosa Maria, and the pasta is supposed to be an alfredo, but we made some modifications, so a purist might argue that they're not really.

I'd made the chicken a few years ago, but I've never tried to make my own alfredo sauce. Both of these are incredibly unhealthy, which means that they're kind of amazing.

Pollo Rosa Maria knockoff (modified from here)
serves 2

2 skinless, boneless, chicken breasts
2 slices prosciuto ham
1/4 cup fontina cheese
1/4 cup clarified butter - see Notes, below
2 small cloves garlic - minced
1/4 sm. yellow onion - chopped
1/8 cup dry white wine
3 sliced mushrooms
2 Tbls. butter
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 cup chopped fresh sweet basil (we used 1/8 cup dry basil because the grocery store was out, but fresh'd be better)
1 Tbls lemon juice

Butterfly the chicken breasts and cook them in a pan over medium heat. If you have pan that's not non-stick that'd be better because you're going to deglaze the pan in a bit, but we didn't and it turned out fine anyways.

While that's cooking chop up the onion and mushrooms, and minced the garlic.

You need to let the chicken cool a bit and then stuff the inside of it with a slice of prosciutto and half the fontina cheese. If the all cheese doesn't fit, just stick the rest on top. Then find a way to keep it warm - I just wrapped it in foil and put it in a warm oven.

The chicken had left all sorts nice little brown bits on the pan, so take it off the heat and add the white wine to deglaze the pan. Then toss in the clarified butter, the garlic and the onion and saute it over medium heat, until the onions are clear.

Add the mushrooms, butter (the non-clarified bit), salt, and pepper, and then saute it a bit more, until the mushrooms are tender. Stir in the basil and lemon juice and stir a bit more. Maybe 2-3 minutes.

Pour the sauce over the stuffed chicken and you're done!

White Alfredo-ish sauce (modified from here)
serves 3-ish

1/4 cup butter
1 garlic clove, minced
1 cup heavy cream
1/8 tsp pepper
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup shredded fontina cheese

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Then add the garlic, cream, and pepper, and bring it all to a simmer. Make sure you stir it often. I just put my husband in front of it, and told him to stir it constantly.

Once it's simmering, add the parmesan cheese and simmer again, stirring regularly, until the sauce has thickened a bit, and is smooth.

When that's done, add the fontina cheese bit by bit and stir constantly, until it's smooth.

Voila! White alfredo-ish sauce.

Survey says...

The chicken was a little dry, so I'll have to try this again and find a way to keep that from happening. It might have been from the time in the oven, or it might have been from the fact that I didn't cook it with anything. We'll work on that for next time.

The alfredo sauce was a little grainy, but I don't know if that's because of the alterations I made or something wrong with all the cooking. That just affected the texture, though - not the taste.

Overall? We'll definitely make the chicken again, though I'll probably follow the recipe exactly for the alfredo sauce next time, and see if that fixes the issue.