Last night I got together with several co-workers for a jewelry exchange. I wasn’t in the market for anything new but I did get rid of (I mean “share”) a couple of bracelets, a pin and some earrings I never wear. We all had quite a laugh over some of the items. (The 80s certainly had a distinctive style!) Mostly, it was fun to just hang out.

Our hostess, Diane, made a bunch of pizzas with all sorts of unusual toppings like roasted pepper pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and Canadian bacon (okay, so that weren’t THAT unusual—but I’m a pepperoni-pizza person, so they were a little outside my comfort zone). Diane, being Diane, made all the pizza crusts from scratch and they were really good. She used a Wolfgang Puck recipe and you can find it here. Like anyone who cooks a lot, she deviated from the recipe a bit. Here are some tips she suggests when making the dough:

• She uses a bread machine
• To ensure the crust stays crispy, she par-bakes it before adding the toppings and baking again.
• If she doesn’t plan to use all the crusts, she stores them in the freezer after she par-bakes them.

Happy weekend!