My throat hurts. I’m not sure if it’s perpetual lack of sleep, or if I’m getting sick. I hope I’m not getting sick, but if I do, I hope I don’t get sick ’til tomorrow, because I’m planning to go to the Songwriter’s Guild mtg tonight. I’ve only been one other time, and it was a year ago, which also happened to be the first night I felt pregnant-sick with Max. It was a rough night and they probably all thought I was mental, if they even noticed, squirming around in my chair the whole time. It was a bunch of men I didn’t know, though, so I couldn’t really say anything without it getting awkward.

I’m so tired. We slept ok last night, outside of the hour between 2 and 3 am, when Max threw up three times. Poor thing. We went to the doctor today, for what was supposed to be his 4 month well-check. He’s dealing with the illness fine, doesn’t have an infection and his lungs are clear.

Thank goodness for that! ‘Cause he sounds awful!

Here he is, watching me make dinner last night

We had margherita pizza, our first attempt, and it was fabulous!

My youngest brother-in-law spent 2 years on a mission in Italy, and we had him over to teach us how to make pizza a few weeks ago. His method is “throw it all in a bowl ’til it looks right” so we did our best to extract measurements of ingredients. This is what I got-

3 cups flour
1 egg
1T or so olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp yeast
about 1 cup warm water

You throw it all in a bowl and poke at it with a rubber spatula ’til it’s more or less mixed. Then you punch it around ’til it’s a dough. (I cheated last night and did some light kneading instead of the punching). Cool thing is, if it’s too wet, you can add a lot more flour and it still comes out. Ask me how I know :-).

Then I washed out the bowl, sprayed it with cooking spray put the ball of dough back in and covered it with a damp towel.

There’s no sugar in the dough, how weird is that? I thought yeast needed sugar, but apparently not.

So that’s it. It rises for an hour or so. I pinch off a handful and shape/stretch it into a circle (if you need help with that, email me or comment), I even tried my hand at tossing it in the air with moderate success. It got paper thin. We put thin slices of roma tomatoes on the dough, and a medium amount of mozzarella cheese. Baked it on a hot pizza stone for 7 minutes (500 degrees), pulled it out, put fresh basil on the top, some coarse salt (french gray this time) and drizzled it with olive oil. It made two large pizzas, plus the one small one in the picture.

Mmmmmm.

They’re not remotely filling, unfortunately. It’s a very light pizza. But the same crust works great with sauce and sausages and such, that’s what we did last week and it’s quite filling that way.

He has a great sauce recipe, too if you’re interested.

1 can tomato sauce (Safeway’s organic is my favorite. It’s sweet and less acidic tasting than the S&W)
1T dry basil
1/4 cup olive oil (you could probably get by with 3 T)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp + minced garlic (or 1 clove)

let it sit for awhile for the flavors to blend. It’s really good on pasta, too.

So there you go, easy pizza recipe. I like the fact that it only uses a mixing bowl, so cleanup is really easy and I don’t have to haul out my mixer and wash attachments.