After cooking such a huge feast for only three people on Easter Sunday, I have quite a few fabulous leftovers to use.  I was sitting around last evening trying to decide what to use them for, when inspiration in the form of the Manhattan Food Project struck.  I’ve been following this blog for a few months now, and I consistently find some really great recipes that help me plan out my meals over the course of the week.  The couple that writes it seems to be budget minded when it comes to food shopping, as am I, and they both relish trying new recipes and flavors out.  There is never any shortage of good ideas posted on their site.  It’s worth checking it out by clicking the link above.

Last night, I read the MFP most recent post about morels mushrooms.  I also love morels, but they are not available at my local market.  I’ll have to make a special trip to Whole Foods for those before the season ends.  I did, however, come away from the blog entry with the idea for pizza, so I trotted down to the Star Market and picked up some ready-made pizza dough and cheese to make dinner.  Their pictures of morel pizza and shrimp fra diavolo pizza looked amazing, and I got me hankering for a pizza of my own.

I’ve used the ready-made pizza dough before, and I find you need to add a fair amount of flour when handling it because it is so sticky.  I’m not a pizza professional, so I’m not adept at tossing and spinning the dough in the air.  Instead, I have to resort to a rolling pin, but the results are still quite tasty although the pizzas do not come out perfectly round as you can see from my pictures.

For my pizza, I used olive oil and salt as the base on the crust.  I added cooked chopped shrimp – the kind you buy in a big bag and keep in your freezer  that are already cooked, peeled and veined – minced garlic and mozzarella cheese.  For Dan’s pizza I used chopped leftover roasted chicken from Easter, a simple homemade tomato sauce, lots of minced garlic and, of course, mozzarella cheese.  I baked them in the oven at 475˚ for 15 minutes on cookie sheets greased with olive oil to help the bottom of the crust crisp up, and to avoid sticking.  I finished both off with freshly chopped chives, dried chili flakes, and freshly ground pepper and BOY were they good!  Added bonus: these ingredients were all things I happened to have on hand from making Easter Dinner, and you can get two 12″ pizzas out of one ball of ready-made dough, which is more than enough to feed two people.

What a fun and easy meal this was to create!  I hope you’ll try your hand at making pizza at home finding some inspiration from this entry and the MFP.  It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than having it delivered, and I think it tastes a heck of a lot better too.  Bon apétit!