Pizza Pie

Tiffany and I made a homemade pizza last night for dinner. We almost ordered out instead. We were starving, and homemade pizzas take a lot longer than delivered ones, what with all the kneading and rising and punching down of the dough. But we'd eaten out every meal of the weekend, so we opened a bag of tortilla chips to hold us over and started prepping.

Pizza is one of our specialties, but this pie had an inauspicious start.

"Doesn't the yeast need to sit in the water for while?" Tiffany asked as I was measuring out tablespoons of salt, sugar and olive oil.

"Yeah," I said. "Oh. Sh*t."

I looked at the bowl, already filled to the brim with flour. My packet of yeast sat unopened on the counter.

"Here," Tiffany said. "I can fix it."

She sprinkled the yeast into the tiny edge of water that remained around the mound of dry ingredients and swirled it around as best she could.

It really did seem to work. The dough rolled out fine and looked gorgeous on the stone. In fact, it might have been one of our best batches ever until we forgot it was baking at 500 degrees instead of our normal 350 while looking over Tiffany's biochemistry homework.

"It's ruined!" Tiffany shrieked when she opened the oven.

I waved away the smoke as I came into the kitchen.

"How ruined?" I asked, "Look! The cheese is still yellow underneath this black layer!"

Indeed, although the crust of our pizza was actually charcoal, the middle met our fluctuating definition of still-edible.

While I dialed for delivery, Tiffany cut up the salvageable parts to freeze for later possible use.

"Okay," she said, "so this is like we're-starving-lost-on-a-desert-island-with-no-food-emergency-dinner."

"Right," I nodded, "Thursday."