stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Every cook needs a good marinara recipe in her or his repertoire. Why not? It's simple to prepare, goes with tons of things, and is easily modified into a multitude of other sauces. It's infinitely superior to what attempts to pass for jarred spaghetti sauces, and again, it's so easily made and even more easily customized that it's really not worth buying it off the shelf.
I recently made a batch from a recipe recommended by raving reviews from my Mom and I fell in love. It's sweet but not overly so with plenty of warm garlic flavor without any of the raw garlic punishment. I used it for three separate applications: saucing ravioli served with fresh mozzarella and torn basil (pictured below), pizza Margherita, take due, and spaghetti with calimari (utterly divine, but so modified on the fly due to utterly poor recipe testing that I wasn't keeping track of things like quantities and time, so I'll have to re-make it in order to post the recipe). Needless to say, the sauce is all gone. Well, that is, until I make another batch...
Muffins get a bad rap, and none more so than bran muffins. See, regular muffins are sugar-and-oil fests, full of empty calories, and most bran muffins are healthy but, well, made of twigs. Can there be a happy medium between these two extremes?
Of course there can be! Enter my breakfast-on-the-go juggernaut, the 150% whole grain banana nut muffin! Now, you may be asking yourself how the hell something can be 150% whole grain, and here's your answer: grains are made up of the germ, the bran, and the endosperm. White flour and other processed grains get poo-pooed (and deservedly so) because the nutritious and tasty germ and bran are removed, leaving behind the starchy endosperm which, while semantically being a complex carbohydrate, is treated by your body just like sugar, a simple carbohydrate. While most muffins are made of only white flour, this recipe is made up of whole-wheat flour (germ, bran, endosperm), oats (again, germ, bran, endosperm), wheat germ, and oat bran. Lots of good-parts-of-the-grain yumminess, see?
An astute reader like yourself may have picked up on the fact that while a couple of those ingredients are the fiber- and nutrient-rich parts of the grain, they do not in fact contain all three parts. So I guess it's not technically whole-grain, but really, when you're only removing the bad stuff and keeping the good stuff it's easy to see that it has way more of the good stuff than the bad stuff, so it's like an endosperm with twice the bran and twice the germ, and hence, 150% whole grain! Don't argue with me on this one, I majored in math and I'll come up with some convoluted argument to prove that It Is So.
So that's enough science geekery, let's stop talking nutrition and start talking yumminess!
This recipe is awesome because it manages to be low-fat without tasting overly low-fat. Yes, when you bite into these muffins you can tell that they are healthy and nutritious, but they are still wonderfully moist and flavorful. That's because applesauce, oil's favorite understudy, has gotten its chance to shine in this recipe, and when it teams up with the bananas you get a moist, remarkably un-twig-like consistency. When you add in things like toasted pecans, flax, raisins, and the grains, you get a complex flavor profile that keeps your tastebuds happy.
These are ideal for early-morning athletes and snooze-button-hitters since they are easy to take with you and eat, ensuring you get those morning calories your metabolism needs to function properly throughout the day. I always eat one on the way to swimming in the morning and if I think there's a chance I won't get to eat my daily oatmeal I always bring along a couple extra to tide me over until lunch. That's another benefit to this muffin's ingredients: in addition to being flavorful, they also keep you full for a long time. So what's not to love? Skip that chemical delight breakfast you were going to grab on your way out the door and eat one of these instead!
Click here for the recipe for "150% whole grain low-fat banana nut muffins" »
Espresso. Brandy. Ladyfingers. Chocolate. Marscapone.
When you look at that list you may find yourself wondering, "What possibly could go wrong?"
And if you answered an enthusiastic "Nothing!" you would be so, so wrong. I sure as hell hope you didn't bet the farm on that one.
Tiramisu, at its best, is light yet rich, warm-tasting with brandy notes, with espresso to offset the sweetness, and because everything is better with chocolate, a liberal dusting of some Scharffen Berger. However, when executed improperly, it's flat tasting, bitter, and soggy. Trust me, you don't want soggy tiramisu.
It's one of those dishes where everything has to go right. Because of that, I won't order it in restaurants anymore, not even the one that Cory took me to for dessert on my birthday, because they screw it up and frankly, mine is a hell of a lot better (sorry Cory, I know you meant well!).
Luckily, if you have a good recipe, like the one I'm about to share with you, you can't go wrong. Too many recipes for tiramisu are too vague and include verbiage like "stir a couple of times" or "heat until lukewarm" and that sort of imprecision, while maybe appearing a little less intimidating to the novice cook, is a recipe for disaster. For soggy, flaccid, bitter disaster. And you know I would never do that to you.
I've been waiting to post this recipe for quite some time.
You see, you might call this dish Highly Significant.
It's so significant that I often find myself asking if Cory and I would have gotten married if it were not for this recipe.
It's one of the first things we ever cooked together, and from the point that we starting smooshing up those tomatoes with our hands, it was painfully apparent that we were meant to be.
