It is the second Sunday of October. Erin, Chris, and Elliott came up for a visit today and it was the first time I’ve seen them since Christmas of last year. I’ve rented a pinball machine for two months and told them they had to come up and play some games while I had it. Here is Elliott earning an extra ball:

Playing pinball works up an appetite so I decided to make some pizza for them. As I pulled out the cheese from the fridge we noticed that I had purchased the whole milk variety instead of the skim milk. The whole milk is fine and tastes great but it melts and browns differently and I really wanted to keep with the cheese I currently know best. Terri and Erin ran out to the store to get some of the skim milk cheese and I think they were glad to get out of the house for a bit.

I asked if there were any special requests for toppings and Erin replied with the favorite line that Niles, Mac, and I used at Ponzetti’s: “The toppings are on the table”. We were strict in our philosophy of Zetti’s that you had to always order a cheese pizza and the only allowed toppings were the oregano, red pepper, and parmesan provided on the table.

I made the 1000 g dough recipe for six dough balls at 280 g each. The first pizza was cheese and came out like this:

The reviews were good on that one. And it even looks really good too. Erin was remarking on how difficult it is for her to launch the pizza off a metal peel and wanted to try with my wooden one instead. She was having some issues keeping the dough circular while stretching and the end result looked like a moon of Pluto. It still tasted really good. Shapes have no flavors.

She launched that pizza right into the oven like a pro. The wooden peel makes it so much easier. Next was the pepperoni crowd pleaser. Going in:

I saw a video where the pizza baker was pre-cooking the pepperoni in the microwave for around 15 seconds to pull out some of the grease before cooking. I tried that for a bit, but to be honest, the pepperoni grease tastes really good. This is pepperoni straight out of the package and placed on top. Out of the oven it looked like this:

Everyone was hungry enough for one more pizza and I talked them into a pepperoni, onion, and banana pepper pizza:

We were done for the day but there were two dough balls left. I practiced some dough tossing techniques. Maybe one of these days I’ll stretch an actual pizza that way. Then I tried to stretch it as much as I could without breaking it:

Erin said I should have made a Halloween mask out of that.