Adventures With Pizza

Sorry for the lack of posts recently - it was a tough week and then I spent the weekend back home in Seattle. But more about the Seattle trip another time, for now let's move on to more important things... like pizza!

I've been on kind of a pizza making kick lately (making pizza dough has just been another extension of my new found joy in bread making). I am kind of in love with unique pizzas like that Butternut Squash and Hazelnut Pizza I made for Thanksgiving, so I decided to try out a few new varieties this week.

Last night I had intended to make a Potato-Leek pizza (inspired by the Pioneer Woman, as much of my cooking has been lately), but it turns out Jonathan used the potatoes while I was away and I didn't feel like heading out to the grocery store. Instead I decided to try an Apple-Leek Pizza...  sounds a little odd (I know) but it was delicious! Here is the recipe (roughly since I never actually measure anything - I should start doing that).

Apple-Leek Pizza
-1/2 recipe pizza dough
-1 leek, white part thinly sliced
-1 apple, thinly sliced
-2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
-cheese (I used a mix of Gouda, smoked Gouda, and mozzarella)
-olive oil
-salt and pepper



Apple-Leek Pizza



Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Saute leeks and half of the garlic in olive oil until just soft, set aside. Stretch pizza dough into a circle or rectangle, rub with olive oil and sprinkle with fresh ground pepper and sea salt. Layer on sliced apples and leeks, cover with shredded cheese. Bake for 10 minutes, remove from oven and allow to cool slightly before cutting.



Unfortunately, I still have yet to get a good light for taking photos so I'm not crazy about this one. I'd also add something else to this pizza next time for color - even just some chopped parsley would have looked nice.

Tonight, at Jonathan's request, I made a BBQ pizza inspired by his favorite pizza at American Dream. They call it the Tejano - I'll just call it a Southwest BBQ Pizza. Here's the recipe for that one:

Southwest BBQ Pizza

-1/2 recipe pizza dough

-Jack Daniels Original BBQ Sauce

-1/2 red onion, diced

-1/2 package Morning Star Chicken strips (or real chicken, if you're into that sort of thing)

-1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped

-Shredded cheese (smoked Gouda and mozzarella)

-Olive oil

-Coarse salt



Southwest BBQ Pizza

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Cook the chicken strips according to package and cut into bite size pieces. Stretch pizza dough into a circle or rectangle, brush the edges of the crust with olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt. Spread a thin (or thick, if you're feeding Jonathan) layer of BBQ sauce on the dough. Cover with shredded cheese, diced onion and chicken pieces. Bake for 10 minutes, remove from oven and allow to cool slightly before sprinkling chopped cilantro over the top.

Yum!! That's all I really have to say about this one.

Anyone else have any good ideas for different pizzas? You should share them with me if you do!

-C







Oregon Truffle Hunting - Rd. 2

Jonathan is at the Trail Blazer's game tonight - sitting behind the coach's bench nonetheless (is that what it's called?)! I tried to find the game on tv so I could see him, but I don't think anyone actually cares about basketball and I was unsuccessful. Instead I get to watch Wipeout and drink wine... and tell you about the awesome truffles we found today!

I didn't tell you before, but those truffles we found the other week? They were no good. I'm pretty sure they ended up in the trash. Or maybe in the compost. They were indeed truffles, just not the good kind. After going out today with people who knew what they were doing it seems so obvious - but at the time we had no idea.

So today we went to another coworker's property - one where they had found many (good) truffles before! (This is where the first truffles came from that Jonathan looked at under the microscope and we made the truffle butter out of.) Today was absolutely beautiful out, which made looking for truffles even better! There were about a dozen of us who showed up, and I'm pretty sure everyone found truffles. It's so much more fun when you are consistently finding them! Here is our loot:

Not very appetizing, are they? They look a little better when you clean them off (although not much really - sorry truffles). Here is one of the larger ones that we found - we were pretty excited about how big most of these ones were!

