I Made Grilled Pizzas for First Thursdays at Thursday Night Smackdown

If you were to take a look at what is in my RSS feeder you'd get a pretty good snapshot of my life: writing blogs, environmental blogs, food blogs, and a few of my friends' blogs. One food blog that I love is Thursday Night Smack Down. The blogger Michelle loves to cook and on Thursdays she tries new recipes from one of her many cookbooks and blogs about them with gusto. She also has something called First Thursdays where she gives her readers a category, they cook something from a cookbook they own, write it up, and send her a link. I thought I'd play along this month.

I made something I've been meaning to make all summer - grilled pizzas. I used a pizza dough recipe from The Bread Machine Cookbook. It was a half white flour, half wheat flour recipe. I asked everyone in the house what they wanted on top of their pizzas - gave them a bunch of options. Know what everyone wanted? Yep. Sauce, pepperoni, cheese.

Not me, though. I took a suggestion from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (great cookbook!) and put pesto (made from my garden), fresh mozzarella, fresh sliced Roma tomatoes (from my garden), and ripped up basil (again - garden) on mine. I sprinkled a little Parmesan on at the end for good measure. Oh YUM!

I've never grilled pizzas before. My husband put the coals all along the rim of the grill so we could grill them indirectly in the middle. After rolling the dough (love, love, love my bread machine) into four small shapes (not exactly round), I cooked them on one side (two at a time) on the grill. Then I took them off the grill, flipped them, and let everyone put on individual toppings.

I put them back on the grill until it looked like all the toppings were cooked and the cheeses were melted. There's all four of them at the left. We served them with our everyday Chianti (the boys had milk of course).

I was a little concerned about the whole wheat in the crust turning the boys off, but no one seemed to notice. In fact, both boys loved their pizzas. Getting them involved in growing and making the food had really made them more open to trying things they otherwise wouldn't.

Since this was my first time making my own pizza dough and grilling pizzas, I'm fairly impressed with the outcome. I think I'll try some other dough recipes and experiment with other toppings, too.