stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
Ain't life grand when you have the luxury of throwing a pizza in the oven on a Friday night? And isn't it even better when that pizza is homemade? We definitely hold by that line in our house.
I've always eschewed the line "Even when it's bad, it's still pizza" (quit rolling your eyes, I know that comes as no surprise whatsoever if you've even spent two minutes reading this blog) and I take great joy in making every component for my pizza that I can. Really, it's the only way you know you're going to get a good one.
I love to use pesto as a base for pizza, especially in the summer. Few things give me more pleasure than shearing my basil plants (Fred has recovered from his confined-to-a-pot days and is loving all the room he has to stretch his roots, for those of you who had met him when he wasn't looking so hot), bringing the green stuff inside, and pulling the leaves off the stems. It fills the kitchen with a wonderful aroma!
The only problem with fresh pesto is that it's really easy to overdo it on the garlic, especially if you're like me and habitually triple - at a minimum - the amount of the tasty stuff called for in a recipe. Luckily, I ran across a technique with which you toast the unpeeled garlic cloves on the stove to mellow out that bite it's known for. It works like a charm and I no longer have to work about whether or not I'm going to OD on garlic. You just have to make sure to toast up enough so that you have extra to put on top of the pizza!
The only thing left to do is to load it up with other high-quality ingredients. Once you've done all of this, you'll have created a pizza night to remember!
You may be sad because summer has come to an end, taking with it delightful foods like nectarines, plums, berries, and locally grown vegetables like greens, cauliflower, chard, beets, and carrots.
But don't fret! Fall has its place in a foodie's heart because it brings delights like root vegetables, butternut squash, pumpkins, an untold number of apple varieties, Bartlett pears, and pomegranates.
I recently celebrated fall by having a harvest dinner (suggested by my most wise and venerable husband). On the menu was a roasted pear salad with candied walnuts, blue cheese, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette, cabernet-glazed shallots, butternut squash risotto with wilted spinach and toasted pine nuts, sauteed pork tenderloin with an apple-sage sauce, and stuffed baked Jonagold apples with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert. I love this menu -- it's so autumn-y with its warm, subtle flavors and unifying themes. Sage and apple are present in many of the dishes but are different and subtle enough to not get old or tiring. And as my guests pointed out last night, there's plenty of booze in every dish! So dig in and get to love autumn as much as I do, and share it with some good friends too.
"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...
Tonight was Cooking Binge Night (bread, muffins, sandwich meat, chicken cacciatore, minestrone 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" »
There are some days at work that are just way to hectic for me to break away for a bit, drive home, and prepare a delicious meal.
Luckily, I have this recipe, and I can make a delicious, healthy meal at work.
I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's occasionally too busy to get the much needed lunch respite, so in honor of all of us eat-at-our-deskers, I present this, a throughly modern, healthy, and delicious version of the typical American baked potato.
If you're like me, that previously mentioned russet potato (a starchy root whose super-nutritious skins are largely discarded), piled high with butter (artery clogger #1), cheese (A.C. #2), sour cream (A.C. #3), bacon (A.C. #4) and chives (woah, an innocuous one managed to get in there) is pretty unappealing. Try this take instead: a yam (not candied, but left in its pure fiber- and vitamin-rich form), piled with tangy plain yogurt (pretty healthy, especially when compared to sour cream), cumin (a wonderful spice), and rosemary (another fantastic flavor). See, the beauty of this lunch is that not only is it as easy and quick to prepare as the four-fold artery clogger, it's much more flavorful because you use herbs and spices and not lots of animal fat on a root veggie that already has plenty of flavor on its own. (Quick note: yes, that is a jar of ground cumin - I buy most of my spices whole but I go through cumin so fast that I don't take issue with buying it ground. I do keep whole cumin on hand, but for a quick, easy recipe like this it's just easier to take the shortcut.)
And I must admit it: I'm a sucker for the yogurt, cumin, and rosemary blend. I first ran across it in middle eastern lamb spread I make around Easter and for some reason it just works with the yam. And really, with fresh, flavorful ingredients like this, what's not to love? Unless, of course, you count the glares of envy that your Lean Cuisine-reheating officemates will be shooting you when they smell the lunch you're walking around with.
Click here for the recipe for "Baked yam with middle eastern flavors" »
Who doesn't love a good scone for breakfast? It's like a waffle that way. Most of us have probably had blueberry or chocolate or maybe even cinnamon chip scones, but how common is a savory version?
