Date Night Pizza

Since we went out to a really nice restaurant on Friday and are now over budget with a week to go, we decided to stay in on Saturday and have our date night at home and cook something together.  Our kitchen is really pretty tiny, and it is a little difficult for two people to be cooking at the same time, so we have to make something where one person preps and the other is at the stove so we aren’t bumping into each other.  So for us the most logical conclusion to this predicament was pizza, our favorite food ever.  I let J cook the toppings and marinara sauce while I made the pizza dough.  I found yeast that is specifically for pizza dough that doesn’t require rise time and was able to make dough for two pizzas in no time at all.  I just used the recipe and followed the directions on the package and was pretty pleased with the results.

Pizza Dough, 1 12-inch pizza

1 cup flour plus additional ¾-1 ¼ cup flour

1 ½ tsp sugar

½ tsp salt

1 package Fleischmann’s pizza crust yeast

2/3 cup very warm water

3 tbs olive oil

J’s Sausage and Black Olive Pizza

1/3 – ½ cup marinara sauce (made from canned basil and oregano tomatoes, pureed and seasoned to taste with garlic powder, oregano, salt, pepper, and basil)

10 oz sweet Italian sausage, removed from casing, minced and cooked in a skillet

¼ cup black olives, diced

½ cup mozzarella cheese

Taylor’s Artichoke and Ricotta Pizza

½ cup ricotta cheese, nonfat

4 oz goat cheese

1 cup mixture of artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives (my HEB has this with the cheese)

½ cup sliced mushrooms, browned in a skillet with a little olive oil

1/3 cup tomatoes, diced

Preheat oven to 425 F.

For the pizza dough (I made one at a time), mix 1 cup flour with the salt, sugar and yeast then stir in the warm water and oil.  Mix until you have a ball of sticky dough and all the liquid is absorbed.  Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and begin adding additional flour ¼ cup at a time while kneading.  Once the dough gets to where it is only slightly sticky and is elastic, knead it for about 4 minutes then roll it out on a greased pizza stone or cookie sheet.   You can roll this out nicely with a rolling pin but I actually just pressed it out with my hands.

For J’s pizza he topped with sauce, sausage, black olives and cheese then baked for 15 minutes.  For my pizza I mixed the cheese together then spread my cheese and topped with the vegetables.  I used what the package called select tomatoes, or something like that, which was basically a mixture of different types of small tomatoes, so I had a few different colors which was pretty until hidden by the artichokes.  My pizza I baked on a cookie sheet and so I think I ended up rolling it out thinner and I cooked it for closer to 20 minutes so mine was more thin and crispy while J’s was thicker and softer. 

I was really pleased with my pizza, the dough was pretty good and very easy.  You could easily start adding seasonings to this to make some pretty good crust.  The mixture of ricotta cheese and goat cheese was awesome and complimented really well by the artichoke hearts.  Pat on back for that one.

When it comes to pizza neither of us have much self control at all, so I will tell you how many calories were in the entire pizza and you can decide for yourself what is a reasonable serving size because I don’t want to tell you how much I ate (hey at least wasn’t the whole thing, lay off me I’m starving).

Sausage and Black Olive Pizza

1926 calories, 80 g fat

Ricotta and Artichoke Pizza

1851 calories, 77 g fat

A big help to get the calories down on these pizzas without forfeiting much flavor would be to make one batch of dough and cut it in half.  This will make 2 thin crust pizzas and save you a whole 650 calories per pizza, then you could come a lot closer to eating the whole thing and not feel near as terrible.