Deep Dish Pizza

Zachary's Chicago Pizza is one of my favorite restaurants of all time but one I don't make it to very often, for a couple of reasons. First, it's all the way on the other side of the country (at least for the next few weeks. By this I mean that we're moving, not it) and second, with pizza this intense, a little goes a long way.

The thing that's amazing about Zachary's is that it's pizza unlike any other I've found. While it touts itself as Chicago style, it's really its own creature, visually similar to the deep dish pie that's been made so ubiquitous by the Pizzeria Unos popping up in strip malls all over the country but miles away from that in taste. Zachary's specializes in stuffed pizzas, essentially pies in which all the toppings are encased in a buttery crisp crust shell--thick on the bottom but thin on top--and then covered in beautifully red peeled tomatoes and basil. This is the ideological opposite of New York pizza, thick and hearty where New York pushes thin and light, bright with fresh tomato flavor and toppings like spinach and mushroom that explode in your mouth where New York slices are often cheese-forward, bubbling crisp and deliciously greasy enough to have you reaching for a fourth napkin before you're halfway through. They're both great ways to approach pizza but Zachary's is so unique, the taste so completely Zachary's, so complexly alive, that it's hard to think of it as a pizzeria at all. This is no simple hole in the wall with a hot oven burning little square scars into the arms of the staff, this is a real restaurant and the food you're being served is not just pizza, it's pizza heightened, it's pizza cuisine. So it's not something you eat everyday.
The trouble is, our cravings for a thick complex slice of Zachary's come more often than our flights to California. Much more often. So we find ourselves all the way on the other side of the country, far beyond the possibility of Zachary's pizza. Yet for some reason, we never really thought our way to the obvious solution: if we want Zachary's and we can't get it, we just have to make it.

So we tried.

This dough recipe comes from Peter Reinhardt's amazing American Pie which I can never appreciate enough. It's an absolutely phenomenal book on pizza that I get more from every time I look.

Chicago deep-dish pizza dough
from American Pie
(makes 2 18-ounce dough balls)

18 ounces unbleached bread flour (I used all purpose and it worked fine. I might actually suggest it because of the delicious tender lightness I encountered.)
2/3 cup fine-grind yellow cornmeal
2 Tbsp sugar
2-1/2 tsp kosher salt
2-1/4 tsps instant yeast
5 Tbsp corn oil
1-1/2 cups lukewarm water

Combine all ingredients in an electric mixer and, using the dough hook, mix on low for 4 minutes until a coarse ball forms. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes then mix again on low for 2-3 until the dough is tacky and passes the windowpane test. Form the dough into a ball and place in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap to rise until doubled. Divide into two equal pieces and round them into balls. Cover in olive oil and let rest, covered in plastic wrap, for 15-20 minutes.
When they've rested, roll out each dough into a disk about 14 inches in diameter. Lay each disk into a 10 inch round cake pan (or springform) and press into the corners and up the sides. The first time I did this, I thought the instructions were to make the dough stretch over the top of the pan so I did and the pizza turned out looking like it had a popped collar and very little substance. It looked like a douchebag is what I'm saying.

For a thinner crust, put immediately into a 400 degree oven, for a thicker crust cover dough-lined pans with a kitchen towel and let sit 30-60 minutes before baking. Either way, bake the crusts for 3-4 minutes to set them, remove from oven and let cool, then top. It should go cheese, toppings, (another layer of crust if you're going for the stuffed pizza which I didn't decide to do), sauce, and a richer cheese like parmesan. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes, rotate pan, then bake for another 20-25 until the edges are golden and the cheese is browned.

We topped it with slices of zucchini, turkey pepperoni, onions and mushrooms sauteed in wine, mozzarella, fresh basil, and crumbles of goat cheese which was... a lot of stuff and in the future I think I will thin down the toppings list so we can focus on the actual flavors.
So here's the rundown: the dough wasn't as buttery as I wanted (next time I might try this actual recipe from Zachary's which Dana found ages ago and which was then lost among my bookmarks until, of course, today), the sauce a little over processed and not the rich whole tomato sauce Zachary's uses, the toppings kind of... muddled, but it was a good first step. And it reiterated a good lesson we seem to get over and over and are just beginning to retain: it's much easier to approximate a dish at home than we ever expect. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's close enough to quell the cravings for a while. Long enough, certainly, for us to make it back to California and have the real thing.

Cardamom Almond Biscotti

High up on my list of things I'll miss most about Ithaca are the Jane Austen tea parties Eisha and I have been hosting since last summer. It started with a screening of Pride and Prejudice with an incredible spread of tea, scones, marmalade, cheese, crackers and madelines, and from then on we were hooked. Accompanied by an always-changing assortment of people and ever-evolving spread of food, we plowed through the fabulous 2008 BBC Sense and Sensibility, hit a definite low with Mansfield Park (really, don't bother with that one), thoroughly enjoyed the 2007 Masterpiece Theatre version of Persuasion and, most recently, undertook a double screening of Emma and Clueless in a single afternoon.

