We were planning to have some friends over for an evening of billiards and socialising, and initially planned to order in some pizza. But as I thought about it, the more I thought that it just somehow wasn’t very “James” to serve Dominos, so I decided to make the pizza myself. Last night, when we returned from our evening out at the garden club meeting, I started a batch of no-knead pizza dough, which requires 12 to 24 hours of untended development, so that took care of the base, and this morning I made a batch of pizza sauce that is supposed to be so good that the originator of the recipe was told to “bottle it and sell it” (I can’t remember who that was, though, but it is a pretty good sauce). I went to the grocery store to buy the toppings for our pizzas, but came up craps on the mozzarella, which only was available in the nasty rubbery version, rather than the fresh variety that I prefer to use. So I had no choice but to make my own mozzarella, which I did using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe, and which turned out absolutely 100% perfect, and which was far easier than any other mozzarella recipe I have tried. To go with the pizza I thought I’d serve a nice garden salad, with “garden” being the operative word, since the greens were to come from our vegetable patch. And this being a dinner at our place, we of course had to make dessert, too. We look like we’re about to have a bumper red (and black) currant harvest this season, so there is really no reason to keep the 2010 harvest in the freezer any longer. Dessert therefore was to be a red currant pie, served with butterscotch ice cream.
The pizza dough turned out really beautifully, and the sauce was just wonderful. I decided to do a trial run with one of the pizza dough balls before our guests arrived, and learned in the course of this trial that I should not bake the pizzas on a piece of aluminium foil, since the dough sticks to the foil. So for the “actual” pizzas, I just spread some cornmeal on the pizza peel and slid them onto the baking stone (though I’m sad to report that the pizza stone — which is actually just a piece of ceramic tile — cracked when the first one of these “naked” pizzas went in the oven). Regardless, the pizzas came out incredibly well, with bubbly crusts, oozy cheese that pulled into mozzarella strings, and delicious sauce. Here’s what one of them looked like (the first):
Pizza!
Unfortunately, no one but J2 and me got to appreciate them, since our friends sent J2 a text (yesterday…) telling him that something had come up and they were no longer free. Of course, since J2 does not generally keep his phone on him, this news was not revealed to us until about 15 minutes before we expected them to arrive, and long after all these preparations began. A conspiratorially minded person might believe that J2 had intentionally kept this info from me to trick me into making this dinner just for him, but I am not so inclined…or am I?? Regardless, the pizza and salad made a lovely dinner for us, and I anticipate that we’ll enjoy the dessert, too!
