The XKTs Come For Lunch.

The XKTs were in town yesterday. They stopped by for lunch and to exchange Christmas presents. I am still without an oven. The second repairman was supposed to be here Tuesday but he called to cancel since he doesn't think he can do it. We've called a third appliance repair center; he says he knows how to fix it, and he'll be here today. Keep fingers crossed.

So with guests for lunch and an oven that has only two settings - Off and Hell, I thought a pizza would work out. Actually, it worked out quite well.

I'm not making a traditional, conventional pizza with tomato sauce. My base will be pesto. The day before Irene hit, I went out to the garden and picked all the basil I had. I made a huge batch of pesto, poured it into ice cube trays, froze the cubes, then popped them into freezer bags. Now, I can have a taste of summer whenever I want. Ingredients for our pizza: 6 cubes of pesto tomatoes black olives red onion green pepper mushrooms spinach lots of cheese (not shown)

I made the dough, of course, but didn't take the step by steps. I have guests coming for lunch and they need to have lunch before suppertime. Dough goes something like this: Pour 1 cup warm water in a bowl, sprinkle 1 package of yeast in water, sprinkle 1 TB of sugar over yeast. Stir to mix. Let proof. When yeast is all puffy, mix in one egg. Add in a tablespoon or two of olive oil - your preference. Gradually fork in about 2 cups of bread flour. Lightly flour your work surface and start kneading the bread, adding more oil or flour as needed. Turn dough into an oiled bowl, cover with plastic, cover with a nuked, hot, wet kitchen towel and place in the microwave or turned-off oven and let rise. When the dough is doubled in size, punch down and knead a few turns. Let rest a few minutes, then start spreading out in a greased pan. As I spread out my dough, every now and then, I let the dough rest for a few minutes. This allows the dough to relax and when you come back to spread it again, it's more flexible, pliable, and workable. It sort of revitalizes the organism.

I always saute my shrooms before adding to a pizza.

Brown the shrooms. Gets rid of excess water so you don't have a soggy pizza.

Mr. Hawthorne found some sausage so he fried that up.

I kinda sorta browned my crust in my broken oven, which decided to get more broken and not even heat up to the Hell setting.

Pesto cubes.

Spread evenly over crust.

Layer of shredded mozzarella.

Now, let's build a pizza.

Chopped green onions, chopped red onions, sliced black olives, sausage.

Add sliced tomatoes and sauteed shrooms.

Add a good layer of spinach on top.

More mozzarella.

Parmesan. Queso Fresco. Some cheddar. And a good drizzling of your favorite olive oil.

Bake until cheese is melted and bubbly.

What a pretty pizza!

This is the beautiful box XKT gave me.

XKT, you really need to see this in the late afternoon light. It's lovely and it makes tittie sprinkles all over my walls.