Raw pizza

You might be saying to yourself, "raw pizza..gross," as images of soggy dough covered by cold sauce and topped with shredded uncooked mozarrella cheese float through your head. But no, this recipe wasn't invented to perpetuate the chipmunk-inspired "raw food" fad. Ovens and elevated cooking temperatures are actually required. In fact, I am calling this a "raw" pizza only because the recipe doesn't ask you to bake the pizza with the various toppings and cheese on top. Instead, you bake your crust, load it up with soft cheese(s), veggies, and herbs and wha-la! You eat it as is. No further baking required. I am a fan of this idea because of the resultant food textures. You have (in theory, at least) a crisp dough and crust, topped with a subtle and soft cheese, and then with herbs and flavorful and crunchy greens and veggies. Yum.

It is perhaps unfortunate that today I had one of those strange moments of ill-conceived inspiration during which I said to myself something along the lines of the following: "Hmm I have a great idea. How about I substitute a different ingredient for everything that is actually listed in the original recipe and hope for the best?" Well I wouldn't exactly call my product the best, but it was good and more than anything else I'd say that my raw pizza pointed to the potential awesomeness that might result if one actually, say, followed the instructions that the recipe provides.

By this point I know that you are gripping your seat and wondering what on earth i did to change around this recipe. Well, please, allow me tell you. Firstly, I changed the flour. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of all purpose flour. Instead, I mixed together 0.5 cup buckwheat flour, 0.5 cup pastry flour, and 0.5 cup whole wheat flour. Secondly, the recipe calls for 0.25 cup butter. In my attempts to cook a bit more on the healthy side (and despite my proclaimed love for butter that we discussed previously) I substituted 1/4 cup of olive oil for the butter. Third, the recipe calls for rolling sesame seeds into the dough before it is baked. I simply skipped this step completely. Finally, I completely changed the vegetable topping, sauteing spinach and onion with olive oil and lemon juice and spreading on top of ricotta and goat cheeses instead of layering thin slices of zucchini.

I do think that this recipe has a lot of flexibility to adjust, alter and substitute. While I was happy with the flavor of the dough I was disappointed that it was not more crisp. Perhaps next time I will have to return to my use of butter. All in all though I was pleased with this recipe and I definitely plan to revisit it in the future.

In any case the original can be found here, on the Chocolate and Zucchini site.

Home-made energy bars

I have to rank this as one of the best recipe discoveries that we have made-ever. Really. Truly. No joke. Let me begin to list the ways that this recipe is amazing: 1.) it's relatively easy to throw together, 2.) it's simple and 3.) flexible, 4.) the bars are healthy, and 5.) they actually taste good! This recipe is a delight, too, because the bars actually stay together, unlike the product from many of the other granola bar recipes that I have tried. These fruit and nut bars serve as a great alternative to the store-bought granola or power bar.

There are many ways that one could adjust this recipe: add some extra spices, use alternative sweeteners to maple syrup, add in some butter for added flavor (see on love and butter for more on this subject), add in cocoa powder and/or chocolate chips, use almond or peanut butter instead of the nuts...the possibilities are endless.

Really I speak from personal experience. When I baked these, I depended on what I had in my kitchen at the time. I didn't have almonds but I had almond butter,. I didn't have raisins but I did have cranberries. I didn't have apricots but I did have prunes and figs. And so on. I was very happy with the result despite all of these changes and I am just so pleased to have this recipe in my life.

Here the original recipe, by Elie Krieger, can be found here:

Energy Bars

On love and butter

Food thoughts by an insomniac

I'm having one of those toss in the bed unable to sleep nights. Sometimes on such nights, a little uninhibited knoshing does the trick and makes me sufficiently sleepy. I open the refrigerator and take little bits of cheese, spoonfuls of yogurt, and slowly shovel these into my mouth. I open boxes of cereal and often without even bothering to put the content into a bowl, munch away on the dry grains. After a few minutes my tummy feels full and I happily return to bed. Sometimes I leave behind crumbs and open cereal boxes, which serve as evidence of my late-night kitchen escapades. Other times I wipe the kitchen clean and it's as if nothing ever happened. Never mind that there's hardly any cereal left for the morning. It's all worth it and tastes much better at midnight anyways.

In any case, I've wasted too much time already. I'm off to the kitchen.

First apple pie of the season! and Joyce Maynard

I hadn't made a pie in ages but got a sudden urge on Friday evening after a long and tiring week. And so I ran to the grocery store and bought a pound of apples before my pie baking energy escaped.

In addition to being inspired to bake by the crispness of fall and my need to do something that doesn't involve staring at a computer screen, I had recently stumbled upon Joyce Maynard's website, where I discovered an entry on pie making. Apparently, Joyce Maynard is not only a writer and story teller, but also a pie maker. She teaches her late mother's pie making style and boasts, "I'm guessing the number of my pie students has probably reached the quadruple digits now, and I'm not about to stop. I have been known to travel with a rolling pin." I love Joyce Maynard's pie making spirit, the fact that her teaching of the craft serves a sort of homage to her mother, and that she uses the process of pie making as a metaphor for life. (For example, in her pie making video, Joyce Maynard says that she cuts that apples into uneven pieces since this is the way life is; uneven and unpredictable.)

