With all we talk about food on this blog, you’d think we never cook, but we do actually have to eat something other than breakfast.  (Well, we cook that for ourselves sometimes, too.  Mike makes a mean breakfast sandwich,

and I know my way around a bagel.)

One of my favorite things to make for dinner is pizza.  I use the pizza crust recipe from Roberta’s restaurant in Brooklyn.  I got to go to the actual restaurant with my brother and sister the night before I ran the Brooklyn Marathon around this time last year.  What a great night!

I would like to work on perfecting my sauce recipe, but for now, I just use the cheapest grocery store brand if I even use red sauce at all.

Try as I might, I’m really no pro when it comes to the pizza peel, so we make our pizzas on parchment paper which slides right off the peel easily.  I discovered these pre-made rounds on a recent trip to King Arthur Flour, and they’re perfect for our pizzas.  I usually try to stretch the dough out really thin to cover the whole round.  (I need to learn how to do that throw-the-crust-up-in-the-air thing.)

Other than the crust, everyone makes their own pizza.  Sometimes, I go all out and put out lots of toppings like I did for my book club recently.

Other times when it’s just us, we pull things from the fridge as we find them.  One of my favorites is a copy of the Matinicus pizza from Portland Pie Company which has cream cheese, prosciutto, and banana peppers (and red sauce and pizza cheese).  Lately though, Joe (my oldest), Frank (my younger son), and I have been working on our copy of Otto’s mashed potato, bacon, and scallion.  I think we’ve finally perfected it.

Did you know you can buy these funny little mashed potato disks in the frozen section at Trader Joe’s?  They heat up in the microwave in less than 5 minutes and miraculously turn into fluffy, mashed potatoes.  I think they’re a bit easier than making mashed potatoes from scratch especially when they’re not going to have to stand on their own.  Last time, Mike doctored ours up with butter, garlic salt, and who knows what else.  They were so good they barely made it on the pizza.  I think they’d still be good without the “doctoring”.

Thanks for reading.  Happy cooking, running, and eating!