In the past, I've contributed madelines, rice pudding, scones, and more scones to our tea parties, but this week I went for something different - biscotti - because I've been dying to try a new recipe since that awesome hazelnut chocolate batch. I needed something a bit more subdued, though, to pair with tea rather than coffee, and in the midst of packing I came upon a Martha Stewart Living from last July. Lo and behold, in the back there was a recipe for Cardamom Biscotti. Perfect.

What follows is my version of this recipe. I haven't changed much about the ingredients (I did go with toasted amonds rather than blanced), but the instructions were pretty hard to follow, so I've clarified them here. Personally, I think anyone should be able to bake, not just people with the experience to know that "mix flour into wet ingredients" means to replace the whisk with the paddle attachment, then add flour a little bit at a time. Come on, Martha. You're better than that.

Cardamom Almond Biscotti (adapted from Martha Stewart Living)

• 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• a pinch of salt
• 3 3/4 ounces toasted almonds, chopped fine
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg white, for wash
• 2 tablespoons sanding sugar
  

Directions

1. Put rack in center of oven and preheat to 325 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
3. Pulse toasted almonds in a food processor until chopped fine. Whisk the following into the flour mixture: almonds, cardamom, and 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar.
   
4. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs and vanilla until foamy. Make a small indent in the middle of the flour mixture, then pour in eggs and vanilla. Mix with hands or wooden spoon until all the flour is incorporated, and a soft dough has formed.
5. Lightly flour work surface, and transfer dough to it.
6. Using as little flour as is necessary, roll dough into an oblong log. Transfer to a baking sheet lined with either parchment paper or a silpat. Flatten the log out by gently pressing on the top with the heel of your hand.
   
7. Bake 25-30 minutes, or until the log is just the slightest bit golden and lightly cracked, then remove from oven.
8. Lightly beat egg white and brush onto biscotti. Sprinkle log with sanding sugar, and place back in oven for 15 minutes.
   
9. When log is golden brown and slightly hard to the touch, remove from oven and let cool on wire rack for 10 minutes.
10. Transfer biscotti log to a cutting board, and cut into it at an angle using a sharp, serrated knife. The slices should be approximately an inch thick.
11. Put a wire rack onto the baking sheet and arrange slices, flat side down, on the rack. Bake until crisp and devoid of moisture, 15-20 minutes.
12. Remove from oven and let cool. Enjoy with tea.

Even though this recipe will always remind me of Ithaca, it's also very connected to our future plans. Justin and I are moving to his hometown of Modesto, California in a few weeks, where we'll be very near to his parents, who live and work on an almond farm. And Modesto is known for its huge Portuguese population, including Justin's family, all of whom use cardamom in copious amounts when cooking. I'm interested to see how our cooking and baking will change, once we get there.

What the hell are garlic scapes?

Earlier this week, Alex strode into the studio carrying a huge cardboard box hoisted like a prize. "Garlic Scapes!" he declared, but honestly, he might as well have been speaking another language. I was convinced I'd heard him wrong, that actually the box he came in with would contain something from my known universe of food. Something that sounded like garlic scapes. Pickled scallops, maybe. Charles grapes. Dana and I were both throwing at the time, something close to a million sorbet bowls for me, a similar amount of spoon rests for Dana. We switched off our wheels and turned in unison to peer into the depths of the box from which tiny green tendrils were winding. This is when it became clear that these were not a known entity, not a gnarled plate or a licked date (I'm reaching). No, these were something else entirely.

Garlic scapes are the curly green stalks that grow from a head of subterranean garlic. They look like long green onions wound into loose ringlets; they seem like thin delicate little things but then resist like bedsprings when unwound. But most important for my purpose here is what they taste like. So lean back and imagine this: when you take a bite of raw garlic--come on, I know you've all done it at some point or another--you get this out of tune rock band of sharp flavors, pungent and overpowering, and lurking quietly beneath all that noise is the flavor that the garlic will cook down to, buttery and rich and very very... well, garlicy, but its hard to even detect it, let alone make sense of the flavor for all the raucous that the bitterness is raising on your tongue. Garlic scapes in their raw state are like that experience with the volume turned down and the talent turned up. You get some of that pungency, a virtuousic solo instead of a skull-splitting shred, and some of that buttery garlicness, but the disparate flavors are suddenly in harmony. There's still some bite, but it's not going to leave you with a headache, there's enough richness to bring you back for more. Cooked, they're somewhere between a green bean and asparagus, grassy and light with just the barest hint of garlic flavor. They're completely awesome and they're amazing in everything.