 I'm not sure what we will do with the actual truffles this time, but we got an idea from Sue (our coworkers mom, owner of the property) to flavor some oil and rice with the truffles while we store them! We got some arborio rice so that eventually we can make a mushroom risotto. See how much better they look now that they are cleaned? You can pretend with me.

You know, I never thought I would actually say this - but I love Corvallis. I love Oregon (but that was less surprising). How neat is it that we can drive 10 minutes from our house and have these kinds of adventures? I have tons more wild edibles to learn about so that I can start using that Vegan Wild Edibles cookbook that Julie and Elliot got us for Christmas!

-C

The Return of The Farmer's Market & Cinnamon Rolls

The second best part of this weekend was that the Corvallis Winter Farmer's Market started back up. The first best part, of course, was that it was a three day weekend. Sorry Farmer's Market - you can't top that.

I've been having a difficult time buying produce lately because everything in the grocery store looks so "blah" compared to the fresh versions. You know, I always heard people say that once you ate a fresh tomato you could never go back to the store bought ones (especially in the middle of winter) and I never really believed them. I thought one might be better, sure - but that it would ruin store produce for you? I never bought it. Until now. The tomatoes in the store look awful, and it's not just the tomatoes - it's just about everything. I'm actually a bit sad about this, it used to be so much easier.

You can imagine how excited I was to have the Farmer's Market back then. Not that there are tomatoes in Oregon in January or anything, but there were other great things! Kale and leeks and sweet potatoes! Yum! And of course, cheese! I'm not willing to pay the $21.99/lb for local cheese in the grocery store so I was really happy to be able to buy it directly from their booth again.

Since we had an extra day off this weekend and since I have found a new love for baking yeast breads I decided to try out making Cinnamon Rolls this weekend as well. The problem with yeast breads for breakfast is that they take way longer than anyone should have to wait before eating in the morning. I made the dough Friday night so that all I would have to do the next morning is let the rolls rise, bake, and frost them.

Later that afternoon I turned on the TV and America's Test Kitchen happened to be on, and they just happened to be making the ultimate cinnamon rolls! I think their cream cheese frosting was key - the vanilla-coffee frosting I used was good, but we all know cream cheese makes everything better.

For once this winter I was cooking when it was light out so I don't have the terrible cast of indoor light! I really need to invest in some lights for taking pictures of food. I'll get around to it eventually...

Unrelated to food, and in honor of MLK day I leave you with a quote worth thinking about:
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - MLK Jr.

Oregon Truffle Hunting

mFirst off - I hope you'll bear with me as I fumble my way through designing my blog. You may notice a lot of changes over the next few weeks as I play with making new templates and banners and try to get things a bit more personalized. Hopefully it doesn't look too awful in the mean time!

There has been a recent peak in interest in mushroom hunting at work. A few weeks ago a coworker had brought in some Oregon White Truffles he had found. The good news is that no truffles are known to be poisonous, but apparently there are a few look-alike varieties that don't taste so great. Jonathan was able to convince this guy to cut up one of the truffles and look at it under a scope to identify the spores. Turns out - they were the good kind! We were given a few and made truffle butter with them (Tasty, but worth the price they go for in stores? I don't really think so).

This weekend we headed out to Lebanon with some friends from work to search for truffles at another coworkers property. Apparently he had just the right trees at just the right age to make finding truffles likely. The only problem was, none of us really knew what we were looking for. We'd heard things and read things, sure, but no one in our group had actually ventured out and searched for them before.

The first hour proved rather unsuccessful - a few "almosts" and "maybe that's one... just a really small one!" and we were about ready to give up. That was when we heard shouts of excitement through the trees - Carrie had found them! We had been going about it all wrong - all you need for finding truffles is your hands, not tools and digging utensils!

We spent the next half hour or so pawing at the ground and found a few handfuls of various size truffles. Nothing super impressive, but we were at least happy the trip had yielded some success!

