Butch's Steel Pan Greek Pizza

It's hard to go wrong with a meal when it's pizza. The dough is pretty happy being thick or thin, however you like to stretch it. I made healthy homemade wheat dough when my kids were little, but today, with my personal schedule, I just pulled a ball of storebought white pizza dough out of the freezer at lunchtime and let it thaw till supper time. 

Making a pizza has never scared me, but turning my oven up to 600 degrees? Now, that was a little scary. In fact, I literally covered my eyes with one hand, peeking through my fingers as I pressed the "up" button on the digital oven temp gauge. 450. 475. 500. Yikes! Dare I go higher? 525. 550. Learned something new today. 550 is as hot as the parsonage oven will go.

As you may have guessed, a Greek pizza is not a Greek pizza without feta cheese and kalamata olives. There are other fun things about this pizza, like fresh, thinly sliced red tomatoes instead of tomato sauce. Next time around, I'll try Roma tomatoes. The ones I used were too juicy and seedy. I used both dry basil and fresh from my herb garden, altho it made me a little sad. Why? Because I realized as I carried the fresh basil into the kitchen that we are at the end of August now, and our fresh herbs won't be with us much longer. Soon I will need to start drying the herbs for winter. 

The recipe called for artichoke hearts. True confession: I skipped them. If the Resident Archaeologist had been eating this pizza, yes, I would have added them. But me, I'm not crazy about artichokes. However, I did liberally sprinkle kalamata olives all over this pizza. I adore kalamata olives and the R. A. won't touch them. Hah! Clever way to keep his hands off my pizza, don't you think?!

The oven really did cook this pizza without catching the whole house on fire. I was impressed. Who knew an oven could get as hot as 550? It just feels like the oven police should be pulling me over and giving me a fine for high heat. I kept looking at the oven thinking it might burst into flames at any minute. But it never did. And the pizza turned out terrific and tasty.

This pizza has a sweet story behind it, and you'll want to get the cookbook just for the story, altho do make the recipe, too. They are both sweet.




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