See, you probably know all this, you in your well stocked gourmet kitchen, you superstar with a whisk and a saute pan, but I didn't. I had no idea. I had never even heard the word garlic scapes before Alex sent some of that enormous box full home with us, let alone processed the flavor.
But since we did, they've been in everything that has come out of the kitchen. The photos here are just of the pizza we put them on (raw but chopped thinly on the bias) but this week we've braised them in turmeric with chicken breast, added to a fresh gardeny pasta sauce, tossed into quesedillas. Every meal lately has featured them in some form or another and while I can't get enough, I feel like the bag we brought home hasn't even changed in size. It's like a mass of wriggling squid in freeze frame everytime I look in the fridge but I swear to God I think they're multiplying.

Anyway, suddenly this thing I'd never heard of is an integral component (and one that, I know, won't last long). But maybe the weirdest thing about this discovery is this: learning about garlic scapes was like learning a new word and then finding that it's incredibly common. I hear them mentioned everywhere. I've suddenly tuned in only to realize that half the nouns in the language right now have been replaced with scape. Somebody goes to the farmer's market and brings home a bunch of scapes, somebody else has a long standing opinion on their proper use, a third person keeps a huge bag full in her fridge, half the world posts (far superior) blog entries about them. I mean, come on, world, how long has this been going on? And more importantly, WHAT ELSE DON'T I KNOW ABOUT!?

If there are suddenly garlic scapes all over the radar, what else might be just underneath the surface? Is there some sort of better heat? Is there a different water? Tell me! Wait, no, don't.

In essence, I guess this is the wonderful ecstatic thing about becoming a foodie. Food was always such a flat map for me, a known quantity, and suddenly in the last couple years I'm learning not only that I don't know everything about food but I'm constantly reminded that actually I might not know anything and, God willing, maybe I never will. I'm hard pressed to imagine anything better than continuing down this road and eternally finding nestled past every bend an entirely new way of thinking and feeling, a new experience that is always, inevitably, a game changer.

This week it was garlic scapes, but just imagine what could be peeking over the edge of the box next year, or ten years from now. What will I be discovering then? What will we be eating? I have absolutely no idea, not even the idea of an idea. Now tell me. Could there be anything more exciting than that?

Easy Peasy Rice Pudding

With only 26 days to go, Justin and I are officially in the "use up excess food items" phase of our move. In the last week, this has meant: 2 huge batches of hummus (to use up a giant jar of tahini and a pound of dried chick peas), three bowls of salsa (to get rid of the jalapenos we've had in our freezer since last summer's farm share adventure), and a big batch of rice pudding (to use up, well, rice). Still to go: that bag of frozen tilapia that doesn't really taste right, canned tomatoes and lots of chicken. On second thought, maybe we should throw out that tilapia.

Anyway, my go-to rice pudding recipe is actually from All Recipes, which does, occasionally, get things right. You probably don't want to be pulling any non-Midwest-centric recipes off there (these ladies will find a way to put cream of chicken soup in an enchilada recipe), but for home cooked staples? They know what's up. I like to throw in a few spices at the end, but otherwise I don't make too many changes. It's quick, it's easy, it's creamy and it tastes like childhood. What more can you ask for?

Easy Peasy Rice Pudding (adapted from All Recipes)

3/4 cup uncooked white rice

2 cups whole milk, divided into 1 1/2 cups and 1/2 cup

1/3 cup white sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg, beaten

2/3 cup golden raisins

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cardamom
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1. Bring 1 1/2 cups of water to boil in a medium saucepan, add rice and stir. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, or until rice is cooked.
2. Add 1 1/2 cups of the milk you've set aside, sugar and salt to the saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat 15-20 minutes. The mixture should look thick and creamy.
3. Stir in leftover 1/2 cup of milk, beaten egg and golden raisins. Cook two more minutes, stirring constantly.
4. Remove from heat. Stir in butter, vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg. Or, if you don't like your rice pudding so heavily spiced, don't add those last three things. See what I care!

There's something wonderful and homey and not-at-all summer appropriate about warm rice pudding, but luckily (or unluckily) we've had dreary weather for all of June, so warm desserts are just fine. For the record, though, this recipe tastes great chilled, too. So go ahead, people. Make it. You probably have all of the ingredients in your pantry, and you know you want to.

note from justin!
Dana first made this rice pudding when I had taken swooningly ill with a little flu not long ago. While I was laid up on the couch half-heartedly watching Gladiator and The Matrix (you know, real visceral gettin' better movies) and occasionally retching into a purple bucket, she whipped into the kitchen and came out moments later with a bowl of warm rice pudding that made everything better forever. I cannot get enough of this stuff, it is a gift from God. I would eat it four times a day if I could but, thankfully, never remember it exists at the right time to actually bring home the ingredients. Luckily, Dana has no such mental blockage and trundled home the ingredients yesterday. It's a good life.

