Garbage Pizza

made with everything about to go bad in the fridge

DISH 30

This dish is almost a cheat. I've made pizza before, I've used all the ingredients on the pizza before. . . It was just the combo of ingredients. It was the night before I was supposed to leave for Burning Man and I need to get rid of everything that was going to go bad in the fridge before I returned. I was so lazy I bought pizza dough from the pizza place up the block. The only think I did differently this time was take care that the crust was actually crispy and and the center of the pizza was not a soup in the end. Hard to do if you don't have an 800 degree over.

Here is what I threw together:
Garbage Pizza
pizza dough (bought from a pizza place becasue I am lazy)
tomato sauce I had in the freezer
Any veggies in the fridge with included:
zucchini
onion
red pepper
mushrooms
pitted olives
basil on its last legs
left over sausage
home made pesto
fontina cheese (seemed like a better idea than humbolt fog)
and what I think is asiago cheese

I sauteed up the veggies, while pre-heating to oven as high as it would go. Then, I did a mediocre job laying the pizza dough on the pizza stone. Then popped dough on stone into the over for 10 minutes.

Remove what should be more crispy dough. Add sauce all the way to the edges of the pizza,

Remove. All all veggies, dollops of pesto and crumble fontina or whatever cheese you have on hand.

Re-pop. Cook until cheese is getting bubbly and golden. Remove, shred asiago on the top, add sliced fresh basil. Cool, serve with red wine. maybe even over the edges if you are like me. Re-pop into over for another 10 minutes.


I think I got the technique done this time of pre-cooking the dough, crumbling the cheese and then shredding the hard cheese on after the cooking was finished.

Corn Dogs with Thai Chili Maple Syrup

not the cutest corn dogs I've ever seen, but damn tasty

DISH 29
I never. . . made meat on a stick before, deep fryed meat

On the way to the park today I found an ancient Betty Crocker cookbook. I'm not too proud, so I picked it up and flipped thru it while my kids mopped around the playground.

That's when I found the recipe for corn dogs. Yum. Fried meat on a stick. I needed to know how to make them.

The recipe went something like this:

Corn Dogs:
8 hotdogs (any kind)
1 c. flour
2/3 c. corn meal
2 pinch salt
2 tbs. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. dried mustard
1 egg
2/3 c. milk
handfull of frozen corn kernels
2 tbs. oil (I used olive oil)
enough oil to fry them in

Pat the hotdogs dry, cut them in half and put them on a stick. You could also make them into smaller chunks and skip the stick to bitesized corn dogs.

mix together all, dip hot dogs, fry when oil is 375 degrees. Flip corn dog every 30 seconds until golden brown.



These were good. I was smart this time and packed them away in the freezer before I ate them all like I did with the suppli. I did have one and I made a maple sryup thai chili sauce which was 1 part thai chili sauce, 1 part maple syrup that has been reduced for 10 minutes over med. heat.

chili maple syrup sauce

technorati tags [deep fried] [kid food] [meat on a stick]

Gumbo

gumbo also does not make a pretty picture

DISH 28
I'VE NEVER. . . cooked okra, made gumbo, cooked catfish

The 3 things that I wanted in a recipe were:

1. to use okra
2. to use just okra and not both okra and to use Filé powder
3. to make a gumbo with to use roux

I looked at maybe 200+ gumbo recipes before choosing this one and most of them were totally different from one another. Some cooked for 30 minutes, some for 12 hours. Some had roux, some didn't. Some used okra, some file and some neither (although it is my understanding that is ain't gumbo without file powder or okra).

There are 2 things that most gumbos have in common:
The first is Gumbo relies heavily on what people refer to as the holy trinity of creole flavors; celery, green pepper and onion.

The second is roux. It is kind of a pain in the ass to make as you have to constantly stir it for 20+ minutes. Roux is not something you can walk away from. I stopped stirring for 15-30 seconds at a time to chop vegetables, but never longer than that.

roux after 5 minutes of cooking

roux after 20 minutes of cooking (you can cook roux until it is a deep brown if you like and your wrist hold up)

The name Gumbo, derived from various Bantu dialects (Southern & Central Africa) terms for okra (i.e. quingumbo, grugombo, gumbo, gombo, ngombo gomboaud, ngumbo, ochinggombo). (The word is one of very few African language words brought over by slaves which have entered the English language. Some of the others are goober or goober pea (peanut) also of Bantu dialect origin, Yam from West Africa, and cooter (turtle) of Bantu and Mandingo origin.

