And No Anchovies Please!

I loooooooovvveee pizza. It doesn't take a whole lot of quality in a pizza to leave me satisfied. When I was a kid, Little Cesar's Pizza (which isn't the best quality) used to be my favorite, mainly because I was never exposed to anything better. It wasn't until I was old enough to buy my own pizza that I found out how quality is what makes a pizza. I still crave Little Cesar's from time to time.

On to my pizza!

Again, I went with the traditional association with pizza, nothing to fancy. Everything was made from scratch, except the dough since The Italian (John Marino) told me it is easy to screw up dough. Also, I didn't have a whole lot of time to make the dough from scratch. For toppings, I wanted to use chicken but didn't want the chicken flavor to dominate the pizza, so I limited the amount of chicken toppings and added arugula, garlic, and mushrooms. I also marinated the chicken in a mixture of virgin olive oil, tapatio hot sauce, salt, and pepper.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb boneless chicken breast
1 (14 oz.) can tomato sauce
1 (8 oz.) can tomato paste
Fresh Arugula
1 garlic clove (chopped)
Earth Mushrooms
Fresh Dough (from Trader Joe's)
1 lbs. Mozzarella Cheese (grated)
Parmesan Cheese
Salt
Pepper
Virgin Olive Oil (from Trader Joe's)
Tapatio Hot Sauce

The first step was to cook the chicken in a mixture of olive oil, tapatio hot sauce, salt, and pepper. I added the hot sauce until the chicken had a slight orange/red coloring to it. At the same time I cooked up the pizza sauce composed of tomato sauce/tomato paste, crushed garlic, mushrooms, salt, and pepper. The salt and pepper were added and adjusted to taste. After the sauce and chicken was cooked, the rest of the pizza was pretty easy to assemble. I just spread out the pizza dough onto a pan (added a little bit of olive oil on the pan so that the dough does not stick) and covered with a layer of sauce. Then I added all the toppings, mozzarella cheese, mushrooms, arugula, chicken, and Parmesan cheese. Throw it in the oven for 15 minutes on 375 degrees. Even though there was a set time of 15 minutes, I let the pizza cook until the bottom was cooked all the way through so that no areas had uncooked dough.

Itadakimasu!!!!!

-Joe