I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

It's time for a shameful confession. I don't really enjoying kneading bread all that much. Oh, I'll do it if necessary, but generally, I just toss it into the KitchenAid with the dough hook.

Even more shameful for an Aspiring Luddite, I own a bread machine. In my own defense, let me say that I only use it for two things. The first is that I will sometimes set it up with the timer so that I wake in the morning to the smell of baking bread. And, frankly, I'm not ashamed of that, it's a lovely treat now and again. The second thing I use it for is pizza dough.

I have pretty liberal ideas about pizza and pizza-like-objects. Honestly, bread with stuff on it! How bad could it be? The trick, I find, is not to overload the crust, a thing to which I am much given. Trying to keep the crust at least slightly crispy, for structural support if nothing else, is also useful. As far as toppings go, nothing is off limits in my world. The kitchen-sink pizza appears frequently on my pizza menu.

The recipe below avoids many of my common pitfalls. It is not overloaded and the topping variety is restrained, almost chaste. But delicious.

• the crust
  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp yeast
  • 1 cup water
  • 2 Tbs olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp salt
• olive oil
• tomato
• feta cheese, ideally home-made of course
• arugula
• onion

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Punch the dough down again and roll out into the shape you like. I go for rectangular and the size of my silicone baking mat. The amount of dough made above is enough for two pizzas this size, so I often freeze half the dough for later use. Once it is rolled out, put it on a baking sheet and brush it lightly with olive oil, not too much, and top it scantily with thinly sliced onions. Pop that in the oven for 8-10 minutes.

Pull it out of the oven, top trepidatiously with thinly sliced tomatoes and crumbled feta cheese. Back in the oven for five minutes. Pull it out and toss on, a hair more liberally, some roughly chopped arugula. Back in the oven for another five minutes.

Remove from the oven, slide gently off the silicone mat onto a cutting board, and serve.

The total cooking time is about twenty minutes, and the point of staging it into three bits is two-fold. First, it serves to keep the arugula from becoming overcooked, while allowing the onions to be fully cooked. Second, by putting the crust in early without watery vegetables like tomatoes or arugula on it, the crust stays a bit crisper without burning as it might if you pre-cooked it fully.