Made to Order

The sous-chef told me I should make a food blog post today...I think that's his way of hinting he wants some good eats. Not very subtle...and rather sly, as he knows I would love to devote some time to blogging.

I have previously touted my love of a restaurant chain called CPU, because you can buy pizza by-the-slice and everyone gets to choose their favorite. And the slices are large enough that one piece per person is usually enough (very cost effective!) We have a wide range of pizza-tastes in our family, and satisfying everyone with a single pizza is impossible. We have the cheese-lover, the pepperoni-addict, and the parents whose taste has ventured past the simpleness of a cheese or pepperoni and actually like to see a few vegetables on their pizza. Shock! Let's not get crazy and add olives on there anytime soon though.
As convenient as pizza-by-the slice is, ordering any sort of take-out food when you live a few miles out of town is never convenient. There's no delivery, so it either means packing all the critics into their car-seats to pick up food, or hoping the sous-chef can stop on his way home...and get the order right, and on-time. (on-time = my time)
Solution: made-to-order pizza...at home. Tonight, is pizza night, and we're going to skip the frozen, boxed pizzas that we usually do and actually enjoy something 'slightly' homemade. It's still a store bought (albeit fresh and not frozen) pizza crust, but the toppings will be all mine. I'm envisioning a white on white pizza for the oldest critic, to feed her love of all things dairy. But what shall I call this plain cheese pizza? While looking at paint samples recently, I was amazed at the number of different ways a paint store can jazz up the color white. There's painters white? egg-shell? (sounds too Oscar the Grouch - that's a color left for walls and not for pizza) how about abalone? unicorn white? or "In the buff". Or I could make reference to my extremely white (nary see-through) family. We are white on white. So we'll call it, the English pizza.
Critic #2 will have his usual salty meats pizza - the Italian.
And the chefs - we're having the Canadian...a friendly mix of everything. A nice melting pot of culture.
Critic # 3 will have to settle for the usual jar of strained peas and applesauce as his pallet isn't quite ready for pizza yet. Oh, just you wait, little man.

Recipe
Start by brushing outer edge of pizza crust with garlic butter and sprinkle with cornmeal or sesame seeds.
Use pizza cutter to divide pizza into portions by scoring the dough. This way, everyone's made-to-order pizza is precise and we don't hear things like, "His pepperoni is touching my cheese!"

The English:

Using leftover alfredo sauce from pasta dish earlier in the week, brush pizza crust with sauce, giving it a nice layer, but not too thick, because she doesn't like it 'too saucy'.
Cover with Kraft Pizza cheese and sprinkle with parmessan.

The Italian:
Spread tomato pizza sauce over crust
Cover with semi-circular cut pieces of pepperoni (he likes this shape best)
Cover with Kraft Pizza cheese and sprinkle with parmessan

The Canadian:
Tomato sauce
pepperoni
ham
red peppers
cheese

The Experiment (the sous chef tells me that outstanding pizza sometimes comes at a cost, when I explained that I would have to defrost chicken breast and cook it before I made this pizza. Extra work is not what pizza night is about...the extra cost will be in man-hours I guess)
alfredo sauce (spicy)
grilled chicken
tomatoes
cheese
(our version of the chicken club - we'll see how it goes)