Home Made Pizza Goodness

We will just start right off with the recipe for this one! 

Thin Pizza Crust

Preheat Oven (and pizza stone if you have one) to 475˚

¼ Dry Yeast Packet
¾ c. Warm water (110˚ warm enough to bring the yeast to life, but not so hot that it kills it)
¼ tsp sugar
1 ¾ cup flour
½ tsp salt

Dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water and allow to rest for eight minutes (or while you do the next step). In a separate bowl combine flour and salt. Pour yeast mixture over flour and mix well with a wooden spoon. Turn onto a heavily floured surface and knead for two minutes.

Side note here: Having an art/ceramics background I have found it really hard to teach myself the difference between kneading; as in bread, where you are trying to work air INTO the dough and wedging: as in clay, where you are trying to get all possible air OUT of the clay. Luckily for me this recipe is for thin and crispy crust and it’s not really meant to rise that much, so not really an issue here... the real problem came when I was making the cinnamon rolls... but that’s a later post.

Using a floured rolling pin roll out dough, if you are really good, you can stretch one batch out enough to make two really thin pizzas.

Sadly this was my last time getting to use my wonderful and very well loved pizza stone. It was awesome; however, I am accident prone and managed to shatter it with this very pizza. If you are luckier than me and still have one, use it! Put it in the oven and allow it to preheat with your oven, it helps bake the dough on both sides and make it that much more crispy. If you don’t have a stone any pizza pan and or cookie sheet works too. I like to sprinkle coarse salt and corn meal on the pizza stone before putting the dough down, it gives it a little more flavor. Plus, for those of us beyond the delivery area of any Cassano’s Pizza Places, it’s a nice substitute for their salty salty crusts.

For this particular pizza I knew we were going with feta and chicken so I came up with a white sauce out of what we had in the kitchen at the time. Sauté a few cloves of minced garlic in some butter (which at the end of Kurio Cookies I had roughly 9 lbs of real sweet cream butter, so from here on out, I say butter you assume I mean REAL butter). Add about a half cup of milk and melt about a half block of cream cheese into it. Salt and pepper to taste. It will thicken up, if you want it thinner add more milk.

Oh and before topping I usually bake the crust for about 5 minutes or until it just starts to get a little color on it.

For toppings this time I grilled two chicken breasts and cubed em. Spread the sauce, add the chicken, sliced mushrooms, crumbled feta, diced green peppers and red onions... on half if you are sharing it with a picky eater like I do, or whatever else you want (obviously).

Before Baking

I rarely time things like this... so bake until the cheese starts to get nice and golden brown on the top.

Most important lesson from this baking experience: turn off your burners when you are done using them. Yet another reason why I hate having an electric stove, if you leave the burner on there is no visible flame to remind you. And then when you have forgotten to turn your burner off and you pull your beautiful yummy looking pizza out of the oven on your awesomely loved pizza stone and sit it on the still ON burner... your awesomely loved pizza stone (with a very loud and scary POP) breaks into three shards. It was a sad day. And I am getting a little better at remembering to turn the burners off. But the pizza did make it a little better.

yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Here's The Story....

Okay so I have always loved to cook. Bake. Make yummy food for friends and family to enjoy. I do this all the time. Whenever requested by my favorite people, or an event comes along that calls for it, or I have a new kitchen gadget that I want to try out, or just whenever the urge strikes really. I really just love to cook and to share my “natural talent for baking” as I have had it called. While I always have my wonderful husband to do this for he sometimes leaves me very little wiggle room if I really want to make something that he’ll enjoy… he has what we will call a limited pallet…. He is soooooooooooooo picky! And on top of this I somehow managed to marry a man who as he puts it is “just not that big on sweets.” This is a phrase that I will never be able to comprehend, if there is a cookies in the house, I know it and I want to eat it, that’s just a given! So while I do enjoy cooking for him, I really love to cook and bake and experiment for other people a little more. I can be just that much more adventurous with things! I mean I can branch all the way out and use crazy ingredients like nuts! (Ha ha, I love you honey!)

So after working at my current day job for about a year and a half and bringing in cookies, cakes, and breads I was convinced that I could easily sell my baked goods. As one email put it “Just open a bakery. Seriously.”

So a friend that I work with has done this before… enjoyed cooking enough to attempt his own business, and he convinced me I could too. With his help and encouragement and that from my whole support system, I did it. I really really did start my very own cookie company. Kurio Cookies.

So while I am giving the back story let me explain the name. While I love to experiment with my baking I of course have a few stand-bys that always get rave reviews. These have ALL been gathered from family and friends over the years. Collected really, like my own little recipe curio cabinet. I know I spelled it wrong, this kind of is two pronged… I have been a notoriously bad speller since I have been old enough to attempt to spell at all. And secondly when it’s spelled this way, it shared my initials! KC~that’s me.

So Kurio Cookies was born. It took immense amounts of help and support from friends, family and my exceedingly supportive and wonderful husband. And after three 12 hour days in the rented kitchen (and countless other headaches I won’t go into because I am looking back on this experience as a whole, as a growing, learning, maturing, and enlightening experience, focusing on the positive) we made it to our booth at the Christmas Bazaar.




Now here I just have to say that while it was fun to be there getting all the great feedback, talking to other local entrepreneurs, and actually selling my cookies, in the end, I am a baker. A salesman I am not.



I do have to say though that when I was able to use my art background with this whole experience I really loved it. I designed the logo, the packaging, the business cards and all that fun stuff which really was the fun stuff! Speaking of the website, it will only remain up until October of this year, so check it out if you’d like. It’s really not that much to see, it is just a simple google template, but I am proud of it anyway.

check out the site www.kuriocookies.com

So by the end of the show, I was looking forward to it being to over! So much that I decided that wasn’t a very good sign for moving forward. So I decided to accept my losses in exchange for the gain in experience and amount that I learned about myself.

But now we finally get to the point of the new blog. The cookie venture came to a close, but that does not make roughly 40 lbs. of cake flour, 35 lbs. of AP flour, 20 lbs. of sugar and 35 lbs. of brown sugar magically disappear!

Side note ~ I also have about 7 rolls of foodsaver bags and no foodsaver if anyone out there would be interested in buying those at a discounted price, they are still unopened and sanitary, I didn’t lick them or anything!

Not to mention yards and yards of blue ribbon, dozens of food safe boxes, and a random selection of canned pumpkin, pecans, and more chocolate chips than I have ever had in my house at one time {not that I am complaining about that one at all!}.



So what to do with all these left over baking products but BAKE?! And Bake I shall!

I plan on posting entries on any and all cooking/baking/general experimentation that takes place from these Kurio leftovers. The plan is to post a few pics of the end product, any particularly fun reactions I may get, who or where I got the recipe, and the recipe itself so you can all give em a try too! I loved selling the cookies, but I love being able to share the process with others more. People who claim the “secret recipe” have always bugged me a little. What, are you afraid I can make it better than you can? Yeah? Well I think that’s great, and if you can make any of my recipes I post on here better, by all means, let me know! Let’s help each other improve, not just be crazy recipe hoarders, where’s the fun in that?

It has been about three months since the last of the boxes of Kurio Cookies were consumed, and plenty baking has already taken place since then so for the first few posts I will be playing catch up, but then I will try and keep up with myself.

While the cookie recipes I was working from were all collected, tested, tried and true from close loved ones, I am totally over that and completely open to any and all recipe suggestions you may have, send them my way! I will give em a try and maybe just maybe they will make an appearance here!