Well, we’re about a week late for slashfood’s pizza day, but oh well. Micah’s here! And he is awesome.

Before, we decided to have some­thing of an appe­tizer. This ended up tak­ing just as long as all the piz­zas did, but that doesn’t mat­ter, since we were eat­ing things as we were cook­ing any­ways. It didn’t really fit with the theme of the evening, but it was decided to make potato bha­jis. Until recently, Kendra has been reluc­tant to cook just about any­thing, blam­ing an under­de­vel­oped sense of smell/taste. This recipe was pretty unfor­giv­ing too. Con­sist­ing almost entirely of phrases like “add water until cor­rect con­sis­tency,” this was not the sim­plest thing to do. Some mix­ing, tast­ing and fry­ing later, the bha­jis were great. Go Kendra! I’m pretty happy to see her get­ting braver, both with the things she’s will­ing to cook and the things she’s will­ing to eat.

So, piz­zas. The orig­i­nal thought was that we’d make “indi­vid­ual” piz­zas for our own var­i­ous tastes. That’s bor­ing, so I sug­gested we buy a bunch of small doughs and every­one could make their own, then we all have some of each. Then, of course, the guy rolls out 3 medi­ums before real­iz­ing we asked for smalls. Which means we had a lot of pizza. Prob­a­bly 2/3 is left in our refridger­a­tors now. Some were stan­dard pizza fare, some weren’t.

The truly stan­dard ones were a basic pineap­ple pizza and a bbq chicken pizza. The chicken one is prob­a­bly inter­est­ing to most, but it’s some­thing we’ve done sev­eral times before, so its lost a bit of its luster.

The “Micah Spe­cial” con­sisted of bar­beque sauce, fresh jalapeno and pineap­ple. I under­stand this is derived from a space-grant tra­di­tion known as the “Chris Spe­cial,” but the fresh jalapeno really pushes this into a whole new realm. The jalapenos you get from most pizza stores are pretty tame after hav­ing sat in a can for months. Only a cou­ple of us were brave enough to try it, and it was spicy. Ow.

Per­son­ally, I decided to go a lit­tle wild. The first thing that caught my eye after walk­ing into Wild Oats was a bot­tle of thai peanut sauce. Hmm! Next, bok choy. After adding gar­lic, gin­ger, scal­lions, chicken and some fresh mozzerella to my bas­ket, I was done. The sauce was a lit­tle runny, but over­all it turned out quite well — the bite of the gin­ger, smooth cheese, chick­eney chicken and nutty sauce com­bined bet­ter than I could have predicted.

Time for best of show. Jen’s cre­ation takes both the appear­ance and taste prizes.

Pesto, toasted pine nuts, fresh tomato, chicken, fresh mozzerella and red onion. The only way I can describe this pizza is “epic.” More writ­ing on the sub­ject would not help to con­vey its glory.

Tags: food, pizza