My cousins, as a housewarming gift, gave us this amazing pizza stone, pizza paddle and rolling pin. We always had this idea of flipping pizza dough in the kitchen… you know, tossing enormous discs up into the air and catching them behind our backs whilst yelling out various Italian words and eventually dancing in each others arms as the dough rose in the oven, to Andrea Bocelli… specs of flour on the tips of our noses.

This never actually happened. it was all a dream. This is how it really went.. Set the scene. In the supermarket… well, right off the bat our hopes and dreams were crushed as we scoured the shelves and isles for raw dough. We felt defeated as we slid the plastic encased, rubbery, Boboli crust off the shelf. we plopped it in our cart and tried to be optimistic knowing that at least we had a pizza stone at home to make the process seem a little more homemade than not. We gathered our toppings, still not totally into the whole thang and moseyed our way to the self check-out. On our way back through the cheese isle I thought I was hallucinating. I saw a huge bin, yes, bin, of raw dough! It was literally stuffed in the cheese section, swarmed beneath and totally lost within packets of grated mozzarella and pepper jack. We felt so cool lifting the heaps of (plastic encased) doughy balls from the cheese wreckage. We won. We found our raw dough. This was it. We were on the road to making straight up, homemade pizza. (next time we will attempt to make the dough from scratch. baby steps.) We hopped, skipped and jumped the rest of the distance to the register. We couldn’t get home, unpack our ingredients and start heating up the pizza stone any faster than we did.

My pizza, not to brag, was the best. It was a whole wheat crust. I smothered it with pesto, extra garlic and freshly grated parmesan cheese. mmm my mouth waters just typing about it. The difficult part was the transfer into the oven. We had no flour and so it was not as smooth as it should have been. Instead, it involved me screeching, dough spilling out of my grip and a quick plop on the pizza stone. I was initially really disturbed that it didn’t land to form a perfect, round shape, but rather, a dilapidated oval.

As it was crisping up in the oven, I made a simple spinach salad with an oil and balsamic dressing. When we pulled the beautiful pizza out of the scorching oven I let it cool for a bit and then sprinkled the spinach salad across the top, added more parmesan cheese and viola! We made another pizza with a spicy sauce, tons of garlic, fresh clams and a mixture of delicious cheeses. Coupled with some delicious wine, the meal was just perfect. Enjoy the pictures as much we did the pizza! Gotta go, getting hungry!