Pizza Brings the Family Together

Some of my best memories I have are the times my family all gathered in the kitchen and made pizza. My mom and I would always make the dough in the morning when we woke and let it rise throughout the day. Then, when everybody starts to get hungry, we would cut up the dough into little balls and get started. Sometimes we would each do our own small pizza and then compete to make the best one while at other times we would all work on the same pizza but at different stages, like an assembly line. My mom would roll it out and shape it then pass it on to us kids who would top it with whatever we wanted and then give it to my dad to stick it in the oven. We always had extra so we would either invite friends and family over to help us eat it or freeze the pizza before we cooked it for later. It’s been awhile since we made pizzas, however, so I decided to introduce Laura, my girlfriend, and friends to the tradition.

Laura and I made the dough at about 2 and then at 6 we called in for help and some friends showed up. We cut the dough into 4 portions, 3 for pizza and then the fourth we divided to make bread sticks. I started to pizza making and not before long everyone started have a blast and doing their own thing. The great thing about pizzas is they only take about 5 minutes in the oven to cook so by the time we are ready to put the next pizza in the first one is ready to be taken out. Also we can eat the pizza as we go! I think the only downside to making pizzas is how hot the kitchen gets from the oven being up so high.

All together we made a pizza with pesto as the base sauce, topped with sundried tomatoes and chicken, and then we put the cheese on top of that due to the tomatoes tendency to get a bitter flavor from burning and the chicken sometimes gets overly dry. We used fresh mozzarella cheese and a mixture of fresh grated parmesan, romano, and asiago for all of the pizzas. Next we made a pizza with an olive oil and garlic base for the sauce topped with our cheese then fresh basil and tomatoes slices. Our last pizza had our homemade tomato sauce, thin sliver of onion, chicken, and diced tomatoes. With the remaining dough we made about 3 breadsticks stuffed with the fresh mozzarella and about 4 regular bread sticks, each one brushed with garlic and olive oil and topped with a pinch of our grated cheeses right before going into the oven.

Everything turned out great, although the shape of the pizzas weren’t exactly perfect circles the taste more than made up for it!