Pizza Party

Against my better judgment, I've decided to sit for the California bar exam in July.  The only way that I could think of to save money and ensure that I still eat while I stick to my crazy work/study schedule was to cook big meals on Sunday's and eat the leftovers throughout the week.  I decided that one easy meal to make would be a couple of different kinds of pizza since it tastes good, keeps well and reheats just fine.  Pizza dough was my first attempt to learn how to become a baker and, after several disastrous attempts, I've finally found a Wolfgang Puck pizza dough recipe that is super easy to make, doesn't have to rise a lot and tastes really good (the honey is a great addition).  Once I had my dough ready, I went searching for a couple of new pizza recipes to try.  Once again, Giada De Laurentiis came to the rescue and gave me a caramelized onion, sausage and basil pizza recipe and an arugula, ricotta and smoked mozzarella pizza.  I started with the caramelized onion, sausage and basil recipe since it took longer.  Here's the onions getting ready to caramelize in my favorite pot, my Le Creuset 5 quart stock pot:

Here's the onions after caramelizing:

Here's the pizza with the sausage, onion and goat cheese (I used chevre) added:

And the final product (topped with basil) after it came out of the oven:

Of the two new recipes I tried, this pizza was, by far, my favorite.  The recipe called for spicy sausage but I only had regular pork sausage on hand.  Next time I think I'd have more caramelized onions and less sausage, but that's the only tweak I'd make.

Next was the arugula, ricotta and smoked mozzarella recipe.  Here's a picture of the topping, after mixing it in my Cuisinart:

 

I didn't have any tomatoes on hand so I skipped that part.  Here's the dough topped with the topping and drizzled with some olive oil:

I must say that this pizza did not taste good to me.  It's hard to know if it was the lack of tomatoes, the arugula or the smoked mozzarella that didn't taste good, but I ended up scraping off the cooked topping and just eating the crust.  If I try it again, I'll try it without the arugula, substituting basil, and without the smoked mozzarella, substituting regular mozzarella or maybe some fontina.  I'll post my results after trying these changes.

Finally, I made my favorite kind of pizza - mozzarella cheese and basil.  There's something about the combination of those flavors that I love, and this time did not disappoint:

All in all, it was a successful pizza party and I had plenty of leftovers to last me a few meals during the week.  I'm hoping to keep up the plan to cook big meals on Sunday's so if any of my readers have recipes they'd like to suggest, I'm all ears.