As I have mentioned before, my dairy allergy necessitates making my own food much of the time, because food I can eat is often either unavailable or outrageously expensive. I rather enjoy making my own pizzas though, and I am generally satisfied with the results. This spurs me to experiment with new ideas, which may succeed or fail. Tonight I had one of each.

I am counting the calzone experiment as a success. In the future, I should make them smaller, and I forgot the cheese substitute in the one I cut in half, but they baked well and taste good enough to me, so that counts as a win in my books. I used hot Italian sausage, canadian bacon, turkey pepperoni, and genoa salami to stuff these.

The sauce was a mix of diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and green chilis along with a hefty dash of Italian seasoning. It needed to simmer off more liquid, but I was impatient. Besides, it didn't mess up the crust, so again, good enough for me!

As for the crust, it's just a basic yeast dough. Nothing fancy. Flour, water, dry yeast, some oil, and a bit of salt. Sometimes I mix in some Italian seasoning mix, but I didn't really think it was necessary with the spicy sauce and meats today.

On to the FAIL!

This is definitely a fail for photogenics. It also constitutes a failed attempt at a stuffed crust pizza. I had some leftover dough after the three calzones, and thought I would try using dairy alternative cheese sticks around the edge wrapped in the dough. The crust was smaller than expected when I rolled it onto my rectangular pizza stone. I apparently didn't properly roll the crust over my sections of sliced cheese stick to securely cover them. The not-cheese didn't melt quite right, and DEFINITELY doesn't taste right. Daiya is OK as a support flavor when sprinkled on a pizza, but it does NOT work when it takes the culinary limelight.

Oh, and in case anyone wonders, it is not like string cheese. At all.

Oh, well. I will eat it anyway. Good night, folks!