After Episode One (which was in somebody else's diary, by the way), I thought that we should move on, past the roasted vegetables, to something that has been getting made since roughly the moment when Man learned to cook over hot embers: the pizza. Now, at that point in time (the Age of Hot Embers), the word "pizza" clearly had not been invented, so this concoction went by other names, like "deer," "squirrel," "mammoth," "guy from the other tribe that I accitentionally clubbed while he was lying down drinking from the lake." But the IDEA was there, even if the refined dough was not, so my original statement still stands. Sort of.
And again, much like the roasted vegetables, this is kind of a guy thing. If you're a woman, you can certainly try this recipe, but it won't be the same, because you probably won't be making it while having to continually run into the other room to see what the basketball/football/baseball/hockey/jai-alai score is.
First, wander down to your local grocery store, and look around until you find where your local supermarket is hanging the 12" pizza crusts. Usually you get some choices on these. There are smaller pizza crusts, for instance, and you might get a choice about what particular dough is in the crust. Really, it's up to you. Feel guilty about eating pizza? Then buy the flax-seed pizza crust, by all freakin' means.
Now, THIS IS IMPORTANT: at the same station (it's usually some stand out in the middle of an aisle somewhere) where you found the pizza crust, you'll probably also find the pizza sauce. Go ahead and buy a couple cans of this. You're getting two pizzas. You need two jars of the pizza sauce. Next thing that is IMPORTANT: do NOT, I repeat, do NOT buy one of the bags of pepperoni that is hanging near all of this. You will spend six bucks in order to buy about twenty freakin' slices of baby pepperoni. What YOU want to do is to wander now over to the Deli, and get someone to slice you about a quarter-pound of pepperoni from out of the case. The reason you want to do it this way is because you'll discover it costs you about a quarter what the pre-bagged pepperoni would. While your pepperoni is being sliced, you can wander over to the produce section and buy one (1)red bell pepper, one (1)8-ounce carton of pre-sliced white mushrooms. You can even buy a white onion and some of that "freeze-dried" garlic-in-a-bottle that supposedly rehydrates when you cook with it. Basil and oregano are also good ideas here, but you don't HAVE to have these to come up with something that is quite edible. After you get your vegetables, wander back and pick up your pepperoni. THEN, look around the deli area and see if you can spot where they keep the decent cheese. NOT the crap that they sell in the milk section, but the REAL cheese that is made from real cow's milk--NOT cat milk, like that shredded, overpriced crap that's made by those people with the cow with the 1950's hair-style. You want to buy a block of REAL mozzarella cheese, and a smaller block (maybe a wedge, depending on brand) of parmesan cheese. Be prepared for some sticker shock. Real cheese ain't cheap. You could at this point also wander over to the aisle where they keep small appliances/kitchen supplies to see if you can find a really cheap grater, but the cool thing about this pizza is you DO NOT NEED to grate the cheese unless you want it to be all purty, or something.
So, you've got all your stuff. You've paid for it. Go home, take all your stuff out of the bags, pop your oven up to 430. IMPORTANT: ignore the instructions on the back of the pizza-crust bag. It will tell you some nonsense about heating the oven to 450 and then cutting it back to 425 when you pop the pizza in. Why the frack would anyone want to heat the oven up and then cut it back? Just heat the oven to 430 and you'll be fine. That oven-cuttin'-back stuff is for artsy-fartsy kind of people. The kind of people who show up at your house and try to "interpret" the mildew stain on your shower wall, because they think it's some kind of clever utility art. You're not that kind of person. You're the kind of person whose wife could be committing adultery in the Barca-Lounger next to the sofa, and you would never know it because there's something on t.v. involving a bunch of guys running around chasing the inflated bladder of a pig around a court/field/diamond. If you aren't that kind of a man, you will be once my pizza is through with you!