Oh, second note: this post is dedicated to Michele whose surprise birthday party we attended last night. Standing in her gorgeous yard, buried amid throngs of her adoring friends and family clamoring for attention, she actually found the time to single us out with a hearty "What, no posts this week?" So, Michele, from both of us, happy 50th, go make yourself some rice pudding!

Focaccia

Since I bought Dana that baking handbook, she's slowly been transferring her obsession with it to me. It's like a parasite, slowly creeping in to lay its eggs in my ear. Pizza, the larvae whispered a week ago, brioche, it's been saying today, focaccia it said earlier this week. This wouldn't be such a problem except that I listen; I can't resist. I am a complete and total sucker for savory baked goods, I acknowledge this and I do not apologize.

The focaccia we made was good but I felt like it didn't rise to its full potential. Some of this is just a technique thing, I'm sure. I don't think I was doing the kneading precisely right, and I added the salt too early, and I might have mixed in a little too much flour in the process but here's the real problem: I made kind of a little fire in our oven when it was baking. Like, a little one. Kind of.

See, here's the thing, we didn't have the right size pan. Ours was short in both directions by a couple of inches. When I realized the problem, early in the recipe, I just shrugged. What could possibly go wrong? When it came time to soak the dough in olive oil (yes, you soak it in half a cup of oil before you bake it, I'll get to that), though, and the oil came pouring up over the sides of the pan onto the counter, what could go wrong became very very clear.

When the oil-soaked dough--on top of which I'd dutifully poured the remaining 1/4 cup of oil against my better judgment--went into the oven on its oily pan, and I went into the office to kill time playing mafia wars on facebook, a funny thing happened: smoke went everywhere. I came out of the office to check on the bread about ten minutes into its baking time to find half the house filling up with acrid whitish haze and not more than fifteen seconds later the smoke detectors in the hallway caught on to the problem as well. So I whipped the nascent bread off its rack (noting, as I did so, that all the lovely oil I'd poured on top a few minutes before had disappeared and a curiously similar puddle of goop was now boiling across the floor of the hot oven). I did the best job mitigating the mess that I could by sopping most of it up with a sponge which promptly and surprisingly melted, but by the time I actually got the smoke to clear, the smoke alarms to quit their irritated bleeping, and the oil to stop emitting that noxious smell like burning paper and pitch, the bread had already been out of the oven for fifteen minutes. This when it had only been in the oven for ten. Afterward, I threw the troublesome little thing back in and estimated as well as possible the remaining bake time.

After some trial and error, the bread that I pulled golden and fragrant from the oven was I think much drier than intended but still incredibly delicious. Here's the recipe, but I strongly suggest against taking my advice on this one.

Focaccia
from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook

7 cups bread flour
3.5 cups warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast
2 Tbsp coarse salt
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Sea Salt for sprinkling (which I found pretty unnecessary given that 2 tablespoons of salt in the dough)

Whisk together flour, yeast, and water, cover with plastic wrap and let rise until tripled (about 2 hours). Add the salt and, using the dough hook attachment of your mixer, mix for 3-5 minutes on low, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl as needed. When the dough begins to climb the sides of the bowl, raise the speed to medium and beat for 15 seconds then transfer to well floured surface for kneading. Fold the dough over onto itself a couple of times and transfer to a floured bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let double again.
I'm going to skip some steps here because you need to just go out and buy this book but suffice to say that after a couple more kneading/resting cycles, you have a dough heavily bubbled and slack. Preheat the oven to 450 and pour 1/2 cup of the olive oil into a 17 by 12 inch rimmed baking pan. Dump the dough ball into the oil and turn to fully coat. Then press it down to fill the pan, letting it rest for a few minutes if it starts to resist. When it has fully filled the pan, press your fingers into it to leave impressions and then pour the remaining oil over the top and, if you're using it, sprinkle with salt.

Pop it in the oven for 25-30 minutes (barring some disaster) and when it comes out it will be thick and crusty and the bottom almost fried from the pools of oil that, if you're lucky, will not have been flung from the bread by oven spring as if bounding from a trampoline.

Even with all the mishaps, it's a bread worth keeping. And today at lunch, finishing the last slice with ripe tomato, a poached egg, and fresh basil, I never would have guessed that anything had gone amiss. So it was a little toothsome, a little more dense than it might have been, it was still another pretty awesome showing from a cookbook that has yet to disappoint.

