when the moon hits your eye

This pizza recently came out of the oven in my kitchen. I jokingly refer to the stove as "the big white hot thing in the kitchen, with coils on top." Over the past few years, I've learned I have a multitude of food allergies, and while I'm very fortunate they affect my skin and respiratory system and not my digestive system, avoiding a long list of foods has made mealtimes a bit of a challenge. As a result, I don't use that big white hot thing as often as I used to.

There is a take and bake pizza chain that makes a pizza that I really like to eat, and don't have significant reactions. Needless to say, we've been eating a lot of it. One of my goals for the New Year was to see if I could find a way to reproduce a similar pizza, using ingredients that are on my "okay to eat" list. While the take and bake chain offers excellent quality and super economical prices, making it at home sometimes could be a money saver. Besides, we have the big white hot thing with coils on top, I should probably use it from time to time. The results were pretty tasty, and considering the whole works was made from scratch, it wasn't all that time consuming.

Pizza: Creamy Garlic Sauce with Zucchini and Mushroom

Preheat Oven to 400

No Yeast Pizza Crust
Adapted from a recipe by Terry H on Cooks.com

2 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2 3/4 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp olive oil
3/4 - 1 cup water

Mix dry ingredients. Add 3/4 cup water and oil, and stir. If dough is too dry, add more water. Turn dough onto floured surface and knead for about 4 minutes.

Then I stretched out the dough like they do in the movies and on TV. Disclaimer: I did not toss it up in the air while singing an Italian aria. I did not toss it in the air at all. Then I pressed it onto a round metal pizza pan that had been sprayed with cooking spray.

When I make this again, I'm going to experiment with using less flour and less baking powder to see if I can make a "thin and crisp" style pizza crust.

Creamy Garlic Sauce
Adapted from several recipes on the 'net

1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped (use one clove if you would like a milder sauce)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/8 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (on my do not eat list, so I omitted this ingredient and my sauce wasn't as thick)
A couple shakes of red pepper flakes (optional)

Melt butter and olive oil together over medium heat. Add garlic and saute for 30 - 60 seconds. Turn heat down to medium low or low. (I didn't get the heat turned down fast enough and my garlic and butter burned the first time I tried). Add cream, salt and pepper(s). Stir until mixture thickens a bit (will still be very runny). Add Parmesan if you wish, stirring it in a bit at a time so it melts gradually and doesn't clump up.

Spread the garlic sauce over the crust. Without the Parmesan cheese, the sauce will be very runny....I was pleasantly surprised that it worked well anyway.

Toppings
You could use whatever you wanted to here. I used...

Three cup package shredded Mozzarella cheese
One small zucchini, very finely sliced
1/2 box fresh button mushrooms, very finely sliced

Spread half the package of cheese over the sauce. Add toppings, then spread as much of the remaining cheese over the top of the toppings as you would like. I had about 1/3 cup of cheese left in the bag when I was finished.

Bake pizza 20 - 30 minutes until crust is lightly browned on the bottom and cheese is bubbly and beginning to brown.