Happy Friday! We made it Blacksburg after a long week on the road!!
I can’t wait to share my first impressions with you, but for now, I wanted to share with you our bon voyage California event: a build your own pizza party. My parents built a pizza oven in our backyard back when I was in high school, and its been the perfect addition for events at our house. It’s a fun activity for folks to do while chatting at the party, and just plain fun to choose all of your own toppings.
We usually have a pretty good spread of toppings–marinara sauce, pesto, basil, mozzarella cheese, olives, pineapples, prosciutto, tomatoes, peppers, salami..pretty much anything you can think of!
We often buy the pre-made pizza dough from Trader Joe’s and split it into fourths, but this time, Jeff actually made all of the pizza dough for the individual pizzas (0ur pizza oven is pretty small so to do larger pizzas is pretty much impossible).
My dad usually runs the oven, carefully turning and arranging the pizzas so that the dough cooks evenly and the toppings aren’t over done by the time the dough cooks all the way through. The key to getting the pizzas not to stick on the plate or in the oven is lots and lots of corn meal. No corn meal = sticky mess!
Jeff got the prize for roundest pizza of the night–I never have the patience to roll it out nicely!
When the pizzas are done, we usually transfer them to a cutting board and cut with a pizza cutter.
The only problem with personal size pizzas is that everyone’s pizza is done at different times, so its pretty much impossible to do this at a formal sit down dinner. But as long as you have plenty of appetizers or drinks, we’ve never found a problem with the assembly line eating.
A pizza oven is definitely in store for my backyard one day–till then, we’ll just have to enjoy my parents’ whenever we visit!
(My (not very round) Pizza!)
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I think I’d like one right now!!
{ 1 trackback }