Prosciutto Pear Pizza

Seriously, who doesn't love pizza? Okay, okay, I'm sure that there are several of you who don't like pizza, but I'm not talking about heavy, greasy, sauce-laden box pizza. I'm talking about a fresh, crisp balance of salty and tangy perfection.

Pizza is actually a pretty new addition to our menu rotation. When my son was diagnosed with food allergies, he was allergic to (among other things) beef, garlic, tomatoes, peas (I'll get to why that matters in a minute) and was intolerant to soy and dairy. I believe in eating as a family so this takes pretty much everything Italian off the table. I came up with some substitutions for things like spaghetti sauce but it's not really the same.

Then one day, I was reading some allergy blog and the heavens burst open and the sun shone down! There was cheese for people like us!!! Dairy-free, soy-free, it melts, it oozes! I'm looking at pictures of allergic kids eating mac and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches and yes, pizza!! So I get on my computer and seek out Daiya Cheese and find it the next town over. I get in my car and there it is in all it's cheesey glory!! I buy like five bags of this stuff (and let me tell you it is not cheap) and I go home and start making homemade pizza dough and roasted red pepper sauce and cook up some turkey sausage. We're having pizza!!

I proudly present this pizza to my son who was about two who was so very excited to be eating cheese! He takes a bite or two and pushes it away. Okay, so the cheese is a little funky but it's not bad.... Then I see the little red spots popping out on his face. I had broken the first rule of living with food allergies. Read every label, every time. I sprint to the fridge and grab the package. Sure enough, to be soy free, they use pea protein. Not a big deal to most allergy families but he was more allergic to the peas then to the milk or the soy.

 Fortunately, it wasn't a severe reaction although he did have an upset tummy for a few days. Those four and a half bags of not-cheese sat in my freezer for over a year before I had the heart to toss them and pizza was off the menu until this summer when my son outgrew his dairy intolerance! He loves, loves, loves all things cheese!

Enough with the trip down memory lane, and back to the subject at hand, I bet you want to see this pizza!

Isn't it beautiful?? And let me tell you, it's even tastier than it looks!

I start with half a recipe of Guy Fieri's Prime Time Pizza Dough. This is my go-to dough. I am lazy and knead it with the Kitchen Aid, but it's a perfect crispy, chewy dough that's perfect a little thicker for the kids and a little thinner for my husband and me. I make a full recipe of dough and let the kids make their own pizzas with the other half.

To get it thin enough, I roll the dough to a rough rectangle on parchment paper and drizzle with about a teaspoon of olive oil and then top with 1/2 cup of shredded Italian blend cheese. Then I arranged about 1/2 of a ripe red pear that has been sliced thin and three slices of prosciutto that have been quartered. That's then topped with another quarter cup of the Italian cheese and a quarter cup of gorgonzola. Bake at 500 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until the cheese is melted and beginning to brown. Finish with bottled balsamic glazed and fresh-cracked pepper. Enjoy!!

Note to Myself as I Begin Training for My First Marathon

Dear Self,

I look back with amused irony that you were the girl in the eighth grade who wanted to lodge a complaint with the office that making us run a whole mile in gym class was cruel and unusual punishment. While you did do it, it was under extreme duress, you took most of the gym period to do it and if I remember correctly, you laid down on the grass more than once claiming you were dying. Yet here you are, mumble-mumble years later (it's not that I don't want to disclose how old I am, I just don't want to do the math) with three half-marathons and well over a thousand miles under your belt about to embark on one of your greatest challenges yet.

Me running my third half marathon.

 Tomorrow is the first day of your marathon training schedule and over the next four months, there are a few things I would like you to keep in mind.

• Tomorrow is the first day of your training plan. It is not the first day of your training. Every run since that first time you decided to try to run to the end of the block over two years ago has lead you to this point. 
• You will bork one of your long runs. You will probably bork more than one of them. That's okay. This is a learning process and every failed run will teach you something.
• There will be days where you won't want to do it, where you will want to do something else instead of go on your run. That's okay. Go run anyways.
• You may at some point resent the time the training takes. That's okay. It will be worth it.
• There will be a run that you will nail and make you feel like you can do anything. Don't forget about that one when you are running the crappy ones.
• Toenails grow back.
• If something happens and you can't run this race, that's okay.  There will be other races. If you don't run this marathon, you will run another.
• This is not the end of your running journey, just a stop along the way.
• Tapering will suck.
• You can do this, I know you can.

And then you can call yourself a marathoner.

Get out there and DO IT!!!

Love,
Me