Good going, Martha.

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti

When I ordered my first scoop of Gianduia ice cream from the Cayuga Lake Creamery, some ancient, golden seal split open inside me and I knew, in that moment, that chocolate and hazelnut were the most perfect flavor combination in the world. I also saw a gigantic, orange-tinged explosion in my mind's eye, and the number 2012 appeared on my ankle, whatever that means. Anyway, the cravings for chocolate and hazelnut haven't stopped since.

So when I found a recipe for chocolate hazelnut biscotti in my new Martha Stewart Baking Handbook, I knew it had to be mine. And oh, how it was coveted, and much easier than I would have thought.

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti
(Adapted from Martha Stewart)

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup Scharffen Berger unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups hazelnuts
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups graunulated sugar
soymilk, for brushing
sugar in the raw, for sprinkling

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a food processor, blend together flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, chocolate chunks and hazelnuts until combined.
2. Using whisk attachment, beat eggs and granulated sugar at medium speed until light and foamy. Replace whisk with paddle attachment, switch to low speed, and add the flour/cocoa mixture a little bit at a time. Do not overmix!
3. Flour your work surface and turn the whole dough onto it. It should be pretty sticky at this point. Separate dough and roll into three logs of equal size. Transfer to baking sheet (I lined mine with a Silpat, but you can use parchment paper, too) and flatten slightly. Brush tops with soymilk (or egg white), then sprinkle with sanding sugar.
4. Bake 20-24 minutes, until firm to the touch. Transfer logs to wire rack and cool for 20 minutes.
5. Transfer logs to cutting board. With a nice serrated bread knife, cut each log into 3/4-inch diagonal slices.
6. Place a wire rack on your baking sheet and arrange slices (cut side down) on the rack. Bake until biscotti are firm and dry, 10-15 minutes. Let biscotti cool completely, store in an airtight container and enjoy a sinfully delicious treat with your coffee in the morning.

I mean, I'm not saying these biscotti are going to help you survive the inevitable apocalypse, but I'm also not saying they won't help you survive it. They certainly can't hurt.

Healthy brunch

Let me be the first to admit it: while Dana and I eat well we don't always eat healthily. It's a mind problem more than a body one. We can cook low fat, low calorie meals, we just don't want to. So much of the American conception of the diet is tied up in the idea that deprivation is holy. This gets perpetuated by The Biggest Loser, by Oprah, by... any number of media outlets obsessed with distancing humans from the seductive pleasure of fat. Food is bad, they tell us, you must disassociate emotion and eating. You must eat only to sustain the body. Food must be no more than fuel: utilitarian and flavorless. Maybe you could trace it back to our puritan roots if you tried hard enough. We're a nation that conflates asceticism with goodness, self denial with spiritual cleanliness. To deny ourselves cream feels good, like tearing off a scab but over a longer period. Maybe it's just a regression of the human relationship to food. Whatever it is, I find it wrong. Permanently (or, at the very least, long term enough for the scale's needle to drop) giving up things that improve your daily life--and I'm not ashamed to say food does this for me--for some ethereal final goal just doesn't make sense to me. So we cook with oil, we make ice cream, we enjoy the full capabilities of flavors. And we don't feel bad about it. Mostly.

But sometimes it's nice to realize that just as the dieting community demonizes full-fat cooking, we tend to demonize diet food. With all of the cardboard microwaveable meals and vegan pizzas out there, it can be easy to forget that a dish can be low in fat and calories and still be delicious. That was what Dana had in mind when she got out of bed Sunday morning with a brunch menu springing fully formed from her mind: An egg white omelette with tomato, fresh chives, cilantro, and jack cheese; lowfat yogurt with fresh raspberries, almonds, and coconut; and a few slices of turkey bacon. Healthy, but still incredibly delicious. The kind of meal in which you aren't forced to process the calorie content, that knowledge can wander off to frolic in the furthest reaches of the mind while your tongue relishes the flavor of fresh herbs or the yogurt's delicate bursts of tart and sweet.

Let this be a lesson to me and my heavy chorizo and eggs ways: there is more than one way to have a good breakfast, and more than one way to eat healthy and still love food.

No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Pie With Raspberries

Life has been a little crazy. Justin and I have mentioned, I think, that we were both laid off recently, and that we're now in the packing stage of our subsequent move from Ithaca, New York to Modesto, California. What we haven't mentioned is that, in our free time, when we're not finishing our books of poetry or cooking or writing for this blog or packing/purging/hocking our wordly possessions, we're also apprenticing at a local pottery studio. So even though we're both without anything you'd call, say, a "job," or something that "makes money" - we're swamped. It's a good way to be, but hard to find time for involved baking schemes.

