Homemade Margherita Pizza

Let's be straight-up with each other for a moment. I have a serious fear of failure. "What?" you say. "That's impossible, because you've never failed at anything in your life!" Or, more likely, you'd say, "What? That's impossible, because you've failed at so many things in your life! (see: earlier posts about exploding cupcake disasters.)

When it comes to high-stakes situations, I need assurance that I won't fail. I won't even attempt something if it carries a chance of failure. And on Thursday, I'm facing my most high-stakes situation ever.

MY BIRTHDAY DINNER PARTY.

Compared to this, applying to college was a cinch! I've been spending hours looking up recipes, but not just any recipes -- recipes that are doable in Kenya. Not the easiest task. I've created a tentative menu, and because of my fear of failure, I need to make SURE these recipes will work before I try to make them on Thursday. Because I have this nagging haunting vision of me dissolving into tears in the kitchen over a pan of burnt blackened FAILURE. Oh wait... that's already happened. More than once.

Anyways, my first project was PIZZA. I was totally daunted by the idea of making homemade pizza. Anything that involves dough rising is a new concept to me; so far, my primary experiences with yeast have been with Saccromyces in a microbiology lab, measuring gas output per concentration of organisms. Nerd 4 lyfe.

PIZZA. right. moving on. Pizza is actually really easy to make! How do I know that? Because if it was even slightly difficult, I would have ruined the whole thing! I adapted this whole-wheat crust recipe because, let's face it, if you asked a Kenyan for a bag of whole wheat flour, they'd give you a bushel of wheat stalks. White flour it is, then.

RECIPE (adapted from How Sweet It Is):

Dough:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon dry active yeast

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup + 2 tbsp lukewarm water

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

(Note: 1/2 cup water wasn't enough to get all the loose flour off the bottom of the bowl, so I added a bit more).

Combine flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add water, honey and oil, mixing with a spoon to form into a ball. Continue mixing with your hands and knead for about 60 seconds. Lightly oil bowl and add dough back in. Cover and let rise for 2-3 hours.


And if you let it rise for a bit more, that'll work, too. How do I know this? I took a serious nap and missed the three-hour mark. I'm developing excellent time-management skills, I know. 


Toppings:
I made two types of pizza: Margherita, and green-pepper-onion-tomato. For each, I added about 1.5 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese and a half-cup of parmesan, then layered the toppings and sprinkled with about a quarter-cup of feta. The combination of cheeses worked really well! The recipe for this is quite simple:

1. Grate cheese unsuccessfully for approximately 5 minutes until you realize you’re using the wrong side of the grater. 

2. Switch sides of grater.

3.Grate cheese for what seems like 5 hours and curse the pizza gods for placing you in a place without pre-grated cheese. 

4. Chop up an entire bell pepper and arrange it in a sunburst pattern around the pizza because it looks really pretty. Chop up other toppings and just toss that shit on the pizza.

Margherita pizza!

Onions, peppers, tomatoes!

Bake for 30 minutes at 375 degrees, or somewhere between 220 and 250 Celsius. Who knows if my oven dial is right or not. It's Kenya!

Oh, and I also made hummus (another fear-of-failure experiment in preparation for an appetizer for Thursday. Although it was tahini-less, after fruitlessly visiting four grocery stores.

Also, it turns out hummus is not very photogenic.

But delicious nevertheless!