Where Has This Pizza Been All My Life?

8/3/2017

     Making pizza used to be my thing.
     Years ago, when my kids were young and I was mostly a stay-at-home mom who mostly, well, stayed at home but had little inclination towards cleaning, my preferred household duties, next to childcare, were cooking and baking, though I was better at, or maybe just preferred, baking over cooking.
   In other words, my house was pretty messy back then, but boy, did it smell good!
   I was a cookie, cake, and pie-baking mom par excellence, though the general consensus was that my pièces de résistance were my yeast breads and sweet rolls.

This magazine was my baking Bible,

...and I used to make bread a couple of times a week, the two below being everybody's favorites.

I also used to make these rolls from time to time, substituting for the blueberries canned sour cherries sweetened with sugar and cinnamon. One bite and you were in the Promised Land.

The other thing I was semi-known for in familial eating circles was my home-made pizza, which had a thick, delicious deep-dish crust, the recipe for which actually just came from my Betty Crocker cookbook.

     I used to make pizza about every other week, for family get-togethers, or upon request, which, as I recall, was fairly often.
      I used to spend quite a bit of time kneading dough back in the day.
     But then the years went by, the kids grew up and switched to auto-pilot, as they were by the time of this photo of Tommy's high school graduation day with our pets of that era, the cat and the bunny,

...I went back to work and began involving myself in various and sundry time-consuming activities, the bread- and roll-baking went by the wayside and for many years now the only pizza I've eaten has been store-made or home-made by someone other than myself.
Until last week. while I was in Los Angeles and folks were hungry for pizza. As I scanned my brain for ideas as to where the best locality for procuring some pizza might be, the idea popped into my head of making a pizza for everyone.
Of course it was too late in the day to start a yeast dough, but I thought I recalled seeing at the supermarket a canned Pillsbury-esque pizza dough in among the cans of refrigerated crescent rolls and buttermilk biscuits.
Well, thought I, canned-crust pizza won't be in the same league as home-made deep-dish-deluxe-crust pizza, but...well, actually I was now feeling kind of intrigued as to what kind a pizza came out of a can.
So I drove over to Ralph's to pick up the ingredients,

Then I made a canned-crust, Ragu-from-a-jar-sauce, cheese-from-a-bag pizza.
   OMG. It was awesome!
     The crust was thin but with the perfect fold-over consistency of a New York slice; in fact this pizza tasted better than many's the New York (I mean New York New York) slices I've had.
Which caused me to ponder: All those years while I was kneading mountains of dough in a state of ignorant bliss, was the rest of the world whipping together this fantastic pre-fab pizza?
   As the thrill of my new pizza discovery was still fresh, the day after I arrived back home in Columbus I made a canned-crust pizza for lunch,

...anxious to try out my discovery on Tom and find out if he, too, loved this new variation on a classic theme:

So anyway, on the chance that there still exists out there others as in the dark as I was on the joy of prefabricated pizza, let there be light:

Prefabricated Pizza

Ingredients
Cooking spray
1 can of refrigerated pizza crust
About 1/3 of a 28-oz. jar of Ragu Traditional sauce
Shredded parmesan cheese
One 8 oz. bag of mozzarella cheese
Oregano

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Spray a 17" cookie sheet with cooking spray.

Spread the dough onto the sprayed pan.