Homemade Pizza

The uncooked pie before the move to the stone.

Last Friday I made pizza with a friend for dinner. We picked up ingredients from Trader Joe's, including fresh mozzarella filled with cream, baby bella mushrooms and the pizza dough they sell in the refrigerated section. To that we added cooked and diced potato, diced onion and fresh rosemary. As you can see we went with a yin/yang approach, using pesto for half and tomato sauce for half. The only problem we encountered was that after rolling the dough out onto my granite countertop and adding all the toppings, moving the pizza to the pre-heated stone was arduous at best. In fact, I nearly thought the pizza was going to turn into a calzone! Next time I will probably either try rolling the dough onto the wooden board that came with the stone - imagine that, following the instructions - or will just forget the preheating of the stone and make the pizza directly on there. The pizza did get nice and crispy, though, which may be attributable to the stone being pre-heated. I'm no Jeff Varasano, but the finished product was not bad, if I do say so myself.

We also picked up chocolate lava cakes from the freezer at TJ's. These were not as good as anticipated. To me, the flavor was off somehow and despite the rich taste, I felt like it didn't really taste chocolatey enough. Neither of us could really finish it as the richness really was too much to handle. The French vanilla ice cream (TJ's brand) we got to go with the lava cakes was pretty good, although I'd take Haagen Dazs over it any day :).