Pizza Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes

I had a bunch of local Roma tomatoes at the end of the harvest season and needed to do something with them. I decided to make homemade pizza sauce. I used the olive oil dough recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for the pizza dough, which was fabulous and really easy. I found this recipe for the sauce - it was actually kind of hard to find a recipe that did not call for canned tomatoes or tomato puree. I wanted to find a recipe that I could use when we live overseas, where I can't just run over to Walmart for a can of tomatoes.

This sauce was great and pretty easy to make. I used dried oregano because that's all I had, fresh basil from our patio garden, and added salt and pepper to taste at the end. I seeded the tomatoes, but did not bother peeling them, which I liked about this recipe. I used my immersion blender to puree it at the end. My husband was very impressed that you can make good pizza sauce from scratch (goodbye, Walmart pizza sauce! At least when we have good, fresh tomatoes).

Pesto and Shrimp Pizza

Made this one up last night. I made the crust using frozen bread dough like I described in this post. I made the pesto recipe in the Joy of Cooking, which is delicious. I've never made pesto before but it's really easy - just put fresh basil, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese, garlic, and olive oil in a food processor and blend the heck out of it. I spread that onto my pizza crust, then topped it with cooked shrimp, red onion, a sprinkling of dried red pepper flakes, and mozzarella cheese. It was pretty good for something that I made up.

Homemade Pizza and Roasted Banana Ice Cream

We had friends over last night to watch football. My team played miserably (Oh, Bears... when will we ever get a good QB?) but at least we had good food.

My husband's mom used to make homemade pizza when he was growing up, and his sister gave us the recipe. It's pretty easy since you just used frozen bread dough for the crust. I have heard about this famed pizza for many years, so I was a little nervous about measuring up... but my hubby thought it was great. Here's the recipe:

Linda's Homemade Pizza
2 frozen bread dough balls (I just used the Kroger brand)
Canned pizza sauce (I used the Walmart brand)
Toppings of your choice (I used red onions, red and green peppers, fresh sliced mushrooms, mozzarella, and oregano)

Place the frozen dough into a waterproof plastic bag and immerse in hot water until thawed. Lightly coat a 9x13 baking pan with cooking spray. Shape the dough to fit the pan, then let rise until the crust is about 1.5 inches high or so. Preheat the oven to whatever temperature the bread directions recommend. Bake the crust for about 15 minutes until the dough looks reasonably cooked. Remove the pan from the oven and increase the temperature to 400 degrees. Top the crust with pizza sauce and your chosen toppings and place back in the oven until it looks cooked, about 15-20 minutes. Voila! Homemade pizza.

I was just in a homemade mood yesterday. I also made fresh tomato salsa, and I had made roasted banana ice cream (again from The Perfect Scoop). I think if you like banana pudding, you would like this ice cream. We topped it with homemade fudge sauce - also a recipe handed down from his side of the family. In celebration of his gastronomic heritage, I will share that one too:

Auntie Frannie's Hot Fudge Sauce
2 squares unsweetened chocolate
1 stick butter
2 cups powdered sugar
5 oz evaporated milk
1 tsp vanilla

Melt chocolate in a double boiler. Mix all but vanilla together and heat until well blended. Add vanilla.

Oh so good. All good things start with a stick of butter.

Margherita Pizza

I made this pizza tonight and based it off the Margherita Pizza recipe from the All New Joy of Cooking. I have not yet learned how to make homemade pizza dough, so we bought store-brand premade pizza crusts and used those instead. This was pretty easy and was great! I used store-brand pizza sauce, four diced Roma tomatoes, about 1/3 cup basil, some grated Parmesan, and shredded mozzarella, then baked it at 450 degrees for about 11 minutes. It was a good, quick, tasty meal.

I borrowed a book on cooking a few months ago from the library, and the most useful tip I got from it was how to freeze basil. I tried growing basil in a little flowerpot this summer and fall, but it didn't work out too well (note to self: frost kills basil pretty quickly, bring the plant in sooner next year). My local grocery store sells basil in these big clamshell containers, but they cost $3-4 dollars and a lot of it would go bad before I could use it. Then I learned that you could freeze basil, and, well, basically my life changed forever. All you do is rinse it, pick the leaves off the stems, and dry the leaves. Then you take a long sheet of wax paper, lay the leaves on it in a single layer, roll up the wax paper, stick it in a freezer bag, throw it in your freezer, and voila! You have basil whenever you want. It won't look fresh in your dishes, but the taste is preserved. So I used some of my frozen basil on our pizza and saved myself $3-4 and a trip to the store.

Pizza with Roasted Garlic, Bell Peppers and Two Cheeses

Made this for dinner tonight. I liked it, my husband did not. I thought it was a little too garlicky though. I used Jiffy Pizza Crust for possibly the last time. We bought a couple of boxes of it because it's so much cheaper than the premade crusts, but it takes too much work and is hard to shape. Either I'll go back to premade crusts or try my hand at making my own next time.