Stuffed

Well, it's not even 7 pm yet and we're STUFFED. Happy Hour is OVER. There's no more room inside our innards for any libations. We don't even want to think of another bite of food. What happened?

It was The Attack of the Deep Dish Pizza Pie! It threw a smackdown on us and we're STUFFED. Like for real.

Here's how it happened. First, Houn' Dawg brought his sack lunch over to the house at noon and we got to swapping stories about cooking stuff. He's a real good cook and he and I enjoy talking foodie stuff together. We had a real nice noon talking food. So, I was asking him as he left, "What's your next project?" He was kind of nebulous about it. He said he really didn't know what he was gonna cook next.

Meanwhile, after he left, I got to asking myself what the heck MY next cooking project was gonna be. "Whacha gonna cook, Johnny?" So, as I was driving round here and there, I got a whim to call Houn' Dawg at his work place and have him tell me stories about his pizza cooking days. He can cook a mean pizza. After listening to him for awhile, I decided I was gonna tackle pizza as my next project.

Then I went and bought a deep dish pie pan--not the kind with the sloping sides--this is a righteous pie pan. it cost me 75 cents at some T-store. (T-store = Thrift Store). I also scored some stuff to make the heat more evenly distributed in El Turco. So, I honestly felt like I could make a decent pizza in ET.

Then I made two trips to the WINCO Spa and Relaxation Center and made up two batches of pizza dough. For the record, I never even considered whether to look online about this stuff--I decided I had at least enough "smarts" to figger this stuff out myself.

Well, I put the first batch in ET at 5:21 and I let it bake too long on too high of a temperature and, besides that, the dough was all wrong. So, what I am trying to say is that I ruined the first batch.

The second batch, though, was dropped straight down out of Pizza Pie Heaven. The crust + toppings was a full one inch thick across the entire diameter of the pie pan. The bottom was browned perfectly and the crust was thoroughly done all the way through just like restaurant pizza. The toppings were cooked perfectly and the cheese was melted correctly and the "from scratch" sauce was awesome. I told myself I was only going to take one bite. HA! HA! There was NO WAY I could stop at one bite and I ate one entire piece of the pie. There's only four pieces in this pie pan.

Well, that piece STUFFED ME. And one single piece STUFFED Susun. We're not big eaters of carbohydrates. So, a little bit of carbs goes a really long way. That's what this pizza did--it STUFFED us Big Time. Heck, I can barely waddle right now and I only had one piece of pizza! We're talking a 9-inch pie pan here so you do the math. The actual flour equivalent for each piece would be one half cup of flour. That's really not too bad as far as "normal" carb consumption goes. But you have no idea how STUFFED a half cup of baked flour makes us these days. Geeze, we feel like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Well, the toppings and the cheese and the sauce had a lot to do with it--they were irresistible. The cheese was a Tillamook shredded blend of mozzarella and Parmesan. The toppings were finely chopped white onion, chopped black olives and thinly sliced fresh Baby Bella mushrooms. The sauce was made from real tomato paste with a pizza seasoning mix added. It's one of the best pizza sauces we've enjoyed in a long time. There was NO high fructose corn syrup anywhere to be found in this recipe!

The total cost for each single pizza (we made two--one failed) was approx. $2.50.
By the time I add a ground turkey protein unit, the cost will rise to perhaps $3-$3.50 per pizza. That's still a pretty good price for an evening camping dinner. We plan on baking this pizza up in Ellis next week--we're gonna need to be stuffed with carbs to do what we do there each day. We're gonna need a real stick-to-our ribs regime this time around. We ain't no youngsters no mo. We cain't live on a granola bar and a smile. Nope, we gotta have some REAL food to amp up for them 20+ mile paddle days.

This new campizza recipe fills the bill for what we're gonna have to ingest this upcoming week.

I didn't take any photos of the process. It was often photogenic and I SHOULD have taken photos but I was too consumed by getting the product in and out of the oven. Next time around, we will photodocument the process.

Well, thanks for reading & Cheers! jp

PS--Just for the record, the timestamp on this post is 7:11 but I actually started writing it at 6:47 pm.