Gluten Free Pizza!!!!

Howdy, folks.  Mike here on this post.  Guest star, pinch hitter, etc.  :-)

I am going to freely admit that, so far, this gluten-free thing has been a bit of a cakewalk.  I haven't really felt the lack of anything, all week.  This is going to be totally easy.

Ahh, but we haven't exactly been challenged thus far, because we really don't consume much in the way of gluten during the week.  Never have, really.  We do 2 Isagenix meals a day, and there are only a couple of their products that actually have gluten in them, and we can easily avoid those.  So that just leaves one meal a day, and with Kelly's Mad Skillz, that hasn't exactly been a challenge, either (see the previous casserole post for how she morphed taquitos into Gluten Free yumminess).  Add in 2 cleanse days, where we didn't eat anything except Isagenix products, and we have the equivalent of the bunny slope at the local ski resort.

But weekends...now, that changes EVERYTHING.

Weekends are when we usually cut loose and tend to eat enough gluten to more than make up for the week.  Pancakes (one of Kelly's specialties), panini (Saturday afternoons frequently find us at Cafe Sorpreso in Presque Isle, having a cup of soup and a panino apiece - yes, panini is plural, panino is singular.  If somebody asks you if you want paninis, slap them.  No, don't.  Just feel smug that you're in the know.  Your inner Grammar Nazi will thank you.  But I digress, sorry), baked goods, crusty bread, the list goes on.  This...this, my friends, is where the real challenge lies.  

And, oh yes, I forgot one very important weekend tradition.  Homemade Pizza.

Kelly makes her own crust; we have a pizza stone that we leave in the oven 24/7, and we have our favorite "configuration," so to speak:  Prosciutto, basil, and sliced fresh mozzarella, with a very light layer of marinara sauce (usually Bertolli Marinara with Burgundy).  It has become a Friday night tradition that we observe probably 40 weeks out of the year.  Usually with a couple of bottles of wine.  

Well, now, this will definitely not work on a gluten-free diet.  But...but...pizza!  Well, Kelly had been thinking about what we would have to do about this ever since day one, so she had several recipes that she had researched.  Yesterday evening we went to the grocery store to scope out a couple of ingredients we needed:  Xantham Gum and Psyllium Husks.  And we actually found the gum!  No husks, though.  But we did find Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Pizza Dough.  So, Kelly figured she'd give it a shot.  

Didn't have any fresh basil, but we did have some pesto in the freezer, so we used that instead.  We forgot to get cheese last night (duh), so I stopped on the way home and picked that up.  Kelly had some leftover Wolfgang Puck's Arrabiatta sauce from the homemade pizza we had last Sunday when we came up with the idea of going gluten-free for a month in the first place (and starting this blog in the process), and we already had prosciutto, so the pizza was made, and consumed.  

Well, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised.  The flavor was pretty good!  The texture on the outside was pretty good as well, but the center was a little mushy and quite heavy.  This might be due to the wetness of the ingredients, or maybe we needed to blind bake the crust longer, or any number of other reasons.  I finished my portion, but Kelly didn't finish hers.  Nonetheless, we do not consider this a failure.  We both think the pizza dough could make excellent crackers, so the purchase wasn't wasted.  And we definitely intend to try some of the homemade dough recipes that Kelly has pulled from the various blogs she subscribes to. All in all, we are pretty psyched.

And we didn't have any wine, ether.  That's got to be a first.  Pizza demands wine.  Well, not tonight.  :-)