I had run across this recipe about six months ago, and it sounded so unusual and so delicious that I tucked it away, ready to be pulled out in the right occasion. That occasion came around when I planned my Thanksgiving menu. Breakfast has a history of being all too often overlooked on that certain day, so on this Thanksgiving, my first un-adult-supervised one, I decided to start it off right.
These were perfect for the occasion - hearty, but not overly so, they satisfied without stuffing. And the bacon/smoked cheddar/scallion/fresh-ground pepper combo was fantastic and bold. Try them next time you have overnight guests - they're a very welcome surprise.
Click here for the recipe for "Savory bacon and scallion breakfast scones" »
All spring and summer I've been humming a snug self-satisfied little tune to myself. Why, you ask?
Because I am growing my own herbs in my back yard. Oh yes, glorious rosemary, sage, and oregano, oh-so-fresh and free for the harvesting to better make my dishes so yummy! Raspberries bursting out of pods and ripening! And thyme, Italian parsley, and cilantro, on the way! But these were to pale in comparison to the prize plant in my herb garden, the crown jewel that was to grow in abundance and make my kitchen floweth over with the deliciousness that would be produced within.
I am speaking of course of that king of herbs (no, really, that's what the name translates to) -- basil!
I was so proud of myself, planting the seeds, watching with delight as the little sprouts poked their heads out of the soil and unfurled themselves, sprouting leaves with exponential abandon.
My dad -- gardener extraordinaire -- sounded impressed. "I've never grown basil from seeds before.... well, intentionally that is." (I should mention that my parents live in Texas, whose climate basil loves maybe even more than I love chocolate, and at the end of each summer there is a literal basil forest in their garden. Needless to say, they get enough volunteers from the previous year's flowers and seeds to supply pesto to all of Italy. Twice.) I was well pleased. There was life -- it was germenation, biology, SCIENCE ITSELF -- happening in my own backyard! How cool is that?
Well, before long, my basil got too tall to support itself. "No matter," I thought, "it's just these really long (20 hours long) Alaska days. The plant is growing too tall too fast to grow any supporting, er, infrastructure." So I staked the plants. I had also noticed that some weird other spouts were coming up in the pots. This wasn't terribly surprising since weeds compose, oh, about 50% of the plant life in my yard, so I pulled those sprouts out, again well pleased with myself. I was keeping invasive plants at bay, thus FURTHERING SCIENCE!
Before long, I noticed the plant itself wasn't really growing in the shape I thought it would, but having only previously bought basil pre-sprouted and never having experienced BASIL SCIENCE before I figured it was just an awkward teenage phase and it would soon grow into the shape I associated with basil. And the lack of scent in the leaves could totally be explained by the lack of scorching heat in Alaska that the herb loves so much.
Alas.
These illusions were to crumble like a cookie before me today, when I abruptly stopped singing my little self-satisfied tune. I'm no longer walking tall, proud of my contribution to science. It turns out that those sprouts -- the ones that had first appeared in the pots, growing so expediently -- were weeds. I've been nurturing invasive plants in pots on my back deck, and those smug little bastards were all too happy to keep the wool pulled over my eyes!
And the worst part?
Those sprouts I pulled up in the name of SCIENCE? As photos from the internet were able to verify, (Google Images knows all) those were the real basil sprouts! Oh, the horror. I killed the very thing I was trying to cultivate! Instead of preening a lovely and understated herb, I may as well have been helping along the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. You'd better believe that it was screaming "FEED ME, SEYMOUR!" when I came 'round each day with the watering can (maybe that's why they call it horticulture. It should really be horrorculture.).
Little green terranean terrorists. You're about to get a taste of your own medicine tomorrow when you get pulled up and shredded.
And this time, I shall be sprouting the seeds indoors!
Ever since I first tried my hand at Olive Rosemary bread for an Easter feast this year, I've been a big fan. The olive and rosemary complement each other extremely well and have a warm, not-too-olivey flavor.
Yesterday I was craving this bread something fierce. The problem? Well, I was sick and was really not liking the idea of mixing, kneading, fermenting, shaping, proofing, and baking two whole loaves. Incidentally, the six hours it would take to get the bread in my belly wasn't really working either considering I was craving it then. Quick breads came to mind, but I didn't know any savory recipes besides cornbread (and my blueberry buttermilk pancakes had exhausted my supply of cornmeal) and as much as I love a good whole-wheat pumpkin spice loaf, I just wasn't wanting a sweet bread (or a sweetbread, for that matter).
