Pizza Party

The tomatoes are doing pretty well. But oftentimes I don’t get them off the vine before they start to split on me.

So I figured I’d make a sauce out of them and use it on some pizzas. I drizzled them with olive oil, sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper, and roasted them in the oven at 400F for about 30 minutes. Then I pureed it with a hand stick blender. I love that thing.

Then I thought it’d also be good to do a batch of pesto. I usually make it by hand with however much basil I can reasonably get from my flowerboxes without decimating the plants.

That’s basil, garlic, a few walnuts, olive oil, and pecorino romano cheese. Pignoli nuts and parmesan cheese are more traditional, but I use whatever I have in the house. I chop up the basil and mash the hell out of it in a mortar & pestle with the minced garlic, broken apart walnuts and a bit of salt and pepper.

Then I mix in some olive oil, add however much grated cheese seems to make sense taste-wise, add more olive oil to make it spreadable or sauce-able.

I made another batch of French bread dough to use as a pizza crust. This time I let the second rise happen in the fridge overnight so I could take it out the next morning when I had the time to make the pizzas.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to take pictures of me pulling the dough into pizza shapes, as I need both hands to pull the dough! This link shows kinda-sorta-a-little bit of what I do—I haven’t formed a lip like he does before, but will definitely try that next time. And of course his technique with his hands helping gravity to pull the dough out is infinitely better than mine.



So after the crust is formed and put on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, and the ingredients are all prepped.

That little dish on the upper right is a few cloves of garlic I roasted and mashed into a paste. That lump of cheese below it is goat cheese. I love goat cheese on pizza. All the tomatoes are from the garden. So pretty!

I assemble the pizzas. Always go on the light side with the ingredients.

Then bake in a 450-500F oven until done.

Yum! Cool them on a wire rack. I slice it up and take it to work for a quick and tasty lunch. The sauces can be made days ahead, dough is also made ahead. So day of it’s pretty easy to assemble and bake. I usually put prosciutto or pepperoni on these as well, but I had enough tomatoes and cheeses from the garden to not feel the need to bother with those. This time.