Pizza, Pizza!

I'm not one to toot my own horn, but...I think I'm getting pretty good at making pizza. I feel like I've really gotten to know the dough from the Smitten Kitchen recipe, what it should feel like and look like, and how it cooks on different racks in the oven. So at this point I like experimenting with different toppings. Yesterday I went to the farmers market in Streeterville and found some new fun ingredients.

I saw these red Tropea onions at Nichols Farm, they looked so pretty and I knew I had seen them on a menu at a restaurant recently (can't remember which one).



I just googled Tropea onions and learned that they're native to the village of Tropea in Calabria, Italy (southern Italy). They're a little sweeter, so I thought they should be paired with something spicy. For this pizza I did some light tomato sauce, a soft pecorino cheese, and spicy capicola.



I put this one on the bottom rack of the oven so it got very crispy. The onions and capicola were perfect.

For the other pizza, I wanted to use these cute little tomatoes also from Nichols.



This one was pretty traditional - tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, and tomatoes. The tomatoes were small enough that only 10-12 minutes in the oven (at a very high temperature) was long enough to roast them. Then I added fresh basil after it was cooked.



So good. When I first started making homemade pizza dough I never thought of it as a quick weeknight meal, but it really is. Making the dough is very easy, yes you have to let it sit for 1-2 hours but in that time you get your toppings ready and make a side salad, read a book, watch tv, vacuum, chase kids around the house, whatever. And then the pizza only has to cook for 10-12 minutes. Yum!