You've now turned the oven on. It's heating. You might briefly want to open the door to make sure there isn't anything heating in there at the moment that shouldn't be, like a stack of library books. Get out a cutting board. If you don't know where the cutting boards are, it isn't really all that important. You can cut on anything that's pretty stable and flat. Like a library book, for instance. You could really cut stuff up on a plate if you wanted to, and that's fine. The board gives you a little more room to work with, and that's good. Before you start cutting the bell pepper on the cutting board, you can actually open the crust-bag and take out one of the crusts. If you have a pizza pan (round pan with diamond-shaped holes in it), you can use that, but my suspicion is that you don't, so you have a couple of options. You can use a normal cookie sheet, or you don't have to put anything under the pizza at all. THAT's RIGHT! NOW, do you understand why cavemen absolutely LOVED the whole pizza concept, tens of thousands of years ago? You cook the pizza, RIGHT ON THE COALS! All right, we don't cook the pizza right on the coals anymore. We put the pizza on one of the oven racks. But it's ALMOST like being a caveman.
Now, the oven's heating, you've established you don't have a cutting board or a pizza pan. You're in business! It's a lot like getting a sub-prime mortgage: you are rewarded for having none of the stuff you really need!
Do you have some olive oil in the house? If you do, drizzle a bit of it over the top of the pizza crust. Then, open up one of the cans of pizza sauce. I believe they're 8 ounces in size, and you can basically use all of one on a pizza without doing any harm to either you or it. If you've got a large spoon somewhere, you can use the back of the spoon to spread it around all the way to the edges of the crust. Now, take out your two cheeses. The mozzarella is the one that you're really gonna concentrate on. If you want to know why the pizza you buy from the pizzeria never quite lives up to your expectations, you're about to discover why: they use cheap-assed cheese, and cheap-assed pizza sauce. Sauce and cheese make up almost everything of importance that you taste when you bite into a pizza. So that 7-dollar chunk of mozzarella you are going to be slicing up (about half of it, actually) is going to pay dividends for you here. As I mentioned, take about half of the mozarrella bar (and you COULD easily use about 8 ounces of mozzarella on a 12-inch pizza) and cut it into fairly thin slices. This isn't because you're trying to be dainty. It's because it will melt a little easier and spread out a little better if the slices are fairly thin (but not TOO thin! You want to really enjoy the mozarrella taste). After you get done with the mozzarella, slice up 3 or 4 ounces of the parmesan and put it on the pizza as well. Then, cut up your bell pepper by slicing off the top, and then cutting the rest down the middle, cutting out the seeds and the membrane. You'll want to slice up about half of the pepper, so that you can toss the pieces around the pizza. And you'll want to take about 8 slices or so of the pepperoni, put it in a little stack like poker chips, and cut it in half (the pepperoni you get in the deli is usually pretty large. You will probably have to cut the pieces in half so that they don't look really funny on top of the pizza). Put the pepperoni on the pizza, however you want to. Also, open your carton of mushrooms and take out a handful, placing them however you wish. Different people have different styles. Some people are very neat when placing toppings, other people mostly just broadcast ingredients with an indifferent throwing motion.
Got all the ingredients on the pizza? Excellent! Take that sucker and pop it in the oven on a rack. IF you are cooking without anything underneath the pizza but the rack, you'll have to be a little more conscientious of potential calamities (oven FIIIRE!!!), but really, it's not a big deal. Remember, once whatever is in your oven has used up all the oxygen in there, it will smolder until you stupidly open the oven door and allow the backdraft to cause your beard to burst into flames. So have somebody ELSE check the pizza if you think you smell smoke. Otherwise, in about twenty minutes, you'll have a really delicious pizza. Notice, by the way, that you are not required, in this pizza recipe to use a single herb that didn't come in that pizza sauce. If you are a little more adept, you can try a bit of basil, oregano, garlic, crushed red pepper, on the pizza. Personally, I kind of like the very "natural" taste of just cheese, crust, sauce, and pepperoni, with the crunch of the red pepper, which will be cooked but not denatured, as it would be if you were eating a pizza that had been nuked in a pizza oven at 700 degrees.
Slice up that pizza. Remember, your dog probably WILL enjoy a slice, but let it cool first, because he'll try to eat it in one gulp and you don't want the hot cheese to give him third-degree burns on the roof of his mouth.