Once a Pizza Girl, Always a Pizza Girl :-)

I have mentioned on these pages how much I love pizza. I don't just love eating pizza. I love MAKING pizza. One of my fondest memories is the summer I spent as a "pizza girl" at an amusement park called Knoebels, in central Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1984. I've loved each of the jobs I've held at Penn State in the past many years. But for pure fun and low stress, nothing beats being a pizza girl!

So as you might guess, my husband and I try to enjoy pizza at least once a week. Over the weekend, we tend to have a frozen pizza either Saturday or Sunday night. But I've been experiencing blood pressure spikes recently - a combination of stress and pure grief, I think - and so in addition to pretty much eliminating caffeine from my diet, we have also been trying to cut down on sodium. Alas, frozen pizza is loaded with salt.

So we have decided to try to make some changes, and one of them will be making more of our own pizzas. The last time we went grocery shopping, my husband picked up two packets of pizza dough. You just mix warm tap water with it and let it rise a little while in a warm spot before baking. No biggie. It still has sodium in it, but nowhere near as much as frozen pizza.

We used to make our own pizzas all the time, but we somehow fell out of practice. But on this day, we brought back a tried and true favorite: the homemade pizza! I made the crust myself, baked it for 5 minutes, and then topped it with a bit of pizza sauce, no-salt-added tomato sauce, three kinds of cheeses (mozzarella, cheddar, and parmesan), diced onions and green peppers, and then just a few pepperoni pizza slices, torn into tiny bits. Bake until golden.

You may see the result above. My husband tucked into that pizza like nobody's business. He ate SIX SLICES!!! I ate several myself. And we finished the last few leftover slices for lunch today (Monday). We never missed the extra salt. And here's a secret: I don't think it'll be too long until we make our next one. Mangia!!!

Here's a soundtrack song for something good: INXS, with Good Times, from the Lost Boys soundtrack, a film that is one of my guilty pleasures.