Pizza, Pizza!

You know that saying that goes something like "pizza is good even when it's bad"? Well, I disagree. Wholeheartedly. For me, pizza is one of those things that is rarely perfect. Don't get me wrong. I have a love for Pizza Hut that is totally inexplicable, so I'm not what I would consider a pizza snob by any stretch of the imagination. But more often than not, I actually like to make my own pizza at home, because that way I get to put everything I want on top of it. See, some of my toppings of choice don't come as standard toppings on any chain pizza I've ever come across (see avocado in picture above).

This week I opted for pizza-making at home, because when you start with a pre-made, store-bought crust, it takes at most 15 minutes to make...and this was set up to be one busy week. So, Monday night I broke out the Boboli and started piling on the ingredients (mostly whatever was in the fridge that I needed to use up). Here's what I ended up with (quantities are estimates, when given...I really need to start writing things down):

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Not-So-Homemade Pizza for One

ingredients:

• one personal-size, pre-made pizza crust (this time I used a Boboli one)
• Candoni sun-dried tomato pesto (this is stuff is on the incredible side)
  
• part skim, low moisture mozzarella cheese, shredded
• about 1 cup of a blend of spinach, arugula, and basil, chopped
• 1 tbsp red onion, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp red bell pepper, finely chopped
• 1/4 cup button mushrooms
• a handful of grape tomatoes, halved
• 1/4 small avocado, chopped
• crushed red pepper
• pine nuts
• sprinkling of feta cheese crumbles
  

prep:

• Preheat the oven according to crust directions. Chop all veggies (if they're not already chopped and stored in a hundred different plastic containers, like they are in my fridge)
• Place your pre-made crust on a cookie sheet and slather the crust with some sun-dried tomato pesto (seriously, I don't ever want to make pizza with anything else. It's that amazing). Refrain from eating it straight out of the jar, if you can.
  
• Sprinkle on a tiny bit of cheese (this will help everything else stick) and start layering the veggies. I started with the greens, to make a nice little bed for everything else. Then went the onions, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes.
• Sprinkle with crushed red pepper, if you like that kind of thing.
  
• Top with as much cheese as you want, within reason (I used the part-skim mozzarella and feta). Top the cheese with the avocado. Sprinkle on some pine nuts. Behold the mountain of pizza you've just created and be thankful that you remembered to put the crust on the cookie sheet before you started assembling.
  
• Pop in the oven and wait about 10 minutes until the cheese is golden.

Yum!

weekly eats

Here is the tentative, meat-free dinner plan for the week:

• Monday: homemade (with pre-made, personal-sized crust) pizza
  
• Tuesday: ditto
  
• Wednesday: maybe the Eritrian lentil stew from Global Table I've kind of been dying to try (I love Ethiopian food, and this seems very similar to a side dish I've had before at Lalibela in Dallas); if not, gnocchi with cannellini beans, tomato sauce and yellow/green peppers and mushrooms (leftovers from lunch on Tuesday)
  
• Thursday: lentil stew or gnocchi
• Friday: wild card

Not very exciting, but I need to make use of what I have in the fridge before this weekend, when I'll be traveling to a ranchito to learn to how to make cheese (wee! I'm practicing my 'rrrrrrrrr's already). Back on Monday just in time to pack for a 6-day work/mini-vacation to Southern California (double wee! I love me some San Diego).

Friday Five

Something I used to do in another blog, far far away, was partake in a little thing called "Friday Five". Every Friday, someone would post a prompt asking their blogger-friends to list their five favorite ______. It was an interesting and fun conversation-starter. This is something I'd like to start doing here, because I really do miss things like that. So, in honor of starting this here blog this week, here are my five favorite food blogs/websites/recipe hunting grounds of the moment:

1. Global Table Adventure: I love everything about this blog. Go forth, and follow on Facebook.
   
2. BrokeAss Gourmet: Excellent food/recipes done cheaply. What's not to like about that?
3. Blue Kitchen: A great all-around blog (on which I recently found a recipe to turn some ribs from a pretty old/tough/muttony ram into the best ribs I've ever made, hands down).
4. 12 Tomatoes: An all-around great resource. Something for everyone.
5. Food52: Also has a little bit of everything.

What are your top five?

