Pizza Night

Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver, I wanted to start doing pizza night for family dinners. Her family has pizza night every Friday, which sounds great in theory but I'm always so done in the kitchen come Friday night that I always suggest eating out. Sundays sound like a perfect pizza night but I'm always so overwhelmed with cravings that I can't commit to having a certain food every week. We had our first pizza night on Sunday and it was great. We will definitely be doing it more often, I just can't commit to a weekly endeavor like I originally hoped.

.

I love pizza on the grill but due to the weather I thought I should use the oven for now. I bought a pizza stone from William Sonoma and it worked out great.

Eventually I would like to try making my own dough, my own cheese, and maybe even some pizza sauce once I get my hands on some great tomatoes. Since it was my first time using the pizza stone and doing pizza in the oven, I thought I would let that be the thing to learn for the day.

.

I'm still a sucker for testing things out though so I bought two kinds of sauce and two kinds of cheese to see which we preferred. I bought fresh pizza sauce from the prepared foods section and Muir Glen organic pizza sauce in a can. I would have thought the fresh would be much better than canned but they were equally good. I bought fresh mozzarella from the farmers market and pre-shredded mozzarella from the grocery store. I think we both preferred the fresh mozzarella but there wasn't a significant difference.

For this week's toppings I chose olives, mushrooms and hot Italian sausage. I bought dough from the prepared foods section of the grocery store. It was fine but I like the dough from a local pizzeria better (some pizzerias will sell you their dough!). I hope to make my own going forward though so long as I have some luck with it. I recommend having cornmeal on hand to help keep the dough from sticking to your pizza stone.

It's an easy dinner and fun if you do build-your-own, especially if you have kids who can participate. And the list of topping options is endless. You can even make it meatless night!