Rest Day Recipe(s) | Pizza Night

Happy 4th of July! This is one of my favorite holidays, and I especially like celebrating it in Boston. Today my family has already been to a parade, where tribute was paid to particular founding fathers, muskets were shot by "minutemen", and the Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony of the Old State House, just as it was in 1776!

Right now I have rolls baking in the oven for our evening picnic with friends to watch the fireworks in a couple of hours. As I've been preparing for friends to come to my house tonight, I've been running to and fro getting cleaning and cooking done, and all of that work made me hungry! I was happy to discover some left overs in my fridge from our friday night pizza night, which I quickly scarfed down.

They were so yummy, I thought I would share the recipes. Our family does friday night pizza and movie nights. We have a great local pizza place, but we also enjoy making our own pizzas (and saving money on buying pizza!), so we alternate weeks of buying a pizza and making a pizza. This past friday was a week to make a pizza, and we tried one from a food blog I enjoy reading.

The pizza dough I used was her overnight whole wheat pizza dough. I think this is now my go-to pizza dough recipe. The recipe made enough for two pizzas, so I have a whole pizza's worth of dough sitting in my freezer waiting for the next time I make pizza. I did forget to make it the night before, but I made it friday morning and it sat in the fridge for about 8 hours before I made the pizza, and that seemed to work just fine. Also, once I started making the dough, I realized I only had about 1/2 a cup of all purpose flour remaining in my cupboard, so my dough ended up being mostly whole wheat. It was so good that way, I think I'll keep it mostly wheat in the future, too.

The pizza we chose to make was the Sherry Mushroom Pizza. We love mushrooms and chicken and sour cream and sherry, and this pizza put all of those together into one massive form of deliciousness! I will say, next time I will just use mozzarella cheese and maybe throw in a little feta. The fontina was a little pricy, and I didn't really love the taste of it. Also, I decided to use some leftover chicken breasts, but when I went to grab them out of the fridge there was not as much as I remembered, so this pizza was more like 90% mushrooms, 10% chicken. But, we love mushrooms, that was just fine with us.

To balance out the richness of the pizza, we enjoyed some garden fresh salads, made from the contents of this week's csa food share. I used iceberg lettuce (which is much, much different when it comes from the farm than when it comes from the grocery store), peas, grated radish and feta cheese. It was fabulous, and made even more so by this delicious dressing that my friend Janet shared on her blog.

And to top it all off, we made some frozen Slap Yo Mama Margarita's! A friend from FL gave me this recipe, so I whipped it up and threw it in the ice cream maker to make them frozen. It's the only way we'll drink them now, because they. were. awesome. To make them all you do is mix together these things:

12 Oz Frozen Limeade
24 Oz 7-Up
12 OZ Corona Beer
1 Cup Tequila

So . . . that was our friday night dinner. It was one that is sure to be repeated at our house, and now maybe one that will be tried in yours, too.

Since I've been typing my friends have all arrived and I'm being anti-social while blogging, so I'm checking out for now. Happy Independence Day, everyone!

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