Homemade Pizza Dough

My fiance and I love to make our own pizza. It's a lot of work to make the dough by hand, but the end result is worth it. We still haven't managed to make a good thicker crust pizza, but our thin crust rocks.  So we stick to what we know. :)

Recently, I became the proud owner of a food processor.  A food processor, I bought my mom for Christmas two years ago that she decided she doesn't actually use, so she gave it to me. So I guess in a way, I bought myself a food processor before I ever even knew I needed one.

One of the things I heard I could make in it is dough. So tonight I decided to give our fabulous pizza dough recipe a shot in the food processor. I have to say that I had my doubts that it would work.

It did! .... kind of. It wasn't a 100% success, but it did cut down on the time standing around with my hand on the mixer. It mixed things well, but my 7c food processor wasn't quite powerful enough to finish the job, so I had to remove the dough and finish with the hand mixer. Removing the dough from the food processor was a bit of a pain as it's quite sticky. I nicked a spatula on the blade and cut off a chunk of that. After pouring some oil on the remnants stuck in the bowl, I was able to extract them and finish the job with a hand mixer.

Another post as we actually bake the dough.....

Salad, What's for Lunch 2/10/2010

I have a very love-hate relationship with salad. Up until about a year or two ago, I wouldn't even touch salad, mostly because of the lettuce. I grew only exposed to Iceberg lettuce. That stuff makes me vomit just thinking about it. Since then I've been more apt to try new things and I've given salad a shot. I'm still pretty picky about lettuce and even go as far as being picky about the appearance of my lettuce.

My must haves for lettuce:

• Romaine or spring greens
• Fresh as absolutely possible
• a healthy green appearance (not wilted looking or fading)
• Not too much of the white crunchy stalk area
• Not too big of pieces.

Yes. I'm psychotic. I get that, which is why my fiance has given up trying to sort out the logic behind all my food issues  It is also is why I don't partake in restaurant salad too often. I used to only like caesar salad loaded with super-bad-for-you caeser dressing and parmesan cheese. I  rarely ate it because I knew just how bad it was calorie-wise. I mean, what's the point of getting a salad for the health benefits if you just slop it full of unhealthy dressing, right?

Somewhere along the way, I discovered I loved italian dressing, specifically a Roasted Red Pepper and Parmesan dressing. My favorite salad morphed from Caesar to:


Roasted Red Pepper and Parmesan salad:

1. Spring green mix or Romaine
2. Dressing
3. croutons
4. carrots
5. red cabbage

 I have since tired of this salad and have discovered a new one that is my new lunch obsession:


Asian Toasted Sesame Salad:

1. Romaine
2. Dressing
3. croutons
4. carrots
5. red bell pepper
6. (Chow Mein noodles)-- didn't have any of these, but would like to get some for this salad

So this is a combo post as that and a Cara Cara orange were for lunch today. I feel so healthy!