This week I used the bread dough recipe for pizza dough intentionally. I love the results.

You know when you’re just working on autopilot in the kitchen? When your hands just do a thing with minimal involvement from your brain? This happened to me on Thursday as I was making dough for our weekly Friday pizza night.

I make pizza dough the night before because letting the dough rest overnight gives a stronger and more easily stretched dough. I also do the same for sourdough bread, which I usually make one or two times a week.

Normally when I make pizza dough I consult a spreadsheet that helps me scale the recipe quickly and make adjustments to things like the amount of starter and the dough hydration. For bread, I just have the recipe memorized: 25-50g of starter (depending on ambient temperature in the kitchen — less in the summer, more in the winter), 500g bread flour (up from 475 due to a recent change in my flour of choice), 25g rye flour, 360g water and about 10g salt.

On Thursday, as soon as I had the bread-mixing bowl down I just started going through the bread dough measurements and steps. I didn’t even realize my mistake until after I had it fully mixed.

Rather than start over, I just made pizza with the bread dough — and it worked. The recipes are not actually that different; the main differences are that the bread dough has some rye flour (or whole wheat) and that the recipe makes about 900g of dough total, or 450g for two loaves. For pizza, I usually use 350-400g per pie. But the larger amount of dough meant the pizza crust was not quite as thin in the middle while stretching close to the full 14″ width of my peel.

Maybe one dough recipe is all I need.

Despite making pizza almost every week for the past few years, there are only a few topping combinations that I keep coming back to.

Most common are the single-ingredient pies: pepperoni, which our five-year old insists on eating every pizza night (not that any of the adults are complaining), and Margherita, with just cheese, sauce and basil.

I have a few that were inspired by Peter Reinhart’s American Pie, which is a very foundational text for all my pizza making. That’s where I got the idea for pesto with goat cheese, which is both delicious and a visually striking green, and pizza with prosciutto topped with fresh arugula after it’s cooked, which is also a very pretty pie.

In the fall, I make a pizza with slivered Brussels sprouts and chopped bacon with no tomato sauce that we had at Motorino in New York City.

But one of my favorite go-to pizzas, probably behind only the one-topping pizzas in terms of how often I make it, is copied from the Twin Cities’ own Punch Pizza: the Adriatico. The Punch menu lists the ingredients as: “Feta, caper, onion, saracene olive, oregano.” I adhere to that loosely; you definitely need to have the raw onion, which gets sweet in the heat of the oven, the olives, the capers and the oregano — usually dried applied after the pizza is out, but also good with fresh. I don’t always have feta on hand, so that one is optional. This week, I used artichoke hearts.

There are times at the farmers market when you see a vegetable you just can’t resist, even if you have no idea what you’re going to do with it. That was the case last weekend at the Midtown Farmers Market when I saw beautiful, massive Napa cabbages from Mom’s Garden. I had to have one.

But once I got the cabbage home and saw the large percentage of my crisper drawer it occupied, I realized I had to do something with it, and quick. One solution: potstickers.

Back in the early days of this blog when I was in my twenties, childless and mortgageless, I was all about big “project” recipes like making potstickers or ravioli from scratch. But for the past few years I’ve been a lot more focused on “easy elegance” — things like one-pot chicken soup, pastas with just a few ingredients, variations of rice cooked with various ingredients: jambalaya, paella, arroz con pollo, mujadra.

Something about this giant Napa cabbage just spoke to me, though, because before long I had biked the kids up to United Noodles for potsticker wrappers and more chili crisp.

For my filling, I chopped the cabbage very finely, tossed it with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes before squeezing as much water out as possible. I mixed the juiced cabbage with ground pork, scallions, ginger and a spice mix from Fly by Jing that we had from a Christmas gift.

Shaping potstickers seems like the sort of thing that would be very easy if you grew up doing it or you had weekly or even daily practice. During my two-month stint working in a restaurant kitchen we had a potsticker dish on the menu that I remember making a few times. Shaping potstickers this week it was very clear that I was not practiced — I kept starting my folds too far along the arc, leaving almost no room at the end to make the fourth crease. But while it’s fun to strive for perfectly uniform folds, it doesn’t really matter. They are going to be good anyway. Our son, who is five, was very excited about helping, and I only found myself refolding a few of his.

We made 58 dumplings, which is quite a feast for a family of four. I cooked them at the same time in two pans, and tossed half of them with copious amounts of Lao Ganma “Fried Chili in Oil.” I was kind of late to the chili crisp bandwagon — I remember a while where I was reading about chili crisp but it seemed very trendy so I rejected it. This was a bad instinct! I’ve subsequently embraced different versions of chili crisp, and it’s interesting how they’ve completely supplanted sriracha for me. (Interesting if you remember what it felt like to put sriracha on your food in the late aughts.) The great Huy Fong shortage of the last couple years probably didn’t help — I’ve yet to find another brand of sriracha that comes close.

Is this the start of a renaissance of complicated cooking projects? More potstickers, more dumplings generally, ravioli from scratch? I doubt it! But, you never know what an ingredient will inspire.