For some peo­ple, a sim­ple din­ner means boil­ing a pot of water and pour­ing it over Cup-O-Noodles. Voila!, din­ner in five minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any­thing against that. In fact, I remem­ber the occa­sional busy Sun­day after­noon grow­ing up, we’d do the same thing. Right before or after bas­ket­ball practice/girl scouts meetings/Costco trips/piano recitals, my par­ents, rush­ing from one child’s needs to the next, would “make lunch” by pour­ing boil­ing water out of an old tea ket­tle into four Cups-O-Noodles, set­ting the chop­sticks over the rim of the sty­ro­foam to keep the lid closed. After five min­utes worth of clean­ing up, clean­ing off, and clean­ing out the car, lunch wasn’t some­thing on the to-do list anymore.

But a “sim­ple” din­ner to me doesn’t mean some­thing I can heat up in five min­utes (although, that would be nice, and in case you didn’t know already I obvi­ously don’t have kids yet). A sim­ple din­ner is some­thing that I can pre­pare with min­i­mal atten­tion, I get with easy prep work, and can use up what­ever I have lying in the fridge. Oh, it also helps if it pairs well with the last bot­tle of Shi­raz in the cab­i­net.

Home­made pizza is on the top of this sim­ple din­ner list. To be more spe­cific, this home­made pizza is on the top of my sim­ple din­ner list, because it really is so. easy. to. prepare…especially when I have left­over tomato sauce in my fridge from the night before. I first read about it on The Wednes­day Chef blog ear­lier this year, and couldn’t believe when all I had to do was let a basic, lightly kneaded dough sit for about an hour, flat­ten it out, top it, and bake it for 10 min­utes. Some­times, I use the hour the dough needs to sit to paint my toe­nails or write a blog post. Other times, I use this hour to clean up around the house. The other day, I used this hour (plus some) to go play a round of bad­minton with B and then shower up.

What’s bet­ter, since we both love thin crust, the quan­tity of dough the recipe makes is best split into two, and the other half saved in the fridge to be rolled out for a sec­ond night’s din­ner. So, this is a recipe where I don’t have to go to the store for any ingre­di­ents, I get to play in the kitchen, yank and knead and punch dough around like it’s play-dough, then play a round of bad­minton, “cook” din­ner, and also have some left for another night’s din­ner, all in one easy recipe? You can see why it’s one of my favorite ‘sim­ple’ meals.

I men­tioned that I don’t have to go to the store for this recipe. On a hot, tir­ing day, this is the best news ever. We’ve got­ten into the habit of hav­ing moz­zarella in the fridge, because we can get a good deal on decent moz­zarella near our house (a huge block, imported, far from the real good stuff and any­thing local, but it’s cheese!). And on top of that, what­ever I have around in the kitchen then gets scat­tered over the top. Often times it’ll be anchovies from the pantry or roasted gar­lic, and if there’s no tomato sauce left­over in the freezer then sim­ply canned whole toma­toes (like Luisa does in her orig­i­nal adap­ta­tion of the recipe). I’ve added spring onions, mush­rooms, caramelized onions– all left­over gro­ceries that haven’t been used up in other dishes, all from the wet mar­ket. For my most recent pizza, I splurged on imported pep­per­oni at the store, and I hap­pily doused the pizza with a layer of the meat, thinly sliced green onions, sliced shal­lots, and minced hot chi­nese red peppers.

I’ve gotta warn you– if you try the recipe, even if you take it word for word, you prob­a­bly won’t get it quite right the first time. Nor even the sec­ond. Every time it will taste really really good, but it won’t be near per­fect until your fourth or fifth time around, because the dough takes some get­ting used to work­ing with. The thick­ness is hard to gauge until you’ve baked it, and there’s absolutely no way of know­ing how each oven cooks the dough. I, per­son­ally, am happy to say I’m near per­fect in the mak­ing of this pizza…which I guess tells you how many times I’ve made this since I saw the recipe in Feb­ru­ary, right?

the Per­fect Pizza Dough

adapted from The Wednes­day Chef and Jamie Oliver

Ingre­di­ents:

• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp. kosher salt
• 1 packet (1/4 oz.) active dry yeast (like Fleischman’s)
• 1 1/2 tsp. gran­u­lated sugar
• 2 Tbsp. good olive oil
• 1 1/4 cups spring water

Direc­tions:

1. Pour flour and salt into a large bowl. In a mea­sur­ing cup, heat the water for about 20–30 sec­onds. Mix the yeast, sugar, and olive oil with the warm water, stir­ring until yeast and sugar is dis­solved and let this sit for a few min­utes. Cre­ate a well in the bowl of flour and slowly pour in the liq­uid, using a fork to stir the flour in. Keep pouring/stirring until every­thing is incor­po­rated. At this point, the dough will be loose and shaggy. There will be a lit­tle excess flour at the bot­tom of the bowl, but that’s fine.
2. Dump the mix­ture onto a clean sur­face and start to knead, draw­ing in the loose flour. Knead for a few min­utes, or until fully incor­po­rated and dough is smooth and springy.
3. Lightly coat a clean, dry bowl (I just wash and dry the orig­i­nal flour bowl) with olive oil, and place the ball of dough into the bowl, turn­ing over once or twice to coat with olive oil. Cover this with a damp tea towel and set aside. Now, you can grate your cheese and pre­pare what­ever other top­pings you plan to top the pizza with, or go check your Face­book for a bit.
4. After one hour, the dough should be roughly dou­bled in size, and lightly dot­ted with bub­bles. Turn the dough over on a lightly-floured sur­face (there will be enough oil to keep in from really stick­ing), and punch the dough down– lit­er­ally, give in a few good whacks with your fist. Split into two even parts, wrap one with saran wrap and store in the fridge or freezer for another use. Or pre­pare to make two pizzas.
5. At this point, pre­heat the oven to the high­est tem­per­a­ture– my oven goes to 550F.
6. Knead the dough in front of you once or twice over itself, and roll into a ball. Start to flat­ten out the dough– I like to use my fin­ger­tips first and then use a roller to get it nice and thin, but even pulling and pinch­ing can do the trick if you like a thicker crust. I try to get the dough as thin as pos­si­ble with­out tear­ing, because both B and I like a thin crust.
7. Spread a gen­er­ous bit of olive oil onto a large bak­ing sheet, and trans­fer the rolled-out pizza dough on the sheet. Now you’re ready to assem­ble the pizza, using what­ever com­bi­na­tions of tomatoes/cheese/miscellaneous top­pings you desire.
8. Place the pan on the top rack of the oven– I’ve found that this will pre­vent the bot­tom from burn­ing too quickly in my reg­u­lar bak­ing pan (if you have a pizza stone, you’re awe­some and don’t have to heed this cook­ing advice). After about 15–20 min­utes, turn the oven to broil, and let the top­pings siz­zle, watch­ing care­fully. Take the pizza out of the oven after another minute or two, and let it rest for five min­utes for the fla­vors and cheese to set.
9. ENJOY it with a good glass of wine or beer.