Friday Night Pizza

Homemade pizza with caramelized onions, served on my pottery plates.

Pizza is in my blood! My mom, whose parents came from Sicily and Italy, made pizza often. We had pizza at midnight on New Year's Eve, thick slices of Sicilian style pizza with pepperoni. Or a pizza stuffed with caramelized onions.

I lived in Chicago in the early 1980's and LOVED their deep dish pizza, especially the ones with spinach in the filling. When I moved to Massachusetts, I would bring home frozen spinach stuffed pizzas when I had to travel to Chicago for business.

Far from my mother and the pizzerias of Chicago, every Friday night for the last 20 years or so, we make pizza. It's a thin crust pie, baked on a pizza stone, easy and delicious. Here's what I do:

Pizza Dough

3 cups flour*

1 cup warm water (for proofing the yeast)

1 T honey or sugar

1 T yeast (or one packet)

1/4 cup olive oil

salt

* You can play with the flour by mixing in different kinds of flour. I love King Arthur's Italian-style flour. It's made with a low-protein red winter wheat flour that gives you a tender crust that's easy to shape. I get it at their store in Norwich Vermont, but you can also purchase through their catalogue or on-line. It makes the best pizza crust I've ever had. I've also substituted up to a cup of flour with a cup of whole wheat flour. Or try it the way they do in Chicago; substitute half a cup of cornmeal for a half cup of flour.

Add yeast and honey/sugar to warm water and proof until foamy. In a separate bowl, mix flour and salt. Add yeast mixture and oil. Knead until dough is springy and smooth, about 10 minutes by hand or 8 minutes in a standing mixer. Let rise 1 hour, punch down, and form into pizzas.

This recipe can make two 12-14 inch thin-crust pizza or one 12-14 inch thick crust pizza.

So what can you do for toppings? Your choices are only limited by your imagination, but I usually start by choosing to make either a red or white pizza.

The white pizza is basically just cheese and fresh minced garlic, and maybe some red pepper flakes and herbs for color. Make a clam pizza by adding fresh (or canned) minced clams. Arrange raw shelled shrimp on top before baking and you have a shrimp pizza. Mix a can of crab meat into the cheese and garlic mixture and you have a crab pizza. Saute and slice fresh asparagus with a few peas and you have a spring primavera pizza. You get the idea.

The red pizza starts with sauce which we always make fresh (and uncooked):

1 can diced or whole tomatoes, or 3-4 fresh tomatoes

1-2 cloves garlic

1 T olive oil

salt & pepper

Fresh or dried herbs -- we like basil and oregano

I usually whiz the ingredients in a food processor, because I like a smooth sauce. My husband likes it chunky. Then we add caramelized onions or sauteed peppers, wilted baby spinach or browned mushrooms. You can also add sausage or pepperoni or any leftover meat.

A couple hints about baking your pizza:

Use a pizza stone. We've had ours for 20 years. Heat the oven to 500 with the stone in the oven. Build your pizza on a piece of parchment. It's easier to get it off and on the stone. Use a wooden pizza peel to put the pizza into the oven. Cook for 10 minutes or until the top and bottom look golden brown.

My husband likes to wait 5-10 minutes after the pizza gets out of the oven to eat it. But I like the challenge of eating a burning hot slice of pizza.

Enjoy!

Slowing down, testing glazes, & introducing Flossie the teapot

When I'm creating, whether it be with fabric or clay or even food, one thing is common. My work is feverish, focused, intense. When I'm free-motion quilting, the whole house shakes. When I'm on the potter's wheel, chaos can surround me and I won't hear it. It's a great way to really understand your medium, but sometimes I get so focused on what I'm doing - I'm so in the moment, that I forget to step back and consider what I'm doing.

What throwing pots is teaching me is that I need to slow down. When I first started working with clay, I would be speeding around the studio, knicking the clay with my fingers, dropping things, making mistakes that could have been prevented by just slowing down. I'm learning how to harness that passion, and be a little bit more reflective of what I'm doing.

For example, take my two whimsical pots. I threw the body of the teapot at the end of one class where I was using a clay pad for trimming; the pad became the pot body. The next week I threw four or five spouts and a couple of lids. I loved the teapot's shape, but the plate was just an excercise in carving; I was trying to disguise a lopsided plate with a bottom that was way to thick, thus the carved bottom and egdgework. The week after I was working on carving the sunflower plate, and in the last five minutes of class, decided to carve the floral top on the teapot. The next week I painted the yellow and red and green with underglaze -- many coats. I was so excited to glaze them and start using them.

When I came in the next week to glaze, my teacher, Lizanne Donegan, suggested that I glaze the sunflower plate first with the opal glaze and see how that came out. I only take classes once a week, so this was hard advice for me to follow; I wanted to glaze that teapot! I dipped the sunflower plate in opal (using tongs) and then painted on randy red in swirls in the center. I was thinking it would be a very transparent glaze, glossy, with just a bit of bluish-purple sparkle. But when the plate came out of the glaze kiln, it was much less translucent than I thought it would be, but I do love the results.

The teapot, now that's a different story. I loved the fleshy shape of the pot -- like Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. We even named her, Flossie. I tried clear on the teapot, which came out great. One problem, which you can't see in the picture is that where the clay is thin (on the spout) and the underglazing is thick, the glaze had trouble sticking.

The teapot pours without dripping, and holds at least four good-sized mugs of tea. My daughter and I had a wonderful tea party with Flossie during the premiere of America's Next Top Model. What could be better than that?

Pottery in Process

About four years ago, I decided to try my hand at pottery. I found it a great way to take a little vacation from the trials and tribulations of everyday life, because it is a craft that you have to really pay attention to. You have to be respectful of the clay. You have to move slowly and purposefully. You have to be patient, waiting for the pottery to dry to leather-hard, waiting for the pottery to be bisqued, deciding the glaze colors and how to apply the glaze and so on

I'm a creative sort, and usually catch onto new crafts quickly. But I made ALOT of mistakes from my pottery. Mistakes on the wheel. Mistakes in how I covered the pots to dry. Mistakes in carrying the pots to the shelf. Mistakes in how I glazed. But every mistake made me see what I could do with the mistake. I went in another direction with my art.

So today, I worked on two pieces that started out as something else. The teapot began as a large flat pad that I threw when I was trimming some plates. It was more bulbous than I wanted, but I saved it anyway. The fleshy spout was also a mistake -- a little shorter and wider than I was thinking. There were three weeks between classes, so it dried out more than I thought it would. But I carved the floral lid. I decided to underglaze it in red, and as I painted, I came up with the polka-dotted body. I had no idea that it was going to look like this when I started this!

The same is true of the sunflower plate. When I was throwing this, I rushed through it, and it got a little lopsided. I made a very thick bottom, so when I was trimming, I had a very large foot. After I finished trimming, I took out the knife and started cutting out the petals- though at that time I was thinking about crowns. (The bottom has the same crown looking carving). When I finished the spotted teapot, I was inspired to make the crown plate into a sunflower plate. Now where did that come from?