Mangiare! Dede! Eat!

My kids and I love pizza. When we were back in the States it wasn’t unusual to order a couple of cheese pizzas every week. It was lovely not to have to cook, and to actually have someone bring something hot and gooey and cheesy right to our front door.

Alas, fast forward 5+ years, and pizza delivery is no more. Ghana has pizza, if that’s what you want to call it, but it’s not the same as a good ol’ Jersey pie – or even a Maryland pie for that matter. One place that we've gone to -- Rendezvous in Tema -- has something that they call pizza and my kids (okay, not Sean, who knows better) will eat it if we order it, but I absolutely refuse to order their pepperoni pizza. A sliced up hot dog (from a can, mind you) is absolutely not a suitable substitute for pepperoni to this Jersey girl.

So, in the interest of gastric satisfaction, I had no choice but to learn to make pizza myself. It has been a lot of trial and error, because while you can get the mozzarella cheese here (at the whopping price of GHC 7 or about $7 for a less than ½ lb. wedge), the sauce has either got to be homemade or a little jar of Ragu sauce (equivalent $3.50) from the local (rip-off) supermarket, Evergreen. Generally, its cheaper for me to make homemade sauce, fresh tomatoes being relatively inexpensive, but some days I just don't have hours to spare and when its like that, I fork over the GHC 3.50 and suppress the guilt over the astronomical expense.

But, as every pizza connoisseur knows, it’s the crust that makes or breaks a pizza. No, we don’t have Boboli here, or any of these ready-made pizza kits that you can buy during fund raisers (what I wouldn’t give for the convenience of one of those, though). You can buy some kind of doughy thing that is supposed to turn into a pizza crust, but in my experience (and my oven), it hasn’t yet become something edible.

So, off I went to the world of recipes in search of a good one for pizza dough. And where should I find one, but in this odd little recipe book from the United Kingdom entitled Great Chicken Dishes! Now, my kids are not much for smoked chicken anything, so the recipe for Smoked Chicken, Yellow Pepper & Sun-dried Tomato Pizzettte wasn't going to go down (figuratively or literally) with them. But the pizzette dough recipe sounded doable and I had all of the ingredients already -- flour, salt, yeast, olive oil and lukewarm water (well, yesterday, at least, we had water). With some modifications – addition of oregano, pepper flakes and garlic powder – it was pretty easy and ultimately delish, if I do say so myself. Throw some sliced pepperoni on top (real pepperoni, not canned hot dogs), and it actually looks like a pizza!

Just wait till I open up my own restaurant here, starring homemade pizza! I’ll have ‘em (the obronis, that is) beating down my door. In the meantime – for those of you in Ghana looking for the “real” deal (as opposed to Pizza Inn), you’ll just have to come on over to my house. You're invited!