Which left me in a bind this afternoon, when I wanted to make a nice dessert for a friend's birthday BBQ, but found myself broke and out of the house most of the day. Enter Alex Solla, our pottery mentor and former chef extraordinaire, with his rescue recipe for no bake, dairy-free chocolate pie. We put the dessert together in his kitchen, shoved it in the freezer for a couple hours, and arranged some raspberries on top just prior to departure. It was so easy and delicious that the whole venture seeemed wrong, some sort of sin against kitchen and countrymen. But I guess that's what chocolate is supposed to taste like.

Alex's Vegan Chocolate Pie (With Raspberries)

• 2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips
• 1 block silken tofu
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  
• 1 store-bought chocolate cookie crust
• 2 pints of fresh raspberries
  

1. Melt chocolate over double boiler.
2. When smooth, remove from heat and dump in tofu, vanilla, maple syrup and cinnamon. Liquify with an immersion blender right in the double boiler. Whiirrrrr, bloop, done.
3. Spoon chocolate pudding goodness into store bought cookie crust, then chill for two hours, or until the thing sets.
4. Pull out of freezer, arrange some raspberries on top, and look like a baking hero to your friends and neighbors while nursing a diabolical secret: the whole thing took five minutes to put together. You are the winner, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Maybe collect unemployment, though, because that helps keep you in tofu and chocolate.
I have to say, I'm a meat and dairy loving sort of girl, but this thing was enough to convert me. It was a hit with vegan and omnivore alike. If you need a quick and dirty dessert, this is it. And if you have time this weekend and are in the Trumansburg, New York area, stop by the seconds sale at Cold Springs Pottery Studio and say hello. We'll be there all weekend, and would love to see you.

Guess what! Pizza!

As Dana mentioned offhand in the last post, while she bought me the wicked awesome Ben & Jerry's ice cream book for our anniversary (as well as this cool signed copy of Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America which I'm totally in love with), I bought her a copy of a book she'd been wanting--no no, needing--forever: Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. First of all, it's hardly fair to call it a handbook. Yes, it serves as a guide to lead you by hand through step by step recipes for any baked good you have ever seen or imagined or eaten in a dream while riding a pegasus, but I feel like "handbook" implies that it can fit comfortably in the hand, that it is palm sized, that it is--in some way--heftable. It's not. It's really an absolute tome, dense with glossy photos of immaculate confections of every variety interspersed with recipes so tested and perfected I feel it a sin to veer away. This is not something I usually take well. I can't recall a time when I simply followed a recipe without making at least one change. I am a cook who won't take do this at face value. I will not be hemmed in by puny words, I will overcome them, I will beat the recipe and then I will add some freaking cinnamon. This is why I am not a baker.

But here, these baked goods have been so perfected, so polished to a luster that today, just this once, I made an exception and made no exceptions. Today, I followed a recipe.

The recipe in question was actually yet another pizza dough. Remember how I said my passion for pizza was reignited? Yeah. That.
So here is pizza dough via Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook:

1 cup warm water (110 degrees Fahrenheit)
1/4 teaspoon sugar (or honey, I'm just saying)
1 envelope active dry yeast
14 ounces AP flour (about 2 and 3/4 cups)
1 tsp table salt
1.5 Tbsp olive oil

Combine water, yeast, and sugar in a bowl and let sit until foamy (5 or 10 minutes). In a mixer or food processor, combine salt and flour then add yeast mixture and oil. Mix until tacky dough comes together. For me, the dough was pretty dry at this stage. It came together but shaggily. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until a smooth ball forms. Plop the tiny adorable dough ball into an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled (between 40 minutes and an hour for me). Punch it down and fold back on itself four or five times to reincorporate the air pockets then replace plastic wrap and let rise until doubled again.

The resulting dough ball is enough for two pizzas so turn it out onto a floured surface and split it in half. Stretch each half into a 12 inch circle allowing it to rest a few minutes whenever the dough resists or threatens to tear. Top with sauce and toppings (today, sauce was a can of whole peeled tomatoes, garlic, and some basil. Toppings were zucchini slices, hunks of mozzarella, basil leaves, and olive oil.)

Bake at 450 on a preheated pizza stone until golden brown (12-15 minutes). If you're like me and you can't wait longer than ten minutes and decide you've had it with hovering over the oven just smelling things which are delicious, pull the pizza out, cut it, and start eating, only realizing halfway through your second slice that it wasn't done yet, it's okay. Pop the other slices back onto the pizza stone--which will have retained much of its heat in the handful of seconds it took you to process more than your gollum-like greed for pizza--and toast them all the way up. The pie is best fully browned, the cheese on top blistered, the crust aching to snap and hot enough to sear your hands without leaving permanent scars.

