Pizza Three Ways

Who doesn't love pizza?  We have plenty of love for pizza in this house.  And I really enjoy making our own pizzas.  That dates back to my first "real" job, back in my senior year of high school, at the local Rochester pizza shop Nubiano's.  I had so much fun working there and one of my favorite parts was actually making the pizzas, just so I could play with the dough!

When we make pizza fresh at home, I do sometimes try to make dough from scratch.  And although I'm a decent baker I usually don't have the patience to plan far enough ahead for pizza dough and any "quick" recipe I've tried just doesn't taste that great or have good texture.  So, instead of making dough we try to buy fresh raw dough balls either from a pizza shop or the grocery store--quick and easy.  (We're going to try Sam's next--we can get a case of dough balls and put them in the deep freezer)

I have been collecting pizza recipes for several months on Pinterest (you can check that out HERE).  Last week we decided it was finally time to try some!

First things first, I got the dough out of the fridge to get the chill off and let it rest some. If you don't let the dough sit and rest some, it'll be too elastic and nearly impossible to work with. I also then put our pizza stone in the oven and preheated to 500 degrees for one half hour--this is so important!  A hot hot pizza stone ensures the bottom of your crust gets nice and crispy.

Working the dough:  I use a combo of hand stretching and then rolling the dough.  I learned a few tricks at Nubiano's but am nowhere near talented enough to hand stretch the entire thing (although I was better by my third pizza).  Here's my method:  lightly cornmeal a pizza peel.  Flatten the dough into a disc and then working from the middle, flatten it some more by pushing out toward the edges.  Then, I pick it up and stretch the edges, gently, by turning the dough in a circle, vertically so gravity helps the stretching.  Then I'll gently stetch the dough on my knuckles to make a larger disc.  By now the dough is fairly thin.  But, to get it to the perfect thickness, I then place it back on the peel and use a rolling pin.  Then it's time for toppings!  I assemble the pizza while on the pizza peel, and when finished, slide the dough onto the hot pizza stone in the oven--this is why the cornmeal step is SO important.  Without adequate cornmeal, the pizza will stick and you'll get a folded mess, probably on your oven floor.  I sometimes use a pancake turner to get the movement started.  Each pizza I bake for 11 minutes--it's the perfect amount of time for our oven.  I use the pizza peel to get the baked pizza off the pizza stone--I leave the stone in the oven to cool down completely before removing.

Onto the actual pizzas!

The first pizza I made sounds crazy:  Strawberry Balsamic Bacon Pizza by ANNIE'S EATS.  What's that, you say?  Strawberry and balsamic vinegar on a pizza? Yessir.  And a few other ingredients.

Siracha, Strawberry Preserves, and Balsamic Vinegar: crazy, right?!
Ignore our ugly wall--we get tile tomorrow!

So those three ingredients make up the sauce.  It ended up tasted somewhat similar to a bbq sauce, sweet and a touch of heat.  For this pizza, the toppings were cooked chicken (we got a roasted grocery store chicken), diced bacon, sliced onion, mozzarella cheese, and diced strawberries.  OMG.  It was seriously amazing.

The first bite was scary, but I couldn't wait to get my second bite!

This one gets a big thumbs up (with a mouthful!)!  Eliza chaperoned.

The second pizza I made (the same night) was also from Annie's Eats and she calls it SPINOCCOLI PIZZA, inspired by a Bloomington pizzeria.  It started with a cream-based cheese sauce.  Super rich and delicious.  Gary and I love broccoli on pizza, so we knew this would be right up our alley.  Add in spinach, mozzarella, and cheddar cheese, and you have yourself an amazing pizza.

Hello, cheese.

We ate it so fast I almost didn't get a picture!

Finally, tonight we tried a Greek pizza recipe.  Greek pizza sounds pretty simple, and it is.  But THIS RECIPE has a special something called "crazy feta" that made this pizza truly special.  In short, crazy feta is a feta cheese dip made with roasted garlic and jalapeno, lemon juice, and olive oil.  The crazy feta, plus mozzarella, onions, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, more garlic, and kalamata olives (for Gary's half) made for a hearty pizza.  We left off the tomatoes in the recipe, and instead added some tomato sauce for the base.  Great addition and I strongly recommend it!  We all really liked this pizza, but after a couple slices the jalapeno was burning my mouth a bit!  Still, a great dinner and with our Greek salad, it was fantastic.  OH, don't pay attention to the recipes instruction to preheat to 375 and bake for 30-35 min.  Get yourself a pizza stone, crank it to 500 and preheat for 30 min, bake for 11 minutes and you'll have a perfect pizza.