That little nugget came from here.

Here is the recipe I settled on:

Sausage & Catfish Gumbo
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup flour
4 garlic cloves
2 cups chopped onions
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped green bell pepper
10 ounces frozen cut okra --If you use fresh chop up and soak in water overnight and then rinse before using.
14 ounce can diced
5 cups chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne
1 teaspoon salt
2 bay leaves
1 pound Andoulle cut into 1/2 inch chunks
6 catfish fillets, washed and chopped

Make a roux with the oil and flour, browning it slowly and stirring frequently. Cook over medium heat for about 30 minutes until it is a rich milk-chocolate color. When the roux is just right, add the garlic, onions, celery, and green pepper, stirring vigorously. Cook 2 to 3 minutes. Turn the heat to low and cook 15 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Skim any excess fat off the top.

Add the remaining ingredients and simmer for 1 hour or more. Stir occasionally.
Makes: 3 quarts

While I was making this I was quite put off. Maybe it was the catfish or how slimy to okra was. Maybe it was just that it looked disgusting. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to eat any. Then, sort of by accident I tasted it. I just put the spoon in my mouth between it's trip from the gumbo pot to the sink. My gumbo was good. I'm going to eat more. My 10 mo. son is eating it as I type. But, he's like Mikey. He'll eat anything.



[gumbo] [baby] [bordum]

Bacon Wallet

Honey, if you are reading this could you please get me this for my birthday or the holidays or just for the next time I do something nice? You can buy it here.
Thanks.

The Fox Testicle aka Orchid ice cream saga continues . .

ground mountain orchid root

The mastic I need for the Turkish Chewy Ice cream recipe came yesterday. A couple hours later I got a message from ebay saying that the woman I bought the sapel--the other important/hard to get ingredient has been banned and is no longer a registered user. I wonder if I should give up all hope of ever getting it and kiss my $20 good-bye.

Just incase, I ordered from another source.

I've also been hunting down recipes and here is what I have found:

Turkish Chewy Ice Cream
* 2 cups of double cream or whipping cream
* 2 cups of full fat milk
* 3/4 cup of sugar
* 2 teaspoons of salepi (level)
* 1/2 teaspoon of ground mastic (see below)

Grind the mastic: Mastic is usually sold in drops of resin which can stick to the mortar and pestle during grinding. To avoid, freeze mastic for 15 minutes before using and place it along with 1-2 tablespoons of the sugar in the mortar.

Grind with the pestle.

In a mixing bowl, beat 1/2 cup of the milk with the ground mastic (and sugar used to grind) until completely blended. Dissolve the salepi in 1/2 cup of cold milk. Warm the remaining 1 cup of milk in a saucepan over low heat. Beating at high speed, add the warm milk to the mastic mixture, then the dissolved salepi. Add remaining sugar and cream.

Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and boil over low heat for about 20 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking and clumping. Remove from heat and set aside to cool to room temperature.

Toss into ice cream maker and follow instruction. . .

Jambalaya Suppli

amazingly good fried treat

DISH 27

You read it right. I figured out a way to combine Cajun and Italian food. I thought I was being really original, but then I realized Two Boots does the same thing. I'm going to mention this one to Doris and see what she thinks.

I had an enormous amount of left over jambalaya from last night which doesn't reheat very well and I can't really freeze it so it is either throw it away (which kills me) or recycle it.

I lived in Rome for a year abroad in college. While there I subsisted mainly on boxed wine and amazingly delicious pizza rustica. These large, rectangular pizzas would come as simply as just olive oil and salt or as exotic as with arugula, shrimp and mayonnaise. The pizza was should by the ounce so when ordering it you'd point to what you want and then make hand motions describing the size piece you'd like. I have only found one place in the US that has anything like it. It's called Amorina Amorina at 624 Vanderbilt Ave. Brooklyn NY. Most of pizza rustica places in Rome would also sell fried and breaded stuffed rice balls called suppli. A bit bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball and changed slightly in ingredient depending on the region of Italy you were. In Sicily, they would be stuffed with meat and sometimes had peas in them- a more African influence. In Rome, they would be stuffed with a bit of cheese. They cost 1000 lire or $.70 so they were dirty cheap.