We still cook up a batch of chicken cacciatore every time we're together. I thought it was criminal that he didn't have a copy of the recipe or The Joy of Cooking, so when he moved into his current apartment I bought him a copy the newly released 75th anniversary edition as a housewarming gift. Before I bought it for him I made sure that the recipe hadn't gotten the axe and was included in that version, but when we brought it home and we inspected it more closely we found that it calls for diced canned tomatoes, not whole tomatoes that you crush with your hands. On that alone, I've basically panned the whole edition. It's not worth buying! Find the 1997 edition! That older recipe helped Cory and I find love, and I who am I to deny anyone else that opportunity by recommending an inferior tome?
I'm going to admit upfront: my version of the classic Italian chicken is so not traditional. Every recipe I've ever seen and everyone else who's ever served it to me - including places in Italy - call for chicken parts, not chicken breasts, but when I was first learning to cook I had no clue what the heck a chicken part was. Even if I had been savvy enough, I simply didn't have the equipment to cut up a chicken and then cook it. So maybe it's for the best that I've bastardized it. I still think it's delicious, and it has the health benefits of being all-white meat.
Not everything about this recipe is 100% positive though. There is something about chicken cacciatore that makes living alone an especially bitter pill to swallow. This dish is so obviously meant to be cooked with people and then shared with people. That alone explains two of my behaviors: I always call Cory when I'm starting to crush up those tomatoes with my hands and tell him that I wish he was there with me, and whenever I'm cooking for a group people for the first time, this is the recipe I pull out. It's just too good to not share with others. It's not just the end result that's important, it's the whole process - from the first time you throw the onions and herbs in the pan and the fragrance makes everyone exclaim with delight to the times when the pan is in a long simmer and you can just sit around and enjoy the company of your companions to the first bite of that warm, earthy, wine-herbs-and-tomato chickeny goodness. Nothing says "I care" like chicken cacciatore.
Tonight was Cooking Binge Night (bread, muffins, sandwich meat, chicken cacciatore, minestone soup, oatmeal...). I'm going to be starting a very unpleasant work week tomorrow night and will have zero time for cooking so I had to get it all done tonight.
Last night I was supposed to start a batch of bread and let it do its twenty-four hour thang. But sleepier heads prevailed and I went to bed without so much as pulling the yeast out of the fridge.
Y'know, it must be a pretty sweet life to be yeast. Just think about it: you're born, you go to sleep, then you get woken up with huge feast and you eat like crazy for a couple of hours, and then you die. Along the way, it's not only normal and accepted to, well, burp and fart, it's required.
Yep, those little critters have it pretty good. Don't let anyone tell you that being a single-celled organism is dull.
But I digress.
So I finally got around to starting the bread tonight. I had forgotten to put oatmeal or any other grain on so that was right out and needed to find a recipe make. I was tempted by my herbs de provence loaf but realized that the only blend I had on hand was the one with anise. Yuck. So I took a page from L'Aroma and settled on a rosemary loaf.
As I was kneading and shaping (and waiting) I was thinking about how I would post this (I know, I'm such a nerd). I was originally going to post it as a variation on the herbs de provence loaf, but....
See, the loaves came out of the oven, and they were exceptional. They rose impossibly high - so high that the bread was so light that I had to slice very carefully so I didn't smoosh it. And the flavor - I can't believe it, it's so delicious. The wheat brings out the best in the rosemary - even though I used a very heavy hand with the herb the flavor is well-rounded, delicate, and almost sweet. I never thought I'd say it, but I think my version is way better than L'Aroma's Pan Marino. Theirs is a white bread with sea salt sprinkled on top and I really think the rosemary needs something more than refined flour. Rosemary is a fantastic herb, but really, it's not that good on it own. It needs something to support its flavors. I've known that for a while, but I never would have guessed that whole wheat would be the perfect complement.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat rosemary bread" »
I am missing a fondue party right now.
This is killing me for two reasons:
1) I flippin' love fondue.
2) I am missing said party because I am having a brunch tomorrow morning, the star of which is to be danish pastries. I just pulled them out of the oven and... they're a disaster.
I'm missing fondue for a disaster.
I'm a little traumatized here.
I knew my December batch was too perfect and that I had gotten a little too smug with my pastry chef-ness, I knew I would have to pay for it down the line somewhere...
Allow me to elaborate.
Visually, well, from a bird's eye view at least, they are a stunning masterpiece of pastrydom. They are the flakiest things I have ever seen come from a household oven. Behold Exhibit A:
But alas, the top view tells an incomplete tale! For, alas, they were.... burned (Trogdor strikes again!). They taste ok (not perfect, but ok) if you just eat the top, but the flavor is not as delicate and nuanced as it should be. And if you eat the whole thing.... it's just a disaster. The texture is all wrong too, it's like they're too tough and heavy. In a way they almost remind me of bad biscuits instead of the Most Perfect Pastry Ever Baked (which the last batch was). Just see for yourself:
I can't serve these. They are simply unacceptable. They certainly aren't worthy of being my piece de resistance.
So I'm starting over again. At 8pm, the night before the brunch, starting over. I've been up since 5am and this recipe takes a good five hours, but I will get it right!
And now you all know: I screw up in the kitchen sometimes too.
The pride cometh before the fall...