Pizza night!

A cause for celebration. When I just say the phrase, it brings me back to my childhood, kind of like those new AI videos made for today’s 30 year-olds with titles like, “Going to Grandma’s for Christmas” and scenes of purple-snow-pant-wearing children playing in a pile of powder or piling their coats on the bed (why did we do that?).

Typically, if I decide to make homemade pizza, I chuck a concoction of flours, baking powder, garlic powder, Italian seasoning and water into a bowl, mix it together and roll it out before baking at 425 until it ‘works.’ Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. The older I get, the more reliable I’ve become (and the more satisfied the costumers). On my recent trip to Alamosa, I stopped at the Amish Grocery store and bought 456,000 protein bars and a bag of King Arthur’s pizza flour.

The good news is that I can’t really screw this up. The bad news is that I have to wait 12 hours for the dough to rise.

The other night, I threw a bunch of chicken thighs I’d picked up for $1.13 a pound into the oven and rolled out the dough into really thin crust. Then, Ella and Novi and I made ‘stuffed crust pizza’ with the extra free string cheese we had stashed up in the fridge. I made a double recipe (duh). One ended up being basic — red sauce and cheese — and the other turned into a chicken alfredo pizza.

I went out for a rollerski while the chicken baked, passing the baton to my wife to make sure the house didn’t burn down. After 90 minutes, we worked together to peel meat off the bone, piling it in a pool of alfredo sauce and calling it good (after it cooked of course).

Considering my kids have to put up with daily oatmeal mixes for breakfast and my uniquely designed oven baked rice and veggie variations for most dinners, you can imagine how thrilled they were to eat this meal. More importantly, the wife was impressed.