Margaritaville

It's been awhile since my last posting, and to any of the 3 or 4 people that might follow along with the blog, I apologize. To say that I've been busy is an understatement. The only thing my kitchen has produced in the last couple weeks have been peanut butter and jelly or frosted mini wheats. But between my crazy work schedule this week, I managed to find time (in the middle of the night once again) to create a pretty quick but great tasting dinner. By viewer request, I took on homemade pizza.

Lets start with the dough...

I forgot to take a picture of the dough so I found this picture on google images. This is pretty much what it looked like though.

 The dough can be made a day or two in advance, which in my case I did. As long as its kept tightly wrapped and in the fridge, it'll keep - and in fact some say it actually makes for better tasting crust if it has time to slow rise in the fridge overnight. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that statement, but since some food scientist said so, I'm going to choose to believe its true. I got the recipe out of my Bread Machine Magic book, which called for 1 C warm water, 3 C flour, 2 T olive oil, 1 t salt, 2 T sugar and 2 t active dry yeast. All of the ingredients get thrown together in the bread machine (salt on the opposite side of the yeast because it will kill it...thanks mom) and then turn the machine on and wait. This can be done without a bread machine as well, just use a mixer with a dough attachment and beat it until it forms a solid ball. Then let it rise in a oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap for about an hour. Since I went the bread machine route, I let the dough rise in the machine.

After its finished rising, or a couple days later, the dough is ready to use. This is the fun part because you can do whatever you want to make this pizza yours. I tapped in to my inner Italian roots and made a four cheese margarita pizza. I don't actually have any Italian in me at all, but nevertheless this is one of my favorite pizzas. The first thing I did was slice up some tomatoes pretty thin and marinated them in olive oil and smashed garlic for a few minutes while the oven preheated and I rolled out my dough. Once the dough was prepped, I brushed the olive oil mixture (minus the tomatoes) on to the dough in a nice even layer. Then I sprinkled on 3 out of the 4 cheeses - mozzarella, parmesan and fontina. I arranged the tomato slices around the pizza and put some freshly chopped basil on and then topped it off with some crumbled feta. Before I put it in the oven I sprinkled garlic salt around the crust because that makes it taste extra good.

Here is the pre-baked pizza. This image is legit, not googled.

I threw it into the 400 degree oven for close to 20 minutes. It probably could have used another minute or two but it looked good enough and at this point I was pretty hungry so I decided it was done.

The finished product

Ready to eat

I've never been to Italy, but I imagine if you could take a bite out of it this is probably what it would taste like. The subtle garlic flavor really comes through in the tomatoes and I think the crumbled feta is the secret ingredient. I'll keep experimenting with other kinds of pizzas, but this recipe is definitely a keeper.