Our new favorite entertaining food is homemade pizza.  Well, semi-homemade pizza.  It’s so good. It’s so easy.  And for some reason, people are excited about it.

We buy all of the ingredients at Monte Carlo Deli in Burbank where the freshest ingredients are so inexpensive you feel like you’re stealing them.  Amazing sausages, delicious sauces, wonderfully salty cheese and fresh dough are basically for free.  Chris puts it all together and the perfect entertaining meal rolls out of the oven every fifteen minutes or so.  Each pizza divides into about 8 small slices, and each pizza is made with different toppings.  My favorite toppings include sausage, thinly sliced fennel or leek and a sprinkling of mozzarella.  But, as pizza goes, you can put anything you want on top and it will be heavenly!  Add a big salad and entertaining has never been easier!

A few tips… use lots of Semolina flour for the surfaces so the dough doesn’t stick.  I’m not culinary master, so I don’t know why, but it’s just better than regular old flour.  You’ll also need a pizza peel and a pizza stone… both are imperative to a perfect crust.   The rest, is easy peasy.

Semi-Homemade Pizza (Makes 2 pizzas)

1 Bag of Pizza dough

Sauce

Cheese (I always buy twice as much cheese as sauce… we go through the cheese much more quickly.  But, every person is different in this respect!)

Toppings

1. Heat oven to 500 degrees.  Put the pizza stone in the oven, on the middle rack.

2. Sprinkle your surface with Semolina flour.  Roll out the dough to desired thickness.  We like a thin crust, so we roll it on the thinner side.   You can use a rolling pin, or just pull it out with your hands.

3. Sprinkle the pizza peel with Semolina flour and place dough on top.  Add sauce, then cheese, then toppings.  If you’re adding sausage, we add it raw and let it cook in the oven.  If you’re adding onions/fennel/leeks/etc use a mandolin so they’re all the same size.  Thus, they’ll bake evenly.

4. Slide the dough from the peel onto the stone.  Bake for 10-15 minutes, until crust begins to brown.

5. Cut into pieces, and enjoy!