On our well-used pizza stone

Can't wait to dig in!

I hope this inspires you to create your own pizzas at home!

Quiche

I really enjoy a good quiche. It's a go-to brunch item that I order at restaurants.  I also made it for 2010 Christmas.  Awhile back we had some diced pancetta and gruyere cheese leftover from another recipe, and I decided it'd be useful for a quiche.  I had one small hurdle:  I needed a pie crust and had no butter or shortening.  And I didn't want to go to the store on a Saturday morning.  Thankfully, we have this thing called Google.  I found an oil and milk pie crust recipe from Saveur: found here.  Score!

Over all the flavor of the crust when baked was not as yummy as a traditional crust, but it was SO easy to work with and roll out.  I then just looked at some quiche recipes to figure out the ratio of ingredients and added our own to it: cooked pancetta, cooked onions, shredded gruyere cheese.

Then of course I added the egg mixture and baked it.  Notice I didn't even attempt a design for my pie crust edges.  In retrospect this ended up made me wishing I had because the thin edge was so brittle when baked.  Anyway, it turned out pretty yummy in the end, even though I only had skim milk on hand, and really should have used cream.

 
What have you cooked up lately?

"Who's Cooking Soup?"

So says Creed on an episdoe of the office--we can't remember which episode, but Gary and his friends used to quote this line often.

The answer?  Us!  Again.  We tried another new soup recipe this evening.  This time I found it on pinterest.  (pinterest is like an internet bulletin board--it's awesome for things like recipes!).

The recipe originated here and is called Southern Chicken and Corn Chowder.  Here's how it went down:

First, we Gary chopped the veggies that would form the base of the soup--carrots, celery, onion.  We added those to a soup pot with olive oil, and added minced garlic (we buy the huge plastic container of minced garlic and go through one surprisingly quickly).

Those cooked down for about 5 minutes, when we added a diced jalapeno.  After that cooked for a minute we added 2-3 diced chicken breasts (raw).  This is when I took over the cooking process!  I added a good amount of freshly cracked pepper (we use a five peppercorn blend from Penzey's spices) and some salt.  The recipe didn't call for salt or pepper anywhere--an oversight in my opinion.  This then got covered with water, about two small water glasses full, and simmered for 20 minutes to cook the chicken.

Then we added two cups of milk + two TBs of flour and two cans of creamed corn--the recipe called for 20oz of frozen, but we just used 2 14.5oz cans instead.  And we added the 1/2 teaspoon of dried thyme called for in the recipe.  It simmered again for 20 minutes (more like 30-40).

At this point, we both tasted the soup.  It was good, but just tasted like canned corn.  So, Gary suggested we add some Tabasco Chipotle hot sauce.  We did, probably a TB worth?  Not sure.  We also added more salt, just a couple pinches.  Still, it was just missing something.  So I thought maybe we should add some lemon juice--sounds crazy, but it just needed some acid/brightness to cut through the richness of the soup chowder.  We only added about one quarter to one half a teaspoon, I'd guess, but it really helped.

The final product:

Bowl of chowder and small salad

The final verdict?

It was a good meal once we doctored it up.  The original recipe provided a good base, but was just "ok" in overall flavor for our taste.  Also, next time I would shred the chicken instead of cube (or just leave it out entirely!).  I also really wanted potatoes in this--I just always think of corn chowder with potatoes.  Every time I spooned up a chunk of chicken I was really disappointed it wasn't a potato!

We'll keep eating it the next couple days and it was worth it.

UPDATE!  I forgot about the bacon called for in the recipe!  Now, as blasphemous as this may sound, I don't really care for bacon anymore.  So we subbed diced pancetta.  We rendered/browned it and added it to the chowder before the final simmer.

Seasons 52 Inspired Steak Chili

Seasons 52 is a great restaurant-concept.  It is a national chain that changes its menu four times a year with the seasons.  It also has a biweekly special menu using seasonal (theoretically) ingredients.  Also, all the dishes are 475 calories or less! I first ate at a Seasons 52 one year ago in Miami, FL.  I ate at Seasons 52 a second time here in Indianapolis.  The food on both occasions was flavorful and light, while still being very filling.

This most recent trip, I ordered the Piedmontese Beef Chili.  It was amazing--like a cross between chili, black bean soup, and chicken tortilla soup.  So, Gary did some sleuthing and found this recipe from a Seasons 52 chef in Schaumburg, IL: Three Floyds Buffalo Chili.  Now, this recipe calls for Three Floyds beer (side note: we've been to the brewery for the fabled Dark Lord Day.  Ask anyone who went with us; it was a bust but a funny story to tell!) and buffalo meat.  But the bare bones of the recipe seemed to be what I had at dinner last weekend, down to the cilantro sour cream garnish.  So we decided we must make the chili and yesterday we did.

