Soup, Pinini and Homemade Pizza

I had a dinner meeting here at the house last week for 15. I wrote this and then forgot about it until I downloaded the pictures and reminded me to post it. It was the first time many of them had been here and I wanted to take advantage of the produce coming in from the garden. They took a tour of the vineyard and stocked up on grapes and figs before dinner, which means they weren't as hungry as I'd have hoped and I had way to many leftovers.

However, dinner was great. We had 2 soups: roasted tomato with basil and parmesan crisps and crab and corn chowder. They were both good. Our friend in Durham who has a outdoor wood fired oven (read: green with envy) supplied the wonderful bread for the panini. We had 1.) Brie with bacon and 2.) Pesto, grilled eggplant, fresh tomato and mozzarella and 3.) Grilled Portabella, red onion and Fontina. A Capaese Salad and a blueberry cobble rounded it all out!



The best part was that we had some of the grilled veggies leftover. The September Cooking Light magazine had an article on pizza. Even though I love my pizza dough recipe, one never knows so I gave it a whirl. They had whole wheat pizza dough with basil in the dough so I topped it with tomatoes, grilled eggplant, grilled portabella, onion, olives and mozzarella and parmesan. The other, I made a traditional crust (their recipe) and made a pepperoni (low fat turkey pepperoni, of course) with mozzarella and parmesan.


Everything was great, although I still like my old standby pizza dough better; however, I probably will use the whole wheat crust again, especially when I'm making multiple pizzas for the variety. I think you can probably find their recipes on their website. The magazine is still on the shelves.

I love pizza, mainly homemade and we eat it whenever we have just the right ingredients on hand. One of these days, I'll post my pizza dough on our website. In the meantime, check out other recipes we have posted swank recipes and eat well, love much, laugh often.