An adventure/experiment in pizza making

I feel the need to preface this post by saying one mushy thing: my boyfriend is pretty amazing.  We have a habit of watching Food Network in the evenings when we're vegging out in front of the T.V. (mostly because its the channel that I miss during my lack of cable due to College poverty), and R. gets to listen to my rambling commentary on food inspiration that the shows provoke.  Every time we go to Publix to grocery shop, I have a moment where I stand in front of the section in the bakery where they stock pizza dough and the makings of pizza and say something along the lines of "You know, we should really make our own pizza one night." To which R. realistically replies "But it takes forever, and there's no guarantee it will taste good."

The other night we were watching Iron Chef: America, Battle Tomato and I made a comment about how much I loved a good BLT and hadn't had one in a while.  The next day, R. shows up at my house to pick me up to make dinner at his place as per our tradition since graduation, and he says we have two options: make BLTs, or homemade pizza. He had gotten the ingredients to do both from the store.  Like I said, my boyfriend is pretty amazing.

So here follows our pizza adventure, which is ongoing as I'm writing this while the pizza bakes.

Ingredients used:
1 lb Pre-prepared pizza dough from Publix
1 package Boboli pizza sauce
1 tsp olive oil, mixed with dried basil and oregano to put on the crust
Canadian bacon slices
Bacon slices (I like regular bacon. My poor arteries)
Pineapple
Cheese (we hodge-podged the cheese, from mozerella, cheddar, and a mexican mix of shredded cheeses that we had available)
Black olives (only for R.'s part of the pizza. Ew.)

Procedure with commentary:

• First we let the dough rest outside of the refrigerator for the required time of an hour, then I had an interesting experience getting it to stretch out to a decent size.  I hope it worked, since it seemed like the bottom was extremely thin in places, while the crust looks overly thick.
• Then we piled the toppings on - a layer of cheese, then the Canadian bacon, the regular bacon, more cheese, then the pineapple and olives (only on R.'s half. Let me reiterate how much I dislike black olives.)
• We put the pizza in to bake for 20-30 minutes, and prayed.

Currently, we just checked the pizza at the 20 minute mark, and it looks like it's baking up well.  I figured I'd give it 5 more minutes because of the doughiness of the crust, which is puffing up nicely and the house smells like delicious pizza baking.  My stomach is currently reminding me that lunch was heading on 6 hours ago.  I'm looking forward to this pizza more and more.  We're going to pair it with a wedge salad (also hodge podged and I just realized that I didn't save any bacon for the salad.  Boo. My bad. Sorry again, R.) since we had the ingredients on hand.

Post consumption judgement: Pretty darn good.  The pizza turned out just doughy enough in the crust, and my worries about the bottom being thin were for naught.  We weren't so crazy about the cheddar cheese taste, but we were improvising with the cheese.  That didn't stop us both from devouring it, and declaring it good.

R. says that I should be sure to state that he did a knock-up job with the eggs for the salad (the salads were iceberg lettuce, apple dices, hard-boiled eggs, olives for R., Canadian bacon, and ranch dressing).

In the end, it was a wonderful dinner that we put together, and I love R. for listening and for getting the ingredients to surprise me with.  Now, I'm going to curl up on the couch with him and watch the terrible movie that is Jurassic Park III (the original was on during the cooking process).

Here is a blurry picture of the final product, with R.'s loot on the right, mine on the left:

Here's to the memories you can make while making food with those you love,
-A