drumrollll...pizza day!!

Ok so maybe we didn't get to toss the pizza dough up in the air or anything (I may or may not have tried at one point and gotten a very stern look from Chef Tony...), but it was still pretty exciting when we found out it was finally pizza day in breads class!  Making the dough from scratch was already exciting enough, but it is super fun to pick any toppings you want from a well-stocked kitchen.  Especially when you just made ricotta cheese in Ingredients class and then your group gets picked to make the pizza sauce from scratch!  (Ok, anybody who knows me knows I hate ricotta cheese, but it was still fun to learn how to make it - even if it took our group a few tries!)

Here are a few pictures of the process - I didn't get any while we were cooking it, but here it is straining, then mixed with sugar and orange water for a filling for pastries.  The point of making the cheese was learning about milk and milk products (lesson of the week), but I guess we had to bake something, so we turned them into these cute little pastries.  This was the first time I had used phyllo dough and I really had fun folding them up - so much fun I went home and tried it with taco meat for filling instead (see below for pictures).  It wasn't as fun after about 12 (for anybody that has never used it, it is very very delicate, tears easily, and can't be left out at all or it will dry up - so you start with one sheet, cover the rest, brush with butter, lay another sheet on top, cover the rest, brush with butter...so on and so on, and that only gets you enough to cut up 3 of the size I made at home!)

(We ended up using mozzarella on our pizza, but a couple other groups used our ricotta on theirs.)

So to sum it up, we made ricotta cheese in the morning, then in the afternoon we made the pizza dough and pizza sauce.  And then of course we added toppings, baked it, and ate it!  Yum!  I almost didn't have room for our standard Monday night Chipotle.  And then after all the pizza making and eating, we also made Challah bread - but we ran out of time, so we didn't get to taste it.  No worries, we are going to turn it into french toast next week!  Chef Tony told the class that if we could figure out a six-strand braid, we would get ten points extra credit.  I got really frustrated after two tries and gave up, but luckily my group stuck it out and made this beautiful braid!  A few other groups got it too, but ours was the prettiest (if I do say so myself).

All of the groups' challah...ours is bottom left.

Oh yeah, and here are a few other things I have been trying out at home in my free time: