Another day, another pizza

Pizza is one of my favorite foods. Especially French pizza. I'm sure I would love Neapolitan pizza, too, but I've never been to Naples. So for me it's French style individual pizzas. I've been making pizza at home for close to fifteen years now, if not longer. I have two pizza stones for the oven, a peel, and a small collection of recipes for crust.

One of Sunday's pizzas, ready to be sliced.

My current favorite crust is based on a recipe from our friend Tom who lives in Illinois. He had a wood-fired pizza oven built into his kitchen not too long ago. When we visited Tom and Harriett in 2006, they treated us to their home-made pizza. Un vrai régal, as they say in French!

Sunday's pizza was made with the rustic tomato sauce I made last week. I ground up a couple of small steaks along with some smoked lardons (bacon) and sautéed them with onions, garlic, and some chopped eggplant from the garden. That all went into a pot with the garden tomatoes, herbs, and spices. We ate it on pasta last week, but we both thought it would make a good pizza. I didn't take the sauce all the way to the edge of the pizza this time because it was thick with meat and eggplant chunks and I didn't want that to spill over on to the stone. So I kept a little bare crust around the edge.

We topped the pizza with black olives and two kinds of grated cheese. One was mozzarella and the other was a dry Wisconsin cheddar that we were recently given. I made two pizzas and they were excellent (if I do say so myself). Served with a green salad they made a terrific Sunday lunch.