New Lease on Pizza

I just need to remember this so I'm sticking it here. I have made the same kind of pizza for a long time and it is ehh--just ok. But I recently started doing a couple things differently that have been making a big difference. I generally always use Barbara's (Jer's mom's) recipe for French bread as the pizza dough. I am attached to that recipe for some reason. Probably because every time I make it I still smile over the first time I had it when Jer's sister Melissa was spending the night at my house as a teenager with my sister Becky. They wanted to make pizza and so called Barbara on the phone to get a recipe (this is pre-internet days). I think the phone Melissa used (at our house) was even stuck to the wall and had a spiral cord and everything (I also wonder if it was that red one?). Whew--how did we survive? So she gets the recipe and her and Becky make it and spread it out on a round pizza pan. It is pretty stinking thick but if I remember correctly they went ahead and put the toppings on and baked it. I don't think it baked all the way through since it was like a foot thick or something--the recipe calls for 8 cups of flour and easily makes 2 large cookie sheets worth of pizza for me. Ha, ha! Funny still to me. So this is the recipe-- 8 cups of flour, 4 1/2 tsp. yeast, 3 cups hot water, , 2 Tbsp. sugar, 2 Tbsp. oil and that's it. I always though it was odd that there was no salt but it doesn't need it. It can be shaped into 2 french loaves and cooked as bread but I always use it for pizza dough. It takes an hour to rise after kneading all that and then it's ready to be spread on the cookie sheets and topped, then baked for 20 min. at 400 degrees. It is so simple and pretty good. The thing I struggle with the most is kneading the dough because I consistently add too much flour during kneading. This makes for a thicker dough that is difficult to spread onto the pizza pans after the rising. So last time I refused to let my impatient self add any extra flour and just keep kneading and kneading until it was very satiny? Hard to describe but it was soft and almost sticky but not too bad. And yes, I knead all my dough by hand. I still have my grandmother's Bosch mixer and could use that to knead dough but I rarely do. Another odd thing about me is that I just like kneading dough. I need to feel it for it to be right. And this was very right. It made such great pizza dough! So the other thing I've done differently is to experiment a tiny bit more with the toppings and to everyone else this will be a duh, who hasn't tried that? But here in my family where people are so picky it makes my head want to explode, we get stuck in a  bit of a rut often. Pepperoni on one and bacon on the other, sometimes bacon with pepperoni--whew! It's crazy. So many options. Then one day recently I discovered more than one child like pineapple on pizza. WHAT?! Hallelujah! I got some chopped ham right away and pineapple tidbits and it was wonderful! Then I realized I have more than one child that likes Ranch dressing (although my husband still plugs his nose whenever he's around it--which is awesome when we are out at a fancy restaurant and I have a salad with dressing and everyone around us is eyeing me for obviously passing gas the whole time-yep, my life is awesome). So I'd had some Buffalo Ranch pizza one time and loved it so I threw ranch and buffalo sauce in with some cooked chicken, spread that on the pizza, topped it with Monterey Jack cheese and Wow! It was like going to taste bud heaven. I even took a picture and then wrote an entire blog about the whole experience.