Two Pizzas

I made two pizzas tonight.

Here's what I did:

Took two 16 oz packages of store-bought pizza dough out of the fridge about a couple hours before my projected dinner time.  Set them out on a counter - still in their packages - to come to room temperature.

Then I got the toppings ready...

First pizza -

Chopped about 3 strips of bacon into 3/4 inch square pieces (approximately).  Cooked them over high heat in a large saute pan until they had rendered most of their fat and were crisp.  Took them out of the pan and set them on a few layers of paper towel on a plate. 

Next - dumped in about, oh, 8 cups of sliced onions.  (I'm guessing - I just used up what I had, which was maybe 8 to 10 small to medium onions.)  Sprinkled a little salt over them and stirred them all around to coat the onions with the bacon fat.  Turned the heat down to medium low and let them go, stirring every now and then, until they just started to caramelize - roughly a half an hour.

While the onions were cooking, I combined about a third to a half of a cup of crumbled feta cheese with about the same amount of ricotta cheese.  Set that aside with the bacon.

Preheated the oven to 450 degrees F.

Then I started working on the topping for pizza number two.

I combined about a third of a cup of basil pureed with olive oil (this had been in the freezer all ready to go from when we harvested all the basil a few weeks ago) - with 3 big fat cloves of garlic, minced.  And about a tablespoon (all I had left) of grated parmesan.  Set that aside.

Assembly:

Pizza number one:  I spread the dough out on the baking sheet.  Rubbed a little olive oil over the surface.  Dotted the top with blobs of the ricotta/feta mixture.  Topped that with about half of the caramelized onions, and then sprinkled the bits of bacon over the top.

Pizza number two:  I drizzled olive oil over the pizza dough (already stretched out and ready to go).  Then smeared the basil mixture on top, and dotted (my word of the day) with ricotta cheese and sprinkled with salt and pepper.

They both took about 25 minutes to cook.  Alex liked the basil pizza.  Julia liked both.  So did Bill and I.  Bill's been sick, so he had tea.  Alex and Julia had juice, and I had some pinot grigio...hang on, let me see which one...Carsasa - estate bottled in Italy...it's actually a pinot grigio/pinot blanc blend (51%/49%)...and oddly enough, I couldn't see the year anywhere on the bottle...I'll look again later.  Maybe it was hiding.

Anyway - that's what we had for dinner tonight.

Oh!  Almost forgot - I've put the other half of the caramelized onions in the freezer.  I figured they'd be nice to have on hand.  If we were planning to have, oh, steak tomorrow, I'd have kept them in the fridge...and I would have bought mushrooms while I was at the store today, too....