My new favorite pizza

The pizza experiments continue in our kitchen. We're eating pizza twice a week or so and debating all the nuances of crust texture, crispness, chewiness, how airy or dense it should be, etc. It's a fun process. Krestia prefers the basic pizza dough recipe in the Joy of Cooking but it needs some altering. We've found that it rises too much in the oven, producing more of what I would call a foccacia instead of a pizza crust. It needs to be more flat and crispy instead of bread-like. So he decreased the yeast which helped a little. Shaping the dough is an important part of the process, too. It takes time to really work it into a nice flat circle. Krestia likes to be really Italian and toss the dough in the air.

While Krestia focuses on the technicalities of the crust, I've been playing around with toppings. He tends to be a basic red sauce and mozzarella guy, but I convinced him recently to try the Backpacker Pizza at Moose's Tooth--fresh spinach topped with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, feta, mozzarella and provolone. Yum. We combined that in our heads with the Goat pizza at Great Northern Pizza and came up with what I call, for lack of a better term, the Mediterranean pizza. Or maybe I should call it the Goat Backpacker? :) Anyway, I spread a thin layer of olive oil over the crust, then put down a layer of fresh spinach leaves, trimmed of rough stems and cut in half if they're big leaves. Then I add artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and roasted garlic. Over all of that I crumble some soft goat cheese, then slide it into a 500 degree oven (that has been preheating with a pizza stone in it for 15-30 minutes) for around 5 minutes. It doesn't look nearly as pretty when it comes out (the spinach wilts and gets a little brown) but it tastes really, really good.

Taste Test

An essential part of the cooking process.

Weekly Review, 3-31 through 4-6

I'm already behind on my weekly reviews. Sigh.

On Monday, March 31st, I made Chorizo and Mushroom Fideua. Sounds fancy, yes, but it's really baked spaghetti in tomato sauce with a few fun ingredients. The spaghetti (well, angel hair) is cooked in the sauce, not in water, and then the whole thing goes in the oven to make it nice and crusty on top. My husband loved it. I liked it, but it kinda reminded me of the spaghetti casseroles from the church potlucks of my youth. It was a little mushy below the crusty top but it's not supposed to be the "al dente" Italian way of pasta. This is something altogether different. Anyway, try it out if you're interested. We had it with a white wine (Viognier, I think).

On Tuesday, April 1st, we had Kashi frozen pizza. This is not an April Fool's joke. I sometimes sink to the depths of frozen pizza, for the sheer ease of it. Be warned, however: I have not yet found what I consider to be a good frozen pizza. Most of them have crusts that manage to be too crisp on the bottom and too doughy in the middle, with bland toppings. This was a chicken and roasted garlic pizza, and was passable for a quick dinner. My husband had to eat fast in between work and an evening meeting, so it worked. When I make a frozen pizza I like to console myself with a nice side dish, so I made steamed broccoli in the microwave, then combined it with sauteed garlic, olive oil and lemon. Yum.

On Wednesday we had one of my other quick meal favorites, Chicken Curry. This is from a cookbook compiled by some of our college friends. I can make it in half an hour (including thawing out frozen chicken) and it tastes good. If anyone's interested in the recipe, I'll be glad to email it to you, but I won't write it out here. We top it with diced apples, sunflower seeds, dried coconut, peanuts and raisins.

On Thursday we splurged and went out to eat at Orso. We had never been there before and had always heard good things about it. It was a fun experience. Somehow I was in the mood for a steak, so we went against the gender lines and I got a 12 oz ribeye (which I could only finish half of!) while my husband ordered the seafood paella. We had fried ravioli for an appetizer and split a piece of tiramisu for dessert. Decadent, and calorie-heavy.

Friday was leftovers, so I'm going to skip over that and continue on to the weekend. Saturday night we cooked a Japanese feast for ourselves. Behold:

Scallops with shiitake mushrooms, snow peas, carrots and ginger, on udon noodles, with miso soup. I made the soup. My husband made the main dish. The recipe is in Extending the Table, and it's actually supposed to be Chicken with Snow Peas. We substituted scallops, with pleasing results. This is an intensely flavored dish, with soy sauce, sesame oil, and lots of ginger. My husband thought the scallops were overwhelmed by all that flavoring but I really liked how they soaked up the sauce. I'm not huge on the flavor of seafood to begin with, so I was happy. He wants to try a recipe for scallops in a light sauce to let their flavor really come through. Anyway. The miso soup was a first for me. I didn't realize how much dried seaweed expands when you add it to soup--it ended up being more of a seaweed soup than a miso soup! But now I have all the ingredients and the soup is so quick to make, so I can keep experimenting.

Finally, we made homemade pizza on Sunday! We got this pizza stone from Habitat Housewares and enjoyed a crispy, chewy homemade crust (basic recipe in the Joy of Cooking) topped with store-bought sauce and mozzarella. We have some tweaking to do to make the crust thinner, but with my fastidious Italian husband as the pizza chef, I have no doubt that we will soon be making mighty good pizza. When we get it all worked out, we'll throw a pizza party. Be prepared for a very hot apartment. 500 degrees in our small place really heats things up!