I went searching for a recipe, found that the rice filling was prepared very similarly to risotto or jambalaya. I had a bag of panko left over from an earlier soufflé recipe.

Here is how it went:

Jambalaya Suppli
left over jambalaya, risotto or similar
egg-beaten
oil to fry with (I used canola)
panko (worked great!) or other bread crumbs

roll approx. 3 tbs. balls of jambalaya
dip and coat in egg
roll in panko
fry in HOT oil for 2 minutes per side

Eat while hot.

These were so good that I ate them all. Usually when I cook, I eat just a small amount. This time, I made 5 thinking my daughter would try one, My Husband would have 3 and I would eat one. I couldn't stop myself. After the first one I broke out the Thai chili sauce and ate them with that. They would be great for a party.

[pizza] [fusion] [Rome]

Lavender Frozen Yogurt & Lemon Cookie Sandwich

tasty adult snack

DISH 26

This is an adults only ice cream sandwich. I made lavender froyo last week and all by itself it was hard to eat more that 2 bites. It was over powering in it's yogurtiness.
But, delicious anyway. So I thought about ways to lighten the impact and thought I would try making them into sandwiches with lemon butter cookies.

I'm not going to bother posting the lemon butter cookies recipe as it wasn't great and they are so easy to fine. Plus, this one was a little too fussy for me.

Here
is the lavender frozen yogurt recipe.

It was pretty terrific. I'm not in love with the cookies, but the great thing is, I can freeze the dough and just hack off the pieces I want whenever I want to make a few more of these sandwiches. Hot cookies, frozen yogurt = good.

Next I'm going to try it with salty sugar cookies.

[adult sadwich] [ice cream sadwich] [cookies]

lame borning muffins

the lame-ass muffin

DISH 25

Nothing to see here . . . .please move along . . . .shows over folks.

That is how I feel about these stupid fucking muffins I was all excited about and bought all sorts of exotic and expensive flours for. I never used almond meal, almond oil or oat flour before.
Blah. They even look boring. It is true that I skipped the sprinkling of almond slivers it called for at the end, but still. . .

Do I even bother to post the recipe?
Sure, WTF:

Almond Muffins with Fig Center
Zest of 1 small lemon
1 1/2 cups almond meal (or finely crushed almonds plus 1 tsp flour)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oat flour (found at health food stores)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
12 small figs, stemmed
1 small egg
1/4 cup clover honey
1 1/4 cups skim milk
1/8 cup almond (or toasted almond) oil
6 tbsp sliced almonds

Heat oven to 350°F. Combine first 9 ingredients in a bowl. Puree figs in a food processor until smooth and scrape into a small saucepan. Place over low to medium heat, stirring constantly, until puree gently boils, about 5 to 10 minutes. Let cool, then refrigerate. Whisk egg, honey, milk and oil in a bowl. Incorporate into flour mixture and blend on low with a hand mixer. Line a muffin tin with paper cups; fill each halfway with batter. Add 1 tbsp fig puree to center of each cup, then cover with a small spoonful of batter. Sprinkle almonds on top. Bake until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes.

lame ass oozing muffin

The fig stayed in the center of exactly zero of my muffins. I'm going to freeze them, and feed them to my 10 month old son every time I'm in a pinch for breakfast.

Lame. I just realized it is from vomit worthy SELF rag. (Got mine today. It went right into the recycling).

Never again.

[boring] [bland] [lame] [SELF Magazine]

The 2 Truths of Jambalaya

The ugly jambalaya

DISH 24

Last night while making Jambalaya, I learned 2 things.

1. You cannot take a pretty picture of it
2. You cannot make a small amount of it.

Both suck, but the fact you cannot freeze leftovers without totally destroying them, makes the #2 issue suck more.

I made a mountain of it. I could have fed half of Brooklyn with what I made. And I cut a 10 serving recipe in half.

