Behold the Amoeba Pizzas!

The amoeba pizzas were last night's solution to "what do I feed to three kids under the age of 12?" I was stuck on this problem for a few days, deluded into thinking that coq au vin would be a kid pleaser. When I asked a gal during knitting night, she reflexively replied "Why, pizza!"

The pizza dough recipe is from Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food, and I doubled it, yielding much more than the 4 10-inch pizzas I was expecting. The pizza dough was good and the rye flour gave the crust a little complexity, but making pain au levains has made me a bread product snob. If I had more time, and as it was we ate dinner at 9 PM, I would have used the sourdough pizza dough recipe from The Cheeseboard Collective's cookbook. I learned to make that dough when I was so in love with their pizza crust but disgusted by what was, in my opinion, an onion pie. (Realize that I have a low tolerance for onions, and the thin onion layer that lurked beneath seemingly every daily pizza made me gag. The boy thought their pizzas were just fine.)

I added some of my ever present mushroom medly to the pizzas, skim milk mozzarella, and magic cheese, otherwise known as Trader Joe's English Cheddar with caramelized onions (and, no, this cheese does not make me gag). Some pizzas had sliced salami, not pepperoni since we just grabbed the first cured, tube shaped meat product we could find at Berkeley Bowl West.

Overall, the great pizza experiment of October 2009 was a success. The kids ate it, the adults ate it, and the dogs enjoyed the crusts.

On a totally different topic, the Scary-Go-Round was truly creepy. Antique carousels are creepy on their own, but add skeletons with long, flowing hair and glowing hearts, and you have yourself the stuff of nightmares. Go when it is dark for the scariest time!