Yay for pizza dough!

My friend, Sooz, I mean DR. Sooz came over to visit for a day trip from PA a few weeks ago. What a special treat!  I love  seeing and catching up with friends. Best thing about the day is that we did NOTHING.. and that was okay.=)  I'm definitely the type of person who doesn't need to travel far to enjoy my life.  I could sit on the steps outside and literally stare at the grass.  I could take a walk in the neighborhood. I could try new things in my home.  I could walk around Safeway just for fun. And all that makes me perfectly happy. What makes me happier is when I can do all those things with friends. In some ways, you could consider me a lazy host. One day I'll take people to the museums or zoo when they visit.  So let's see we went for walks in the trails, brought Sooz to try dim sum for her FIRST TIME, walked at a lake nearby, took a nap (for realll), and most importantly, Sooz helped to save my first attempt at making pizza dough. 

You would think that when you have a breadmaker, making pizza dough would take less time.  It took an hour and half for the machine to make the dough (only?!?!?) and then I had to do all this punching and kneading.  I honestly thought it was a flop.  Thanks to Sooz and all her experience and her mom's experience with pizza dough, the pizza dough was saved and perhaps I may try it again (not in the near future...it's too much work).  Unfortunately, Sooz didn't even get a taste of the pizza, but props to her for saving my pizza dough!  You have no idea how horrible it feels when you try and make something and you spend all this time in anticipation and then next thing you know, everything flops and you're left with a lump of dead dough.  

The new things I've been making this year... ham and potato chowder, bread, almond jello, a baguette that took me way too many hours to make, meatloaf... it has been an exciting year. Thank God for my friends and my sister, Jo, for being a hotline that I can call when I don't feel like reading the directions.=) Actually, even I do, getting live instructions to recipes seems to work best for me.

Adding to that... Thank God for an extra day before heading back to work.  Not working on Mondays is pretty fantastic.