Pizza, Mao and Cranium

I invited my friend Shawn and his wife Vahideh over for dinner on Friday night. I suggested making pizza. Of course, I have to work while Zack has the summer off from grad school. Zack was nice enough to get started on the pizza dough and buy the ingredients for the pizza.

Here's the menu:

• Mixed greens salad with cucumbers and tomatoes
• Herbs and cheese pizza
• Carmelized onion, roasted pepper, and goat cheese pizza
• Pesto, tomato and mozzarella cheese pizza
• Fruit custart tart "made" by Shawn and Vahideh
  

I've made the first two pizzas before (see my post dated March 26, 2006) but somehow they didn't turn out as good as I remember them being the first time. I remember eating the herbs and cheese pizza right out of the oven and it was delicious.

I also remember how delicious the roasted pepper and goat cheese pizza was it wasn't as good this time around. For some reason, I don't remember spending a lot of time carmelizing the onions but when I checked the Joy of Cooking, the recipe instructed you to cook onions in butter and olive oil over low heat for ONE hour and over medium heat for another 25 minutes! As you can probably tell, I didn't do that and my onions were half "sweated" and half burnt before I even put in on top of the pizza.

The pesto pizza turned out the best (sorry, no pictures... I didn't like how any of the pictures turned out). With freshly made basil pesto as the sauce, fresh tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella cheese, it was really good. I think there's room for improvement in the dough department too.

After dinner, Shawn and Vahideh taught us this card game called "Mao". Basically, the rules are similar to Uno (put down a card with the same suit or number until all of your cards are discarded) except that a beginner doesn't know what the rules are when he or she starts playing. For example, when someone puts down an "8", then the order is reversed. Of course, Zack and I didn't know that so we would be unknowingly violating the rules. Shawn would immediately call us on it and penalize us with card from the pile. My least favorite rule was "no asking questions" including "what?" I think I was penalized five times in a row because I kept asking "what?" and "what's going on?" It gets vicious, as Vahideh warned us at the beginning, because you have to call people out on their mistakes.

We also played Cranium. Actually, we spent half the time trying to figure out how to play the game. It was pretty entertaining because you're supposed to do things like guess what tune your teammate is humming and you get to watch everyone doing humiliating things.