I’m almost 30 years old, and until today have never made my own pizza dough. Weird, eh?

I don’t know how, it wasn’t intentional, I love pizza. We buy local whole wheat pizza crusts and make pizza weekly, it’s just so much fun. I’m new to Active-Dry yeast, and maybe that has something to do with the lack of pizza dough in my life (for heaven’s sakes, I even worked in a take-and-bake pizza place my first year of college (mysteriously, I never had to make the dough)).

Well, today was a new day, and started out like any other weekend morning, a small child climbing over me and trying to put my glasses on at 7:30am. So much for sleeping in. Around 4pm inspiration struck, can you guess, yes, pizza.

I whipped out a couple classic cookbooks  “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and “Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza and Calazone” compared and contrasted their recipes… and started foaming my yeast!

Three little pizzas sounded like a good idea (since there are three of us), so after mixing my dough and letting it rise and then rest, I cut up my big ball of dough… and rolled these babies together.

I stretched them out, then put them down on a polenta and flour covered pan.

Toppings were prepared!

The first two in the oven were BBQ Chicken and BBQ w/out chicken pizzas!

Then the Mediterraneanish pizza with sun dried tomatoes, blue cheese, arugula (thanks Rene!) and artichoke hearts.

Wowsers… they were good!

It was so much easier than I though! I might start a weekly pizza ritual… although I also said that about making cheese, and have yet to make another batch!