Do-Over Dinner

We set for ourselves a challenge this week: two dinner parties, a day apart, with almost no prep time with both of us in the room. Dinner #1: A Saturday night BBQ with lots of folks. Dinner #2: a quiet evening with another couple. Turns out the same menu works for both: pizza on the grill!

Dinner #1 was a bit chaotic and really festive. We bought dough from the pizza place around the corner and prepped as many toppings as possible, but there was still a lot of assembly while guests looked on. One friend remarked that it was like Grimaldi's, where half the fun is watching the guys flip the dough while you wait.

Dinner #2: Monday was a whole new mood. I did exactly what we had planned for the party dinner, but the chaos of the first run-through gave way to a peaceful afternoon stirring a little circle around the kitchen: caramelize onions, simmer sauce, knead dough -- stir, stir, knead.


The result of a questionably planned couple of nights spent entertaining was the rare opportunity to do it all over, recollecting recipes in tranquility.

If you can remember not to go nuts with toppings (three per pie should suffice) and keep the rest simple, you won't have to make a fantastic but debilitating, leftover-using, morning-after breakfast like this one following Dinner #1:


I used 101 Cookbooks's tomato sauce (lemon zest!), and made three varieties of smallish, semi-personal pizzas. Make sure everything is chopped and pre-cooked and organized in little bowls, and have a post-it with each pizza topping combo handy.

Ours:
Mozzerella - tomato - basil
Asiago - grilled peppers
Gorgonzola - caremelized onions - sausage

Next time I would like to make the dough, but I find no shame in buying a ball of dough from around the corner. Guests seemed equally impressed by the fact that they sell it to just anyone ("You just ask? Do they look at you funny?") as by homemade dough. The pizza is fabulous, cheap and impressive. We don't ever order pizza at home, but now I know we never need to.