War and Peace and Pizza!

I managed to cook two nights in one week, so I took the week of January 21st off to make room for irregular after work activities! AKA dragon boating practice (which I haven't been to since Halloween..womp womp) and multiple trips to the rock climbing gym. 

This past Friday was the first meeting of the dragon boating book club. Oddly specific, I know, but the book club was created because a small group of us dragon boaters wanted to read war and peace. This behemoth of a book would be very difficult to tackle solo, so we thought that this task could be completed by holding periodic meetings over dinner to discuss the readings. Needless to say we've had difficulty starting to read the book, so we attempted to start off this reading project with a dinner. 

We work together like rama lama lama ke ding a de dinga a dong

We cooked pizza. I've been wanting to try pizza for a very long time, so it felt good to put a check mark in that box. This pizza was to be made with love, aka from scratch. Unfortunately, probably owing to my bagel cooking escapade on New Year's Day, I underestimated the amount of time it would take for the dough to be left to rise. Luckily we had enough toppings prep work to keep our hands occupied, and we were able to put together a nice avocado salad and brussel sprouts, onions, and bacon dish to hold us over. 

IT'S BACON! 

Mark showing Kai how to chop an onion without crying.

Kaila is a guacamole salad pro!

Guac salad and bacon, brussels, and onions

Once the dough was finally risen, we were ravenous and it was ten PM. We rolled the dough out onto two cookie trays, and made pizzas with half feta, onion, and mushrooms, and half mozzarella and bacon. The toughest part of the entire night was waiting ten minutes for the pizza to cool after it was cooked. The dough was a little to rubbery for my liking, but it was otherwise a delicious dish. 

A great thing about cooking in a larger group like that was the higher cooking IQ. Whether someone was a novice cooker like myself or pickled her own cucumbers like Kaila, we seemed to know a lot about a little. Different skill sets were used to cook the dish, and although the dish would have tasted just as good with a smaller cooking IQ, we learned a lot about each other and the cooking world. 

Until next time, little chefs!