So, of course, I turned to my favorite cooking friend, The Joy of Cooking. I flipped through their quickbreads section, considering zucchini bread (but was foiled by a lack of the namesake ingredient), coffee cakes (but then remembered that I didn't want something sweet), and muffins (ditto), before my eyes rested upon a Mediterranean olive loaf recipe. Ye gods, had I just found a quick version of the very bread I was craving? Indeed I had! I immediately went into the kitchen and ten minutes later my loaf was in the oven.
The bread came out wonderfully moist with a very crumbly texture, and as my venerable printed friend suggested, the bread was excellent with some goat cheese. Move over, chicken noodle soup - that's some good comfort food.
Click here for the recipe for "Olive rosemary quick bread" »
I used to think that I did a fair amount of cooking for myself. Sure, I ate pre-boxed cereals like Grape-Nuts and used mass-produced bread and turkey breast for my sandwiches, but surely that doesn't count, right? You can't make those things for yourself!!!
Then one day I woke up and realized, "Wait a minute, it is not natural for turkey breast to come in this shape. Plus this stuff doesn't have nutrition labels I can read, so god only knows what they put in it!" Luckily, I had this epiphany around Thanksgiving and I had just gotten myself a brand new roasting pan. After eating leftover homemade turkey sandwiches for a couple of days, I decided something in my daily lunch routine had to change. "What the hell," I thought. I had just started baking my own bread, so I figured I might as well go whole hog.
So I looked in some cookbooks and magazines for some inspiration. Some suggested brining before roasting, but one of the big reasons I decided to start doing this myself was to get away from all that sodium. Some suggested marinades, but I wanted a (relatively) quick fix. Others suggested lemon, but that tires pretty quickly for me.
Then I remembered our Thankgiving Turkey Trifecta: Sage. Rosemary. Thyme. And no, I am not going to Scarborough Fair!
Eureeka! It's genius. So I minced up these fresh herbs and some garlic (because garlic makes everything better). I drizzled just a tad of olive oil over the mix to make it more paste-like and easy to handle. Instead of stuffing the cavity (as is the fate of the turkey), I borrowed an idea from Cook's Illustrated and used my fingers to loosen the skin from the breast and thighs (they actually suggest using a chopstick to do this because "fingers are more likely to tear the skin" but I disagree -- your fingers can bend. I've never torn the skin with my hand) and rubbed the meat with the herbs generously. Then I prepped the limbs for the oven, turned it breast-down (this helps the white and dark meat reach safe eating temperatures at the same time), and popped it in the oven. Twenty minutes later I flipped it on its back and let it continue to cook until the instant-read thermometer said it was done.
I will swear up and down that this is the best sandwich meat ever. After cooking your own lunchmeat, I promise you will never be able to go back to the salty, processed, unnaturally shaped abomination in your grocer's deli counter again. I also promise that after you use the leftovers to make your own stock, you'll never buy that salty, watered-down abomination in a can off the shelf again either.
The first time I had gnocchi, I was pretty doubtful. Cory and I were living in San Angleo and he happened to find a package of gnocchi on the grocery store shelf. He used to make it with his family and he loved the stuff, so he bought it and cooked it for me one night. I was not impressed -- they seemed like heavy, tastless lumps in the no-man's-land between pasta and tortellini.
But then, we went to Italy.
We had gnocchi there.
And I have seen the light!
Yes, light is what they are, light and flavorful! Those potato dumplings have won a place in my heart.
I came back from Italy all culinarily inspired, even more firmly convinced than ever that when it comes to food, Americans just don't get it. To help shed some light in those dark corners, I resolved to serve a proper Italian meal to some friends -- with complete with antipasti, primi and secondi piatti, and dolci. I wanted to try something new, something delicious that I had never made before and that my guests would probably have never eaten before, so after a bit of searching, it came to me: gnocchi was the obvious choice for primi.
When I found the recipes, I realized I had a new dilemma: I don't have a potato ricer, and I have this thing about taking up limited storage space with single-use gadgets. So the stubborn, yet forsightful, bit of me decided to instead buy the Pasta Maker with Food Grinder attachment for my stand mixer, figuring that I could also use it for tomato sauces, apple sauce, sausages, and, of course, pasta.
Last week I made a test batch of gnocchi for the dinner I'll be having at the end of the month. Let me tell you, even though I'm not really sure what the authentic shape is for these dumplings, they are delicious -- especially when tossed with a pesto sauce you've just ground up yourself.
