When my friends and I get together we like to make food, drink copious amounts of wine, gossip and watch good movies. This past Friday was a little bit of an exception as one of my friends is preparing to run a half marathon, wine was not drunk, but we did make a delicious meal.

After a lengthy email exchange, we settled on homemade pizza as the fare for the evening. We gathered pizza crust, tomato sauce, zucchini, artichoke hearts, olives, spinach, bacon, and chicken. You will have to forgive me because I forgot to take pictures until after we had made the crust, and prepped all the ingredients.

We made the pizza crust from packets from Kroger, and while the crust rose we prepared the bacon and all the other toppings. When the crust was ready, we divided it into two balls. My friend only has one baking sheet, so we made a baking sheet out of aluminum foil. To make your own baking sheet out of aluminum foil, just take a large piece of foil and fold it in half. Then fold up the edges. I don’t recommend cooking anything really heavy on this makeshift tray, but it was perfect for pizza. We spread the dough out on the sheets and began piling on the toppings.

First, we added some tomato sauce straight from the can, and seasoned it with salt, pepper, garlic salt and oregano.

Then we added olives, zucchini and spinach.

Then we liberally sprinkled on chicken, bacon and artichoke hearts.

Here is the pizza before we added the cheese. We used mozzarella and an Italian blend.

To go with the pizza, we made a simple salad of arugula, spinach, tomato, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, cucumber and parmesan.

And I didn’t remember to take pictures of the finished pizza because I was so hungry, and wanted to eat immediately. We finished our delicious meal with a screening of Ides of March.