• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Content Modeling for WordPress
    • WordPress Hidden Gems
    • Web Design
  • Work
    • Presentations and Interviews
    • on GitHub →
    • MLIS Class Projects (2019-2022)
    • Portfolio (2002-2019)
    • WordPress Plugins

Stephanie Leary

Writer, Front End Developer, former WordPress consultant

  • About
    • Press Kit
    • Presentations and Interviews
  • Contact Me

Good pizza

August 14, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

We’ve had good luck with Smitten Kitchen recipes lately. The scalloped tomatoes were so good we made them twice more — Michael especially likes the breakfast suggestion with the egg — and the cheddar biscuits were pretty great. So this weekend I wanted to find a good pizza sauce recipe. Our plain tomato sauce is amazing, but didn’t have enough kick to work well as a pizza sauce.

So, when I saw recipes for pizza sauce and dough on Smitten that originally came from Mario Batali, I figured they were worth a shot. And Michael came home with two huge bunches of asparagus the other day (one white, one green), so I thought we’d try the asparagus pizza too. We recruited a couple friends to help with the baking and the eating, and… well, NOM. We were a little short on mozzarella, but we grated some white cheddar to fill in, and that made a great combination. For the sauce, I decided to start with canned peeled tomatoes, since it’s already getting hard to find good fresh ones. That worked; I just let it cook down while we waited for the dough to rise. I kept adding red pepper flakes to make the sauce spicier. (I wasn’t kidding about wanting a kick. Michael: “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?”)

Our guests brought peaches that were a little underripe, so they fixed that by caramelizing them with butter and brown sugar, and we dumped them over the fresh batch of vanilla ice cream I’d just put in the freezer.

Life

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Footer

My Books

I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2025 Stephanie Leary · Contact