Sunday Pizza: 10.09.2011

Dry Fly Gin and Tonic, Lime, and Frozen Strawberries (outta ice)

When I was a kid I loved getting silly, slap-happy over-tired at slumber parties!  I can still remember staying up and laughing until my sides hurt over absolutely nothing at all.  Such simple and wonderful memories.

This Sunday I felt like a little kid all over again and LOVED it!  Truthfully, Sunday was a tiring day.  We played with Z in the much too early morning then brought him over to Bubbe's house around 10:30. {Thanks Mom!}  From there we went to Home Depot and our local nursery, Molbaks.  I'm starting to sound like Will Farrell from Old School - totally mid-thirties and married.

Deep dish - should have grabbed my real camera

We tackled a large portion of our front lawn that has been scaring all the children in the neighborhood long before Halloween rolled around.  I did my fair share but C was the real hero taking out two huge heathers.  Bye bye heather!  I'm rambling...

You get it, right?  What I'm trying to say is we were crazy tired.  Saturday night we invited our regulars, Em and Pete, over for pizza.  When it was time to grate the cheese I really had to put on my rally hat.  So glad I did!

Seriously, it was like everyone laughed from the minute they walked through the door until they left.  It was completely what the doctor ordered!  The boys ran around and did their own thing together and didn't even fight.  hmmm the word "magical" comes to mind.

Looky here - the boys eating salad!

Speaking of magical... I'm guessing by now you realize we love pizza.  You have probably also figured out more specifically we love our pizza.  Well, this week we made some tweaks care of Sortachef's recent blog post of 10 pizza dough tips.

Here are the tweaks we made:
1)  half Italian "00" flour and half all purpose flour
2)  letting it rest 10 minutes before kneading
3)  kneading for 10 minutes (he says knead 15 - close enough)
4)  punch down for a second rise
5)  new batch of sausage (our own tweak) this time with much more fennel and honey

We made a deep dish pizza and a thin crust pizza.  Let me just say this is the first time I took a bite and chewed and thought Wow we should sell this!  It was that amazingly good!  We all went from chatter box city to crickets while we ate our first couple bites to "this is so GOOD!"  "I love the crust"  "this sausage is amazing!" "It's better than CATS!"  Ok no one said the last one but it seemed to fit...

Where to go from here?  I don't know...  Who can help us build a pizza oven in our backyard?  I think that's the next natural step.