I am a master of the narrowly-averted disaster.

So, I feel like every time I post about cooking/baking/house cleaning, it's about how I set something on fire/broke the sink/seared off my eyebrows. I figured I should post a picture of something delicious I have made to help balance these stories out. Today is a bit of both.

Ok, so I like to make my own pizza dough because it's way easier to always have flour and oil on hand than to wedge frozen pizza crusts into our shoe-box sized freezer. PLUS I make a wikked-good pizza crust, and I like the way dough smells when it's rising.

Which brings me to today. Because for dough to rise, you need a warm environment. Basement suites = sub-arctic temperatures. I have, in the past, considered roosting on my dough to make it rise, but sometimes I got shit to do. ANYways, I figured out that if you turn the oven on for a minute, and then turn it off, it'll warm up enough to do the deed. I like to give the temperature a little flick again about halfway through the rising, because our oven has trouble retaining heat.

The trick is to turn the oven OFF after you've turned it on. Otherwise, instead of rising nicely, your dough will cook into a loaf-ball, and you will have to slice it and make those slices into pizza, because you have been Christmas shopping all day and are too hungry to start over. I was about eight seconds away from this happening to me today. I'm all, why is the oven smoking? Oh right, because I have a bowlful of dough with a dishtowel draped over it in there, AND IT'S ON!!!

Luckily, the dough was just this side of cooked, and I was able to spread it out and bedazzle it. So behold (a foodie photog I am not)! My sausage/red onion/tomato/cheddar and asiago cheese pizza! Covet it!!!