Youth Group Pizza

As I mentioned in the last post, Eddie and I spent the first three days of his visit getting ready for a youth group meeting that I had planned for that Saturday. Getting ready basically consisted of going door to door to invite youth to the meeting. This actually turned out to be a pretty exhausting endeavor as my community is pretty spread out. But it also turned out to be worth it. That Saturday I had about 16 kids between the ages of 10 and 16 (or so) show up in my backyard for a meeting. We sat and talked for about 30 minutes about what sorts of things they are interested in (taking day-trips, english classes, ways to make money). After the meeting, we walked to a neighbor's house who owns an outdoor oven and we baked pizza. Now, the most complex pizza either Eddie or I have ever made consisted of Prego tomato sauce, Boboli pizza crust, already shredded mozzerella cheese, and already sliced pepperonis. This experience turned out to be a bit different.

The day before, Eddie and I bought a ton of flour, yeast, two kinds of Salvadoran cheese, tomato sauce, and salami (in place of pepperoni). That Saturday morning we woke up early to make the dough while leaving ample time for it to rise. We were a bit worried that that yeast we bought was really baking soda and that the dough would never rise. Actually, we had a friendly competition on whose dough would rise more, but then we forgot which was which after leaving it out to rise. Eddie claims he won, but I'm pretty sure I did. Fortunately, the dough did rise (at least a little bit) and we were ready to make our pizza. The kids loved spreading the sauce and adding mountains of salami. Then, after my neighbor hacked down a tree with his machete to use as fire wood for his outdoor woodburning oven, we were ready to cook. Having no idea how long to cook pizza in a woodburning, outdoor oven, we guessed about 10 minutes and amazingly enough, it came out great...'Mejor que Pizza Hut y Dominos' according to some.

It was actually quite fun to make, and it was nice having Eddie there to help me. The idea is to start making pizzas to sell to fans at the community soccer games as a way to fund our youth group. That is if I can get the kids not to eat it all first.