Wow, I can’t believe its been so long since I’ve last posted! Sadly, the most exciting thing that happened worth noting around Chez Mousie in the last two weeks was that I accidentally slammed an Exacto knife into my thumb a few nights ago while trying to remove the plastic wrapping off of a bottle of vitamins. Seriously folks, when bodily injury is the best subject you have for a blog post, you might be in trouble.
So, instead of offering up some more bodily injury.. I bring you a post about homemade pizza! (everyone all at once) mmmmmm…. pizza.
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I love to cook (nothing fancy- mostly slapped together curries, family favorites, and the occasional tv recipe) and I do like to make easy desserts and those boxed cakes & muffins.. but I would never ever call myself a baker. Truth be told, I’m pretty well terrified of any recipe that involves little yeasty beasties because I have heard all about the things you can do to absolutely ruin a loaf of bread. The only bread I’ve ever “baked” involved a weekend fling with a borrowed bread machine and packaged mixes… and believe me, it ended BADLY.
So, how did I end up with homemade pizza when I’m clearly a bit yeastophobic? I’m blaming my MIL & P*zza H*t – seriously. We don’t have a lot of money so in our house ‘delivery’ pizza (we pick it up to save on cost and always use coupons) is a once a month treat. At our last stop for pizza & movies night (yay Netflix..) my husband ran into ‘Pizza the Hut’ (does anyone else get this reference? ) and came out to tell me that our local PH is in the process of being bought out- and that the new owners will NOT be accepting ANY PH brand coupons even though the name will remain the same!! It was already a stretch for us to get pizza at the coupon price, so this new plan just torched us. We bought a garlic bread frozen pizza from the grocery store next door and went home to cook it.. vowing only to return to ‘the Hut’ for boneless wings, should the late night craving arise.
When I relayed this story to my mother-in-law, her (rather snide) response was “well.. what are you going to do, make your own pizza??” Yes, yes I am.. and mostly because you just insinuated that I couldn’t. Yesterday, while hubby was out doing odd jobs (boy, this economy SUCKS) I searched the internet for “easy pizza recipes” and hit on one from Hillybilly Housewife which looked like maybe even I could pull it off. The only ingredients I needed from the store were yeast, fresh mushrooms and some shredded mozzarella cheese… the canned tomatoes & tomato paste needed for my stupid-easy homemade sauce and the rest of the crust goodies were already in the pantry. The dough (which I had to set outside in the sun to rise b/c I feared it was too cold in the house for it) ended up getting just right and the family declared homemade Mousie Hut pizza to be a success. It was so much of a success that I ended up baking up the second batch of dough so that we could stuff ourselves stupid.. even Munchkin enjoyed helping. I’m definitely going to be baking our own homemade pizzas from now on.. and I’ve conquered a bit of my yeast bread fear in the process. Next up? Homemade soft pretzels!