Instead of buffalo, we used steak.  The recipe called for seasoning the meat and refrigerating over night.  Then, Gary browned the seasoned meat in batches.

Yummy browned steak bites.

 Then, Gary chopped all the veggies.  An onion and many peppers.  He's very good at it.

In action.

 Look how pretty!

Gary  has mastered the fine dice.

 After cooking the onion, peppers, and garlic in the pot, we added 12oz of water instead of 24oz of beer.  I'm sure the beer would have added a good flavor dimension, but 1) I don't like beer, and 2) we only had a Sam Adams chocolate stout on hand--not appropriate for chili.  We then added chicken stock and the beef.  The soup then went into a preheated oven--yes, you read that correctly, the oven--for an hour.  We then added canned black beans and the chili went back into the oven for 15 minutes.  By this time we were dying to eat the chili.  It was a little thinner than the restaurant version, but it tastes amazing.

A little sour cream mixed in and ready to eat!

We had leftovers today for dinner, and it was just as good if not better today after letting the flavors meld more.  Yummmmmm!  A perfect winter soup/chili.

Our Favorite Meal

Gary and I have decided it would be fun to begin sharing one of our other major loves: cooking.  We have no illusions that we'll become famous food bloggers a la The Pioneer Woman or Indiana's own Annie's Eats, but we do make some good food.  So, every once in awhile we'll share with you our successes (and hopefully not too many failures) in the kitchen.  A family friend told us upon our marriage that love grows in the kitchen.  We have definitely found that to be true and enjoy our time spent together cooking our meals.

We'd like to start our sharing with our hands-down-favorite-easy-meal.  When Gary and I started officially dating, by which I mean going on car dates, our favorite restaurant to go to was TGI Fridays.  One of our favorite menu items at Fridays is the tostado nachos.  The nachos are the right mix of cheesy spicy goodness.  For whatever reason, it took us ten years or more to discover how to make these cheesy bites at home.

We start with browning a pound of ground beef and seasoning with taco flavoring (we recently invested in a giant container from Sam's, though we used to mix our own).  Meanwhile, we warm on the stove a can of refried black beans (avoid the Target market pantry brand--very bland).  Once these two items are finished, we combine them in a mixing bowl.

At this point, we turn on our broiler to high.  We then prepare to assemble our tostados.  We've tried several brands of tostado rounds.  The best deal is the kind that comes in a plastic bag, but the Ortega rounds in a box are less likely to break and are flatter.  We don't have a flavor preference.

To assemble our tosados, we place 2 rounds per person on a cookie sheet.  Then schmear a thin-ish layer of the meat/bean mixture.  We cover this generously with shredded cheddar cheese (we like a medium sharpness, thick shred).  We also add canned jalapenos, either diced or in rounds.  Then pop the cookie sheet on the middle rack under the broiler.  We keep a close eye on the oven window to pull out the tostados as soon as the cheese is completely melted and the edges of the tostado rounds are browning.

Once we remove the cookie sheet, we remove the tostados one at a time onto a wooden cutting board to cut them in half.  We each get 4 halves.  For the longest time we only used sour cream as a topping for these nachos, but lately we've also added guacamole, Gary's homemade salsa, or a fresh red onion & cilantro garnish.  Each is delicious!

This meal is so easy and so yummy.  During our 3L year of law school, we ate these nearly every week.  We don't ever get sick of them!

Here's the final product:

we'll practice our photography skills to better show off our food!

 Gary's guacamole is pretty awesome, too.  He uses 3 ripe avocados, minced garlic, salt, 1 jalapeno, red onion (very very finely minced), a couple spoonfuls of our awesome salsa (Gary says the secret is to use the "salsa juice"), a touch of pepper, and cilantro.  Oh, and you can't forget lime juice.

mmm, garlic.

Our salsa recipe is also quite straight forward and has been a hit at several carry-ins.

1 can diced tomatoes, do not drain

1/2 medium red onion, rough dice

1 TB minced garlic

Palm full or two of cilantro (leaves and top part of stems)

1 jalapeno (or 2 for medium heat), de-seeded and de-veined

At least 1 ts kosher salt (to taste)

About 4 or 5 grinds of fresh cracked pepper

Juice of one lime or about 1 TB of lime juice

1/4 ts cumin

Pour can tomatoes in food processor first, then the onions.  Add remaining ingredients.  Whiz for about 5 seconds or until desired consistency reached.  Refrigerate or serve immediately!