As opposed to the last crust I wrote about, this had a thicker more luscious flavor granted in large part by the addition of the olive oil. Even the color was a bit darker, pushed more toward the bright yellow green of the oil. It has a tight crumb and it's fairly thin (not quite new york style but closer to that than the airy yeasty dough I culled from Eggs on Sunday) and it's really lovely. Don't ask me to pick a favorite because I could agonize for months and never come to a decision. They're both pretty phenomenal crusts to completely different types of pizza.

I'm just ecstatic to have come upon both recipes so close together. It's been a good week. For an unemployed poet, I'm an exceptionally lucky man.

Cornmeal Drop Biscuits & Sausage Gravy

When I moved to Ithaca from California, everyone warned me that the winters would be hard. And yes, they were - I lacked energy, the desire to get out of bed, the ability to stay away from any and all bread products. Okay, that last one is true all the time, but winters were definitely a huge adjustment. The thing no one told me about, though, was the boundless energy I'd get come spring and summer, something that I've been taking full advantage of the last two months.

For example: this morning I got out of bed early, tried my best to not wake Justin, scooped some Gimme Coffee into the coffee maker, opened up the copy of Martha Stewart's Baking Book that J bought me for our anniversary, and picked out a breakfast recipe. It had to be something quick, something I had all of the ingredients for and something that I could pair with our one remaining link of hot Italian sausage from The Piggery. And so it was that my fortuitous gaze landed on a recipe for cornmeal biscuits, and lo! there was music from above, and all the children of the land rejoiced. The biscuits took about 25 minutes to make, from start to finish, and paired appallingly well with the sausage gravy I instructed Justin to make when he woke up. I felt a little bad handing him a wooden spoon and a frying pan while his eyes were still blurry, but it turned out, for Justin, this was an ideal way to start the day.

Cornmeal Drop Biscuits from Martha Stewart

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup fine yellow cornmeal
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 stickunsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
• 1 cup nonfat milk

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl.
3. Cut butter into flour with pastry cutter until the mixture forms coarse crumbs. Drizzle milk over top of dough and fold in with a rubber spatula. Try to get all of the little cornmeal bits off the bottom of the bowl, and be careful not to overmix. The dough will be sticky, but they're drop biscuits, so you're cool. It's supposed to look like that.
4. Using two large spoons, leverage globs of cornmeal dough onto a baking sheet (I line mine with a Silpat) and bake until golden, approximately 15 minutes.

While the biscuits are in the oven, whip up a batch of sausage gravy, or force your poor, sleepy significant other to do it. Justin's recipe below:

Sausage Gravy

2 1/2 tbsp all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups milk
1 link hot italian sausage
a pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

1. Remove sausage from casing and crumble into saute pan. Cook until thoroughly done, approximately 3 minutes.
2. Add flour a little at a time and cook, stirring, until just starting to brown. Add milk all at once. Cook until thickened, stirring constantly.
3. Season with a dash of salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper - or more, if you like.
4. Spoon over warm biscuits and devour.

Hazelnut Kitchen

One of the worst things about moving is that I inevitably find the best restaurants right before I do. It's just one of life's rules: if you know for a fact that you're going to move, you will suddenly, right before you go, meet the coolest people you've met in all your time in that place, discover the best restaurants, learn the names of all the local flowers and feel intense stabs of longing at the thought of leaving. When Justin and I left Berkeley four years ago, we stumbled on a little Indian restaurant only a block from our house - one that we had failed to notice in all of our years there, and that we only got to eat at a handful of times before packing up our lives and fleeing to the east coast for grad school. And so it is, of course, that as we begin the process of packing up our lives here, we discover one of the best restaurants we've ever been to: Hazelnut Kitchen in Trumansburg, NY.

Don't let the location or the entree prices fool you. I grew up in a family that measures quality of food by price of entree, size of wine cellar and proximity to major culinary centers like Los Angeles and Paris. As I've become a cook in my own right (which is, to say, an amateur one that's really way better at baking, anyway), I've come to realize that this is a very poor way of judging a meal. The most important components, to me, are a combination of simplicity and elegance - and, well, ideally a price tag that's kind to my pocketbook. I mean, I'm an unemployed poet. These things matter.

And so it was that Justin and I found ourselves enjoying one of the best meals of our lives at Hazelnut Kitchen this Sunday, our first wedding anniversary. The best way I can think to describe the ambiance of this restaurant is to say that it's like eating a meal inside an Anthropologie store. The waitresses are all 20-something hipster girls in vintage polka dot dresses or high-waisted, vaguely nautical shorts. The place settings are mismatched, but perfect: antique silver tableware, delicate, bright cloth napkins that vary from table to table. Every plate or bowl is slightly different from its mate, but somehow cohesive.

