Yum, Homemade Pizza!

I love to bake and cook from scratch. I seriously love it. I am a bit of a snob, especially with baked goods. I just don't believe in
that "if you make it at home it is homemade" and you then pull out a package of dry brownie mix. Yuck! Seriously, it is so incredibly easy to make brownies by scratch. And if I make it from scratch I can sneak in white wheat flour (weird name, great high fiber flour), healthy oils, wheat germ, etc. I am always trying to lose weight or at least maintain, so I refuse to waste my waist on sub-standard desserts.  ;-)

Yes, I do love to cook and bake. However, like many of you out there I am sure, I don't do it as often as I would like. There are times we eat interesting dinners such as a piece of cheese, a small box of raisins, a hard boiled egg, some strawberries and some peanuts. I call it our Snack Dinners.  Yes, sad isn't it...

Some days I can't wait to make a new creation, and I love to make homemade pizza. I am always looking for the perfect pizza crust, and I tried this one today. I added the water first in the machine and added a pile of fresh herbs from our herb garden (the only type of garden I can grow apparently) to the crust and smothered the pizza with chedder and goat cheese and fresh basil. And it turned out pretty good! I made the outside crust too thick (the chickens are going to be doing a happy dance), so next time I will make two smaller pizzas.

If you haven't checked out Recipezaar yet, please do. I have found every recipe I ever needed there and you can sort them by ratings. I love reading ratings.   I have found great recipes for homemade pudding (I won't eat that supersweet boxed junk anymore), smoked ribs, cobbler, mayo, spiced wine, etc.

See, I am a simple hausfrau at heart.  I get more satisfaction feeding my family a delicious homemade pizza than from any job I worked and got paid for.  I also get huge satisfaction from a clean house, but for some reason cleaning isn't as exciting to me as cooking.  ;-) 

I edited this pizza photo in LightRoom with just basic contrast adjustments.  I love doing my editing in LightRoom, but I rarely end up using LightRoom presets while I use actions in Photoshop all of the time.  I find it so easy to quickly edit a photo in LightRoom that presets really don't save me much time, unless I am doing something really arty.  I am curious if Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is going to be worth the upgrade.  I finished the photo off using my Web Rounded Corners Photoshop action (I love my web actions!).

I will be releasing the Urban Grit tutorial and action in the next day or two. I hope you are having a great week.