Want some 'za?

When it comes to a lazy, quick dinner, pizza is one of the first things I think of. It's so easy to run across the street and grab a slice, but it's also just as easy to make your own - and that's exactly what Doug and I like to do. Normally, if I think far enough in advance, I like to make my own pizza dough on my picture-perfect KitchenAid (a year into my relationship with it and I'm still in love!). However, sometimes I can't wait the hour plus it will take. And that's the mood I was in when we decided to make pizza the other night. So instead, we went to our grocery store and purchased Boboli's large, thin crust whole wheat pizza. Next we had to decide on what we were going to put on our pizza. This is always a pretty long debate since Doug will eat anything and I can't make a decision. Eventually, we decided to make a "sausage and peppers" pizza. So we also picked up some Boboli pizza sauce, an Italian six cheese blend, hot Italian sausage, green peppers and an onion.

Upon returning home, we took out our frying pan, heated it up, dropped some oil in and got ready to brown the sausage. Instead of just slicing the sausage, I decided I wanted it "crumbled" on top, so using a paring knife I sliced open the sausage casing and dropped the meat into the hot frying pan. Then we just used a wooden spoon to mash it up. We turned on the oven and while Doug oversaw the sausage (he thinks meat is the man's job), I chopped up the pepper and onion. Before we knew it, the oven was hot, sausage brown, vegetables chopped. All we had left to do was assemble, put it in the oven and eat!

So on a large, flat cookie sheet, we put our crust down. On top went the sauce, the sausage, the peppers and the onions. Then we added cheese until we were satisfied. We put it in the oven, opened a beer and 10 minutes later...

*When chopping up vegetables for the pizza, you can make them as big or as little as you want them. I prefer short strips of peppers and onions, so after slicing them vertically, I then just cut them horizontally in the middle, making each piece about 1 inch long.

**Upon reflection, I also blogged about pizza back in May of 2009, almost exactly a year ago. If you go to that post, I have a recipe for homemade pizza dough, try it!