(from the original Moosewood Cookbook via Peter Haarsgaard)

Ingredients:
1 cup room temperature water
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbs honey or sugar (go with the honey - my addition)
2 1/2 to 3 cups flour
olive oil

1) Place water in medium sized bowl. Sprinkle in the yeast and stir in the honey until everything dissolves. (Let sit 5 minutes for the yeast to do its work)

2) Use a whisk to stir in salt and flour. When it gets too thick to whisk, mix with one floured hand. Knead in the bowl for anout 5 minutes (10-20 minutes is more like it if you want the best results. Also 3 cups of flour ain't going to cut it unless you want the stickiest dough on the planet. Just keep adding flour until the dough feels like more like dough and less like paste)

3) Brush a little olive oil on the dough. Cover the bowl and let rise in warm place until double in bulk. About 1 hour.

4) Punch it down and flatten by hand or roller into a nice pizza crust (I like to put a little olive oil around the edge and let it ooze around the perimeter of the pizza. This ensures two things. One, that the pizza will have a nice crispy crust. Two, you can remove the pizza from the pan without a hammer and chisel)

5) Bake at 450 F for 15-20 minutes (Presumably, you'd put the toppings on before you slapped the thing in the oven, but the people at Moosewood don't specify, so it's up to you. I'm the sort of guy who likes my cheese melted, so I prefer toppings on before cooking. The time is really a guideline. I look for a browning/bubbling of the chesse, then yank the pizza out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes and slice away.)

The plan was to get home by 6 o'clock, make a pizza for dinner and veg in front of the TV for the 3-4 hours of the Miss Samoa contest. Unfortunately, TV Samoa (now called SBC One) didn't show it. Instead they showed some movie about a Mormon missionary in Tonga.

The contest was on the radio, so Jen and I listened in true 1950s style. But the pagent has so many visual aspects which the radio can hardly do justice, so when the pizza was ready, we slipped a movie in the VCR and turned down the volume on the radio.

As of right now, 6:19am (I can't sleep), I still don't know who won. The Miss Samoa 2003 website has not been updated so far this morning and probably won't be all day because it's Sunday. I'm waiting for the news to come on the radio at 7.

The pizza was 4 cheese (mozzarella, cheddar, edam & blue) with tons of rosemary, both in the crust and on top. Since I ran out of the pizza sauce from Trader Joe's that my brother sent me, I went with Prego that I bought on sale at MD's Big Fresh. It was a decent pizza, but it's going to be so much better when my spice garden is producing fresh rosemary, oregano and basil (see below).