This week, my box had a melon, peaches, cucumbers, onions, turnips, romaine lettuce, tomatoes and swiss chard.  From the share box, I grabbed onions and an extra bundle of turnips.  With the turnip greens, in addition to the chard and the lettuce, we have leafy greens overload this week.

We decided to make pizza and use some of the weekend’s tomato sauce and  peppers.

For the crust (3 –  12″ pizzas), I sprinkled

• 2 t. instant yeast   over
• 1/4 c. warm water,    and added
• 1 T. honey.

I let that stand for about 5 minutes until foamy, then added enough olive oil to make 3/4 c. of liquid.   I have trouble with yeast activating sometimes and adding a sugar at this stage seems to help.  And the honey tastes good.  🙂

In the food processor with the dough attachment (plastic blade), I combined:

• 4 c. unbleached flour
• 1 t. kosher salt

I pulsed this to combine, then gradually poured the liquid through the top and pulsed until a big ball formed.  After turning  the dough out onto a floured surface,  I kneaded for about 5 minutes, until the dough was smooth and elastic.  Then I placed the dough in a large metal bowl coated with olive oil cooking spray, turning the dough to coat it with cooking spray and covered it with plastic wrap.  I set this bowl on top of the oven to rise for about one hour, or until the dough had doubled.

While the dough rose, we shredded fresh mozzarella and parmesan cheese and sliced peppers.  I preheated the oven to 450°.

Her favorite job, but I think she eats a lot of cheese before it gets to the pizza!

Sweet Peppers

When the dough had risen,  I punched it down, then turned it back onto the floured counter.  We divided the dough into three equal portions and each rolled our own pizza.  Two were thin, but cheese girl rolled hers for cheesy filled crusts.

filled crust pizza

We topped each pizza with about 1/3 c. tomato sauce, sliced peppers in red and yellow and sweet Italian salami, topped with the mixed shredded cheese.

I added crushed red peppers to my pizza for some extra heat and dollops of ricotta.

We cooked my 14 year old son’s pizza first because he is always sure he is starving.  Usually,  I check at about 5 minutes to see if I need to turn the pizza for even browning.  After about 10 minutes, it looked beautiful and the cheese was melted and browned all over.

Here is where things went sideways, apparently.  I pulled one pizza out of the oven and since we were getting hungry, I put the remaining two pizzas in in the oven.  At about 5 minutes I  rotated them between the top and bottom shelves.  For as hot as the oven was, I did notice the pizzas weren’t as brown as I would have expected.  After another 5 minutes, I went to check, and they still weren’t the nice dark brown color the first pizza had been by this time and the cheese was really only partly melted.  What is going on?

Another 5 minutes, still not much progress, then I noticed…

I had turned the oven OFF when I pulled the first pizza out of the oven! 
Automatic efficiency had let me down.  At least now we knew what the problem was.  I turned the oven back on to 500° to heat up faster and we quickly had beautiful pizza that tasted great.

The kids  ate their whole pizzas and were too full, but I have had leftover pizza for two days at lunch.  🙂