The first thing we were served was a selection of artisan breads with a velvety chive butter. Heaven! Since this was our first wedding anniversary and perhaps the best excuse to splurge that we could think of, we also opted to share a deliciously floral bottle of Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc/Viognier, and both ordered appetizers. I know, we're crazy, right? Perhaps more crazy was my choice of sauteed green curry coconut cream escargot, a dish that seriously only set us back $10 and which proably ruined me on escargot for my whole life (in the good way). Snails, man. De-lish.

For our entrees, we went straight off of the May menu, J choosing the spanish style fish stew with mussels, tuna, baby octopus & shrimp (and also a few potatoes, some cilantro, scallions & grilled bread for mopping up juice). Just look at this monster:

I went with the duck confit, which was served between a bed of sweet beans and a small heaping of greens with mustard vinagerette. Maybe it's a given that duck should be served moist, cooked until the juices are oozing through the meat, but I find that this is not usually the case. So I'll just say this: Jonah McKeough, the chef at Hazelnut Kitchen, is a man who knows how to cook duck. I was a happy girl.

We ended on dessert, of course, so I'll end the post on this little gem: a perfectly-presented vanilla bean pot de creme with caramel sauce, whipped cream and a strawberrry on top. Thank you, everyone, for the anniversary wishes. I hope I always get to eat this well once a year.

Rediscovering Pizza

We were addicted to home baked pizza for a while. I would make a triple batch of doughs about once a week and we would inevitably burn through them in quick succession, three nights of pizza in a row and then four days of recovery before we dared that endeavor again. This went like clockwork for months until, eventually, I made a set of doughs and only used two. Then one. Then I just didn't make a batch for a few weeks. The next time I did, we were unhappy with the result. The dough was somehow both rubbery and shatteringly sharp, dry and bland, thin and dense. Suddenly we were looking at this ubiquitous dish we'd tasted a hundred times as if for the first time and finding it wanting. We thought for a while that we'd erred somewhere along the line. In our quest to make the pizza "healthy" we'd subbed in too much wheat flour, reduced the oil to amounts only measurable in parts per millileter, done something that had suddenly turned this dish we loved into something unpalatable. I think now that this assumption of a new issue with the recipe was wrong. Nothing had changed in the dish irrevocably, we were turning out basically the same pies as we had before. I suspect instead we'd simply matured as cooks past our appreciation for the recipe but couldn't yet grasp the (admittedly kind of disturbing) idea that as our cooking improved the things that were once on the bleeding edge of our skills had now been left behind, that something once difficult was now too simple. Yes, it is an integral part of the human experience, that as we grow we leave things behind, but it's a particularly difficult one to come to terms with. As our skills developed, Dana and I were ready to leave years of these pizzas behind us with no indication that there was homemade pizza in our future at all.

A couple weeks ago, though, the fabulous local food blog (and Eat This House's official hero) Eggs on Sunday ran a pizza post in which Amy narrated her development of a new pizza dough recipe based on Michael Ruhlman's 5:3 (flour to water) ratio. I found myself intrigued by the idea of a fresh start on pizza and, in retrospect, I find that my poety-sense (think spidey-sense but instead of warning me about danger it warns me that I'm not thinking deeply enough about the issue at hand, also it's going off all the time) indicates that perhaps this experience is mappable to a sort of emotional baggage. I carried around the old pizza dough recipe for a long time, continually turning and turning it, tweaking tiny pieces--more oil one week, less honey the next--but never changing the essential components, never thinking my way past the things that made it what it was: a subtle failure. In short, I was in a terrible crippling rut, baking and eating pizzas I was only just this side of satisfied with, and because the flavors were familiar and on mildly satisfying, I just never realized it. After reading Amy's post, and then Ruhlman's, and then following a few other related pizza links, though, I really came to the epiphany I've been laying out this whole post. For the first time in a long time, I was hungry for pizza.I followed Amy's recipe pretty faithfully--only adding in a tiny bit of honey because I find the tinge of sweetness a welcome counterpoint to the tang of tomato sauces--and the dough it turned out was beautiful: spongy and light with a delicate flavor similar to a fresh baguette.


I topped it with a fresh sauce--made from tomato, garlic, a little oil, and some dried basil and oregano(I wish I'd had fresh but you work with what you have)--cheese, some sauteed vidalia onions and sausage. and fresh cilantro. I think it turned out quite well.I've made the recipe a couple more times since then, each time mixing something closer to the 5:3 ratio Ruhlman recommends, and even though this dough is extremely different from the new york style pies I was making before, even if I go somewhere else with pizza from here on out, I know for certain I won't be going back. This is progress. And really, can you ever ask for more than that?