Here's us with our loot minus Jonathan since he was taking the photo (I know you can't see it, but trust me - there are truffles in there)!

-C

P.S. Don't worry - no one has eaten any of the mushrooms yet. We are waiting to verify that we definitely know what they are before we do that!

Breaking News!

We didn't win the Mega Millions $355 million jackpot. Not really a surprise - but what did surprise me when I searched for the winning numbers was how many people care about Mega Millions. The real-time results in Google were flying by like crazy! I've never actually bought any sort of loto ticket before (personally at least, Jonathan does on occasion) - I had no idea it was such a big deal.

In other breaking news, my meal planning is already not going well. Safeway never has what I am looking for, and today they didn't even have what I needed for my back-up dinner plan! I ended up making Saturday's Mac & Cheese tonight thereby completely confusing the weeks plan (but it was delicious, so I'm not going to complain anymore... mmm cheese with bread).

Speaking of bread, I made a loaf of 50/50 white/wheat bread yesterday and it turned out amazing! It rose much more than my first loaf - not sure if that's because I used a new jar of yeast or because I tweaked the method slightly, but either way I am quite happy with this whole bread making situation!

Also, that vegan fried fish I tried to make the other day? Not very fishy. However the beer batter was kind of nice, perhaps I can find something else to use that on. I don't really like deep frying though, not because of any health reasons exactly but more because I don't like wasting all that oil and I don't know what to do with it afterward. Also, I usually end up hurting myself.

Vegan Fish & Chips

Enough rambling - the real reason I started writing this was to share something I found online that I thought was really neat. It's a calendar designed by The Cottage Industrialist that tells you what produce is in season on a given month, and it is adorable. Here's a link to this year's design. I stumbled on last year's calendar first, and I actually think it's a little cuter - but not so much that I'm willing to go through and manually edit all of the dates to match this year. If you have the patience here is a link to 2010 as well!

I haven't spent a lot of time looking at this blog, but so far the things she has posted are great. I only wish I could be that artistic! Hope you enjoy the calendars - I know I am printing out two copies tomorrow!

-C

New Year - New Recipes

Happy New Year! I can't believe how fast 2010 went... seems like only a few months ago we were celebrating last New Year's Eve. Best part about the past year? Finding my passion for cooking! I always enjoyed cooking, but I was never as excited about it as I am now. Getting the Harvest Box really helped to spark that interest and I'm so excited for it to return in June!

I received a ton of great cooking related gifts for Christmas (a lot having to do with cookies - I think my coworkers will be happy about that too, or not - depending on their New Year's resolutions :-) ). But right now my new favorite thing is the Kitchen Aid stand mixer I just bought at Costco! I'm really excited about bread making - I tried my first loaf ever this past week and it went pretty well! It was definitely time consuming, although not really involved, I'll just have to keep that in mind for tomorrow when I try out some more recipes!

We ate half the loaf the first night with some Havarti cheese (I found vegetarian Havarti, yay!). It reminded me of working Saturdays in the bakery when lunch would be fresh rolls with Havarti cheese from the block that must have weighed 10 pounds in the back room. This was before I found out the cheese had rennet - saddest day ever. But all that is fixed now - I can have all the bread and Havarti I want!

Fresh Bread!

This week I will try to make a french bread to go with the stew we'll have on Tuesday (New Year's resolution: work on planning out meals for the week and reduce the number of grocery trips we make) and pizza dough for Pizza Friday (I don't think this planning will last long - but I might as well give it a shot).

On a non-bread related note, tonight I am attempting to make vegan fried fish. Weird, right? I thought it sounded interesting though and even though I wasn't really a fan of actual fish, I did have some vegan fried fish at a place in Portland once and it was amazing! Last I heard though, that place had turned into a vegan strip club (only in Portland), and so there will be no more delicious fake fish for me anymore. Fingers crossed this recipe turns out edible!

-C