We arrived home on Monday night from our two week UK trip. Jet lag is a killer. Tuesday was hard. I was tired, but I woke up far too early. All day long it seemed my brain was not keeping up with me. Poor Mr. MarthaAndMe had to get back on another plane and head off to a business meeting, so it was me and the kids for dinner. I decided to make Martha’s Grilled Pizza with Fontina and Arugula (August Martha Stewart Living) for dinner. Fortunately, I was functioning well enough to plan the meal and buy the ingredients at the grocery store.

Dough on the grill

I’ve never grilled a pizza and the recipe made it sound WAY too easy I thought, but I gave it a try. You shape your dough and brush it with oil. The recipe says to fold it in half, move it to the grill and unfold. Eeek. This was not easy, since the dough stretched when I picked it up and it kind of crumpled when I got it on the grill. I set the grill to medium as the recipe said and let it cook 3 minutes.  I came back and the dough was looking puffy, which was encouraging. Then I flipped it and revealed the horror of what had happened. It was burned to a crisp. Take note – set your grill to LOW not medium if you try this recipe! I immediately turned the grill off and began trying to scrape the burned parts off. I wasn’t very successful. The dough kept ripping and I had to take big chunks off. There were pieces of dough all over the grill and all over the deck (I was too tired to clean it up, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a pack of raccoons or some other animal feasted on the deck last night).

Finally I dumped the cheese on top and closed the cover to let it melt. Things at this point had gone from not pretty to heinously ugly.

Cheese

I tried to put the cheese on the parts that were the least burned, so it was rather uneven and awful looking.

I got this monstrosity off the grill with no trouble and went to get my bag of arugula. Another demerit for me. At the store, they did not have any plain arugula. They had a bag of spinach and arugula, so I decided to buy that. Well, in my jet lagged state, somehow I grabbed the wrong bag and ended up with a bag of spinach and “zesty greens”. There was some arugula in the bag, so I just went with it.

Results

The pictures are a little blurry because apparently I was not thinking clearly enough to even use a camera! The results? Well it was certainly ugly looking, but I have to say the parts that were not burned were delicious. This is actually a really great recipe. I am going to attempt to grill pizza again sometime, when I am more awake, and I will set the grill to the lowest setting and watch it like a hawk. The moral of the story: when jet lagged, get pizza delivered.