Recipe: Homemade Pizza

Halloween marked the end of National Pizza Month -- but honestly, who needs an excuse to eat this tasty dish? Making a pizza at home can be a fun activity to do with friends and family. Not only that, you get to choose all the toppings yourself, whether they be from a farmers' market or from your own backyard. Here’s a recipe we cooked up ourselves using in-season veggies picked up from a local famer’s market.

Ingredients:

squash
jalapenos
mozzarella
mushrooms
pizza dough
red bell peppers
marinara sauce

Instructions:

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. You'll want to get this done first so that you're ready to throw the pizza in once you've got it formed.

For this pizza, we grabbed the dough from Sprouts, but there are some good recipes for homemade pizza dough available online. Either way, start out with your dough in a ball and make sure it is at room temperature. Then put a little flour on your work space and start flattening out the dough with your hands until you have a well-rounded base. From there, you will start in the center and work your finger tips out to stretch it to the size you want. Be careful not to puncture the dough as you work it out, and try to reduce the amount of air bubbles if you can -- they'll only get bigger once you pop the pizza in the oven.

Once you've got the dough shaped, it's time to put on the marinara sauce. We used a basic recipe for this and added a little bit of red pepper to give it some kick.

Next you'll want to put some cheese on the pizza. We used mozzarella because it gets nice and gooey, but the choice of cheese is up to you. It might be easiest to use a cheese grater, but we cut slices of cheese off instead to give the pie some extra character.

Now it's time to dice up those veggies and add them to the pizza. Be careful not to cut them too thick, as they will not cook as well, but you don't want them too thin either. We'll let you decide how much or little you want of each topping, but keep in mind that the fresh jalapenos can get a little spicy.

Pop the pizza in the oven for 10-15 minutes, depending on how crispy you want it, and voila dinner is done!