Apparently, in her recently published book, Labor Day, one of the main characters teachers another to make a pie:

" We were his ticket across state lines. That was the story. I’d watched enough episodes of Magnum P.I.. to get it. Only then Frank turned around to face us, and he was holding a knife.These peaches, he said, looking even more serious than before. If we don’t put them to use soon, they’re goners. What did you have in mind? my mother said. There was a sound to her voice I could not remember ever hearing. She was laughing, not the way a person does if you tell them a joke, but more how it is when they’re just in a good mood and feeling happy. I’m going to make us a peach pie, like my grandmother did it, he said. First thing, he needed a couple of bowls. One to make the crust. One for the filling. Frank peeled the peaches. I cut them up. Filling is easy, Frank said. What I want to talk about is crust.You could tell, the way he reached for his bowl, that this man had made more than a few pies in his life."

The passage continues and provides detailed instructions for making a pie crust. The recipe calls for 3 cups of flour (for a double crust pie), 1 stick of butter, about an equivalent amount of shortening, salt and sugar.

After reading this I was inspired to try Joyce's recipe for pie crust making myself. While I have experimented with using butter, and shortening, separately in pie crusts, I hadn't ever before tried to use both in roughly equivalent amounts.

All in all I was pleased with the pie that I made. However, I had some trouble rolling out the dough. My theory is that this problem results from the fact that I took the oft-cited rule of pie crust making that one should never add too much water to an extreme. As a result, the raw pie crust dough was dry and therefore crumbly and difficult to roll. When baked the pie crust was tasty but remained a bit soggy. After this experiment using shortening + butter I decided that I prefer an all-butter crust, to a butter/shortening one, because of the far superior flavor that the butter provides. The apple filling that I made was quite delicious and consisted of ~ 1 pound of apples, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, sugar, lemon juice, rum, and corn starch.

After this pie making experience I was left with renewed energy for pie making, and with ideas for future pies. Stay tuned for more!

Olla Podrida

This perfect fall recipe was inspired by a dish that I had during my trip last December to the northern coast of Spain. As you can imagine, we tried many delicious foods while there (god, the food of Spain is just amazing!), but one dish, in particular, a bean and sausage stew that we had in the town of Burgos, was especially memorable. In fact, I've wanted to recreate that meal ever since our trip but it's only now, 9 or so months later, that I mustered up the energy and confidence to try.



After a quick internet search I decided that the dish that I remembered is something that's known as Olla Podrida. The so-called "authentic" recipe calls for blood sausage, which is really hard to come by here in the States. For my stew, I ended up using an Italian Sausage that we bought from a local farmer here in Carrboro--the use of this type of meat in the context of this stew is probably completely atypical and some might even skoff and roll their eyes at the thought of my having done such a thing. But my excuse is that this was meat that I trusted and that I could find relatively easily. So there.



Truth be told I ended up tweaking the recipe a lot--so much so that I don't know that
it's even appropriate that I titled this post "Olla Podrida." Nevertheless the outcome was really tasty. It made our apartment smell amazing and G. already bought the ingredients so that I can make the stew again!! And yes, it was so good that I wanted to record the recipe on this blog, before I forget what I did. And so here goes. This is a really flexible, loosey-goosey recipe (at least in my humble opinion), so enjoy and don't follow the instructions too closely!


Olla Podrida--North Carolina version

1 pound of Italian Sausage
1 pound of dried white beans, such as Great Northern Beans
1 onion, coarsely chopped
5 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons paprika
pinch of saffron
1 can of tomato paste
salt to taste
2-3 bay leaves
4 tablespoons of olive oil
red wine for cooking

1. First, cook the beans, in water and with the bay leaves. I did this in our slow cooker, but use whatever method suits you. I recommend taking them off the stove/out of the slow cooker when the beans remain al dente. This way you can simmer them with the other ingredients and make sure that the beans don't fall apart.

2.When the beans are nearly finished cooking, saute in a dutch oven or large sauce pan the sausage in 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat until it is browned and fragrant.

3. Add the onions to the sausage and saute for a 1-2 minutes.

4. Add the garlic and saute with the onion and sausage for a minute.

5. Add the beans, about a cup and a half of the water that they cooked in, the spices, tomato paste, and a nice chug of red wine to the sauce pan. Add salt to taste. Give this a nice mix.

6. Now allow the ingredients to simmer on medium low to medium heat for about an hour or so (or longer, if you have the time).

Serve with crusty bread and a glass of red wine.

Welcoming fall

Well hello there, long time no see. My last post was ages ago, in February. Since that time we survived a long, cold winter (especially for North Carolina) and an equally brutal summer. And already it is time to celebrate the arrival of fall. I always become nostalgic during this time. The smells of the season, the falling leaves, they make me sentimental and ever so aware of the cycles of life. The colors and the smells that appear during this time make these things tolerable and beautiful and so any sadness is engulfed by beauty and hope.

But enough of the sentimentality. Fall is also a great time to begin to think about food and cooking again. Because it's now that the days become shorter, the temperatures begin to drop in the evenings, and I want nothing more than to smell spicy warm bubbles emanating from my kitchen. And it is with these thoughts that I resolve to cook more this season and to post more! Because I realized that this blog is a wonderful way for me to catalog the flavors and events of the seasons. Well I guess I missed most of the winter and all of the summer of 2010. Hopefully I will manage to preserve some of fall 2010. And with that I leave you with some food images from these past few months. Until next time!