Daniel's Bread Marathon Dinner Blog: An ominous second week: Giotto's pizza

So, first announcement: my phone is still semi-broken, so prepare yourself for more incredibly life-like MSPaint images. Anyway, as the title suggests this dinner blog is getting off to something of an ominous start: it's only week two and I've already had to invoke the "hey, it's not a new dish but at least I won't look at the recipe" rule. But, after you read my justification in paragraph below I think you'll agree that this pizza was very much in the spirit of the dinner blog. I also think what I really need is for you all to start suggesting things for me to try cooking. Oh well.

Anyway, for this week I went with a pizza, partly because about three months ago I finally acquired a circular pizza pan... until that time I had been making a veritable legion of rectangular pizzas using a broiler pan, and in fact have continued to do so this summer. And you know what? That had to stop, and it stopped this weekend.

So, for the dough proof 2 teaspoons of yeast in just less than 1 cup of warm water. Add a splash (a heavy splash...maybe 1 T) olive oil, 2 t salt, a clove of minced garlic, and 2 T dried rosemary. Start stirring and then kneading in about 2.5 cups of flour. Let the dough rise for an hour (a good hour).

But even before making the dough, start preparing the tomato sauce. Saute 1 large chopped onion and 1 clove minced garlic in 2 T olive oil, and when the onion is translucent add 1/2 a cup of red wine and 2 T tomato paste. Add a few dashes of salt, grind in some black pepper, and sprinkle in some oregano. Stir, and let it simmer until some of the liquidity of the wine/paste mixture has bubbled away. Having forgotten to get tomatoes at the farmer's market this Saturday, I reached into my emergency stash of canned tomatoes: crush by hand the contents of one of those 28 oz can whole plum peeled tomatoes, and add the tomatoes/juice to the sauce. Set it simmering.

Okay, now's the fun part! Take the dough, punch it down, and flatten into a circle. When you got it to a rough 7" diameter or so, start throwing it!

Totally awesome flying pizza... there were definitely no collisions of the dough with the cabinets, as depicted. Also, in my apartment there are only two cabinets above and below that counter, but "two" is apparently a hard number of cabinets to draw.

Okay, now that you've had your fun, take the blobs of fallen-apart dough, recombine them, and just use a rolling pin. Le sigh. Put a little olive oil on the pizza pan, put the dough on top, and evenly coat with sauce. Shred about, say, 1/2 a cup each mozzarella and asiago (the supermarket was out of Parmesan...how is that even possible?), and sprinkle on top. Saute half of a cut up green pepper briefly, add as a topping. Preheat your nice wood-fire oven to 800 degrees (or, failing that, your gas oven to "as high as it'll go without setting off the fire alarm") and put the pizza in the oven. Bake for 12 minutes, and then remove and let cool.
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Another week of not really having much to update you all on... work is busy, but good. I have an upcoming conference in Cleveland (in October), and one of my friends was good enough to send along this tourism video (language)...which was pretty fantastic. It really helped get me excited about visiting the city for the first time. More news next week. Maybe.

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