Pizza, pizza

Success! We have been making pizza at home for years, but a thin crispy crust had always eluded us... Until last night. With the help of our new pizza stone we did it; delicious chewy crust, with a definite outer crunch.

However, there are still kinks to work out on our quest for at-home pizza perfection. Using a pre-heated stone means assembling the dough, sauce and cheese trifecta on a separate surface before transferring the pie to the hot stone and putting it in the oven. Trust me, this sounds easier than it actually is for a first-timer. Ideally you would make the pizza on a peel, the long-handled wooden spatula that pizza shops use to easily slide pies in and out of the oven. Pies practically dance off those things... Not so with the peel-substitute we used. Despite a heavy coat of flour and cornmeal, our stubborn pie had no interest in gliding off our baking sheet onto the stone. Creative problem-solvers that we are, we had no choice but to pick our 'za up hope for the best. The resulting pizza brought to mind Dalí's clocks, though I must say that it was no less delicious and crisp.

{ If the above pizza appears to be rather ugly, that's only because it was }

The verdict? While there is room for improvement on our prep-to-oven transfer, we are decidedly in love with our pizza stone.