The Pizza Stone

One day about 8 years ago (my how time does fly) I was at work and at the time I was working a 12 day shift. It was a Saturday and all the kids were at home. Jim decided (unbeknownst to me) that he was going to make pizza, from scratch. I started to receive a few cryptic phone calls at work around mid afternoon -- like "Do we have cornmeal?, Where do you keep the yeast?"

When I got home from work he had a batch of dough in the big mixing bowl and had the bowl down on the floor in order to kneed it!!

He had spent the entire day on his pizza project. He first had gone to a Italian grocery store about 40 minutes from our home to get Italian salami and parmesan and mozzerella cheese. He got canned crushed tomatoes and olive oil and basil to make the sauce from scratch. He went out into the garden where we had a small pile of Pensylvania Blue stone that we had just purchased for a path, he bleached and heated the stone in the oven, ready to bake the pizza. And after about 8 hours of labour and prep --when I got home from work he was punching down the dough from the final rising. I don't think he had ever made any kind of dough in his life before that day. We had two wonderful pizza's about 8:30 that night.

He has since made a half dozen or so more pizza's on the Penslyvania Blue stone. He did manage to get his time down to about 3 hours prep time!! He hasn't made one for quite awhile though - since all the kids have moved out we just don't cook like we used to.

Reading Leah's blog and remembering the wonderful pizza crust that comes of the pizza stones reminded me of how it all started. We still have our pizza stone and I think it just may be time for another pizza.