Lenten Vegetarianism

As an observer of the "Raised Southern Baptist, But Now Mostly Methodist With an Inner Catholic" faith, I gave up meat for Lent. All meat, including fish. Oooh, fishies, delicious fishies. The raw fishies, the perfectly grilled fishies...Let's just say that giving up red meat/poultry is really no big deal, but abstaining from fish is a pretty huge sacrifice for me.

Anyway, I wanted to use this opportunity to expand my vegetarian horizons. Save for a couple of years during college, vegetarian main courses haven't really had a starring role in my go-to meal line-up (and even then, to be perfectly honest, "dinner" consisted mainly of popcorn, cheese, and peanut butter sandwiches).

At the beginning of Lent, I was relying on the processed vegetarian meat-like products to take the place of meat in meals I'd normally have made, but let's be honest...this stuff is really kind of gross if you let yourself think about it too much. I found myself eating a version of meatless "ground beef", trying to convince myself that it wasn't all that bad but, all the while, breathing through my nose and wondering if my body was really better off eating a highly-processed soy protein product instead of something like lean ground turkey breast. After a few days of forcing myself to eat the taco-delight leftovers, I decided that it wasn't worth it and fed the mystery meatless-meat to my unsuspecting dog instead.

And then I reverted back to college and made myself a month's worth of macaroni and cheese. And then I realized two things: 1) that I've come a long way since college, 2) that I can no longer live on mac and cheese alone, and 3) that mac and cheese was a total cop out. This most recent foray into vegetarianism was supposed to be an adventure. I was supposed to be expanding my horizons and trying new things. I was supposed to be eating more healthfully, not more cheese-fully. What the heck was wrong with me?

Enter The Huffington Post.

Yesterday on Facebook, the folks at Eating Well posted a link to an article in The Huffington Post titled, "Wait, What's So Great About Quinoa Anyway?" I've actually been wondering that for some time. Quinoa has been popping up in all of my usual recipe-hunting grounds for the past few years, but I've just put on the blinders and bypassed any recipe that featured this mystery grain. See, I have a confession. I'm not a huge fan of trendier, healthier grains (like brown rice and barley). I'll eat them if I have to, but if given the choice, I will opt for white rice any day. I don't know why. Call me a product of my upbringing, where things like brown rice and tofu didn't exist. However, after reading this article, I pretty much made up my mind to take off the training wheels and jump into something new--something with quinoa.

As luck would have it, my friend Claudia had picked up lunch from My Fit Foods in Dallas, and her lunch just happened to come with a side of quinoa. How fortuitous! The Grain Gods were smiling. Cad offered me a taste, and to my utter surprise, it was actually good. Not just okay, but pretty delicious. Not at all what I expected. Light and fluffy like my beloved white rice, but different...like a soft cous cous. It sealed the deal. I even had the perfect recipe in mind to try.

I remembered that Maria, a friend of mine from college, posted a recipe on her food blog sometime last year for her Quinoa Quiche, and again, with the luck, she had re-posted the recipe recently as a part of her family's weekly menu plan. Being a lover and oft-baker of quiche, it sounded right up my ally. I left work, hit the Rosemeade Farmers Market on the way home and grabbed the necessities: a bag of quinoa, onions, and a red bell pepper. Sadly, there was no broccoli rabe (from Maria's original Quinoa Pie recipe) to be found at the market, so I just decided to use up what I had at home in the crisper--a small zucchini and some green bell pepper--instead. But, as I discovered, the beauty of this recipe is that it doesn't much matter what veggies you decide to use, because the final result is bound to be delicious anyway.

I won't repost Maria's recipe here (that's what the links are for), but I'll tell you what I did differently:

• Substituted a mixture of red bell pepper, green bell pepper, zucchini and mushrooms for the 2 cups of bell pepper (my mixture ended up being about 2 1/2 cups)
  
• Used 4 eggs instead of 3 to accommodate the extra veggies I threw in

The verdict? Delicious and light, quiche-y but not heavy...in short, the perfect weeknight "I decided to skip the gym and cook something new instead" meal. I will definitely be putting this one into the regular rotation, and trying it with a combination of different veggies.

My First Quinoa Quiche:

And p.s. I tossed those mac and cheese leftovers faster than I could say "quinoa".

lemon blueberry scones

This weekend, Chris and I drove to Tulsa to see a guy about a tooth. While there, I happened across some lemon cream lotion that I had to have. It smelled lovely, and standing there in the lotion aisle of Walgreens, it hit some kind of sugary-baked-goods-loving sensor in my brain.

