Homemade Pizza. Hold the Baby.

Since I haven't had my baby yet, (mercy! How much longer am I going to have to start every post with this disclaimer?) and since my mother is already staying here with us (the "and" here is a very important conjunction; I would never have had the ambition to start this project without her) we decided to have homemade pizza for dinner tonight. My mother is famous for her homemade pizza and we had it all the time growing up for birthdays, parties, and everydays, too. Tonight we tried it Kara style with the excellent multi-grain crust recipe she had recently posted online. Boy did it deliver! I did happen to have the grains on hand, but the sour dough starter we had to skip and the agave nectar got replaced with honey.

The fun part about tonight's meal was that each kid got to roll out and assemble their own pizza. Talk about made to order! We each rolled them out on parchment and then popped those in a 500 degree oven onto a pizza stone. With no pizza peel in the house we used a sturdy but flexible chopping board to place them in and an extra long handled BBQ style spatula to remove. Our house smelled just like a pizza parlor, but in a good way!

Mine: BLT style, Handsome: Bacon & Cheese, Grammie: Pesto with spinach, bacon and fresh tomato

Sunshine: calazone style--she likes folding dough, The Baron with cheese and bacon, StarGirl gives her dough a spin.

When every square inch of your counter tops is covered by some object (stuffed dogs included) it is evidence you're having a great time!

If you want a simpler recipe, here's a link to the recipe for CPK's dough. It is straight from my California Pizza Kitchen cookbook. Theirs' is also delicious if you don't have spelt or amaranth in your pantry. p.s. We did NOT take the time to let our dough rise for any longer than it took to take our toppings out of the refrigerator and it worked out just as good.