I also did some research about jambalaya before I made it so I could make a more traditional one. Wikipedia has good info, among which is this nugget:

Prominent among them is the combination of the French "jambon" meaning ham, the French article "à la" meaning "in the style of" and "ya", thought by some to be of West African origin meaning rice, though "ya-ya" is also an old Creole patois phase meaning "everybody's talking at once."

The other thing is that jambalaya is both Creole and Cajun. I never actually knew that there was a difference. Creole is more city – urban, cosmopolitan, and French-inspired – while Cajun is more country, with simpler recipes and more common ingredients. Cajun cooking uses foods that one could grow, fish, shoot or catch in the mid-southern LA region. Actually, the whole Cajun history is really interesting. There are ethnic cajuns as well are folks who culturally identify with the Cajun tradition and call themselves cajun. They came first from France and then Canada, where they are known are Acadians, then forced out of Canada to Southern Louisiana.

A few years ago my sister and I drove from Laredo Texas to the southern most point in Louisiana via the southern most back road route. We drove down this peninsula that ended at the mouth of Brenton Sound. On this peninsula I couldn't understand anything people were saying to me at the grocery store or gas station and it took me a few minutes before I realized that they were speaking with very heavy Cajun accents. It was thrilling. We also got great food down there.

Anyway. The history of Cajun and Creole and what sets them apart are more interesting than the Jambalaya but here is the recipe anyway. I never used andouille before.

JAMBALAYA
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter
2 red onions, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 jalapeño chili, finely chopped with seeds
1 tablespoon Creole Seasoning
1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano, crumbled
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 pound andouille sausage cut into pieces
3/4 tasso, cut into 1/2-inch pieces (I used a smoked ham steak instead)
28 ounce chicken broth
28 can plum tomatoes, diced, with liquid
3 cups long-grain rice

Melt butter in heavy large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add red onions, bell pepper, garlic, bay leaves, jalapeño, Creole Seasoning, cayenne pepper and oregano. Cover and cook until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes. Mix in tomato paste. Add sausage, tasso, broth, tomatoes and rice. Bring mixture to simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover and cook until rice is very tender, stirring occasionally, about 1 hour.
Serves 10.

It was good, spicy, very filling. Too spicy for my kids to eat it.

del.icio.us tags [jambalaya][tasso][andouille]

Fig and Olive Sandwich Vinaigrette

The delicious Sandwich

DISH 23

As an experiment I've decided to eliminate mayonnaise from the fridge (It's not so good for me, I could make it on my own in a couple of minutes if I needed too) so, I've been looking around for some new things to spread on a sandwich.

I came across this, I was pretty skeptical at first 1. Because it was originally published in SELF magazine. In a fit of insanity I ordered a subscription to this rag last fall and I have learned to hate it. 2. Because olives and figs together just didn't sound so tasty.

I never used fig preserves before.

I made it and let it sit overnight, to ripen. Here is the recipe and the sandwich I made with it:

Smoked Turkey and Cheddar with Fig and Olive Spread
2 tbs. fig preserves
4 tsp cider vinegar
4 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 small clove garlic, peeled and minced
2 tbsp finely chopped kalamata olives
ciabatta load
8 oz smoked turkey breast, thinly sliced
4 oz sharp cheddar, thinly sliced
8 thin slices tomato
8 thin slices red onion
boston bib lettuce

Combine preserves, vinegar, oil, mustard, garlic, olives, and a pinch of salt and pepper. I used a tiny food processor/blender. Spread onto top and the bottom of split loaf. Layer lettuce, onions, tomatoes, turkey then cheese.

The tasty spread

Here is an alt sandwich to try:
Creamy Fig and Olive Grilled Ham (or Turkey) Sandwich
cream cheese
swiss cheese
fig/olive spread
turkey or ham
sliced farmers bread of a very hearty sliced whole grain
butter, pam or olive oil.

Spread layer of cream cheese on one side of one slice of bread, then turkey or hame, then swiss, then spread the fig/olive spread on the other slice, make sandwich, grill on med. until swiss cheese is melted.

Amazingly tasty. It is important to use a very crusty bread for the first sandwich. I've been thinking about this sandwich for 24 hours now. I miss it. I want another.

del.icio.us tags
[ciabatta] [fig and olive] [sandwich]