On the drive back to Dallas, I noticed that my hands were horribly dry. Aha! But I had this magical lotion, freshly purchased, in my bag next to my feet. I put the lotion on my hands and was immediately overcome by an intense urge to bake something. But not just any baked good would do. No...it had to be something I could eat with lemon curd (because that's exactly what this lotion smells like). Thanks to my good friend iPhone and, eventually, a 3G connection when we finally made it to Durant, I scoured recipes in the epicurious app and found exactly what I was looking for: Meyer Lemon and Dried Blueberry Scones.

Only...the closest grocery store to my apartment doesn't carry Meyer lemons or dried blueberries, so I made do with the basics (adapted recipe follows):

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Lemon-Blueberry Scones

ingredients:

• 3 cups self-rising flour
• 1/2 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 cup (11/2 sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 1 cup blueberries (one 6- or 8-ounce package)
  
• 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon reduced-fat buttermilk
• 1 1/2 tablespoons finely grated regular lemon peel
• lemon curd (for serving, optional)
  

prep:

• Position rack in top third of oven and preheat to 425°F. Line large baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk self-rising flour and 1/2 cup sugar in large bowl (or give it a whir in the food processor). Using fingertips, rub in chilled butter until pieces are size of small peas. (Or be really lazy and dump the butter into the food processor and whir until everything is mixed). Add blueberries and toss to coat.
  
• Mix 1 cup buttermilk and finely grated lemon peel in glass measuring cup. Pour buttermilk mixture into dry ingredients and stir until dough begins to form (some of flour will not be incorporated).
  
• Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and gather together. Don't freak out when you drop dough-covered blueberries all over the floor, because your crumb-seeking dog will probably sense that they've fallen and will come to your rescue. Knead dough briefly, about 5 turns.
  
• Divide dough in half. Form each dough half into ball and flatten into 1-inch-thick disk. Cut each disk into 6 wedges.
  
• Transfer scones to prepared baking sheet, spacing 1 inch apart. Brush tops with remaining 1 tablespoon buttermilk and sprinkle with remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar. Bake until scones are golden brown on top and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, about 25 minutes.
• Remove from oven and let cool, if you can wait that long (because you decided to start making the scones at say, 9:30 on a school night and are old and can't hang), gently remove from baking sheet and smear a little lemon curd on top of your scone. Yum!
  

Welcome!

So, I have a confession to make. I miss blogging. I haven't been very consistent about it for the last year or two, and that's a shame. For me, at least. As a writer by day, I sometimes shy away from writing for fun in my spare time, but even so, it's been one heck of a blogging dry spell. I don't know what's been stopping me, but as per the terms of my birthday resolutions (which I used to blog about but, of course, failed to blog about this year), I'm starting a new one. A fresh one. A blog with purpose, you might say.

It's no secret that I like to cook. Okay...I love it. I do. I'm one of those weird people who finds cooking incredibly relaxing. I love playing with, modifying and creating recipes. I love cooking on the fly/making meals up as I go along maybe just a little more than I love the structure of diligently measuring ingredients before baking. I like getting my hands dirty (when making a meatloaf or my Granny Mills' World Famous Oatmeal Cookies). The only thing I don't love about cooking and baking right now is my tiny apartment kitchen (but I can't hate the kitchen...it's not its fault it's so tiny).

I think, as a general rule, people fall into one of two camps: those who view food primarily as a necessary evil/energy source and those whose who view food as a hobby and entertainment source. I am very much a food-for-entertainment kind of girl. The only reason I don't have cable? I'd call in sick to watch Food Network, the Cooking Channel, reruns of Top Chef, No Reservations, Kitchen Nightmares, and any other cooking/food related show all day, every day. No lie.

So. When I thought about topics for blogging regularly, cooking was the obvious and natural first choice. I'm actually kind of excited. Okay, a lot excited. The things I'll be blogging here? Recipes I've written, recipes I've adapted, recipes I've shamelessly stolen from other bloggers (with links and praise), and weekly menus, just to name a few. I know I'm repeating myself, but...Excited. That's me. I haven't been this happy about writing for fun in a long time.