Keeping it simple

WHILE WE ARE ALL LOOKING FORWARD to greeting 2021 — and saying goodbye to 2020, I am more in favor than ever of keeping life simple and enjoying what little pleasures we can find in these difficult days.

On New Year’s Eve, I will probably make a small onion pie in honor of my family tradition. I wrote about it here.

But if I decide not to make it, that will be okay too.

I have some pizza dough in the refrigerator and I believe pizza goes very well with a glass of bubbly. Last evening I put some pesto on a small round of dough, with both mozzarella and feta cheese atop. I was too lazy to make a salad so I just topped the pizza with steamed baby greens and a drizzle of olive oil. It was so delicious I just might make it again!

WORTH A SECOND LOOK: “A New Year of Simple Pleasures”

Lemon pizza!!

As soon as I read about this “pizza with a twist,” I knew I had to try it. Lemons on pizza– what a natural for me, two of my favorite foods combined.  But would it really be as good as it looked?

This recipe for “Pizza Sorrentina” (created by a fourth-generation pizzaiola in Naples for her mother Rosaria, who loved lemons) in the Wall Street Journal, gives directions for a homestyle version of the Naples-style crust, using 00 (doppio zero) flour,  a very finely ground flour producing a tender and puffy crust. You bake it in an oven set to 550 degrees (pizza in Naples is baked in wood-fired ovens that reach 950 degrees).

I don’t usually use the 00 flour for pizza, but I happened to have some so I did something that I very rarely do and followed the recipe. I also never buy smoked mozzarella, but this time I did that too. And I soaked thin lemon slices in water for 15 minutes, just like the recipe said.

I have to say, this pizza was just terrific! Soaking the lemon slices meant that the peel was chewable, not hardened, and the sharp clean flavor of the lemons contrasted beautifully with the smoked cheese.

One of the three 8-inch pizzas, along with the salad, was a fine dinner for the two of us. But one very hungry person could probably eat the whole pizza.

Will I make it again? Sure, but I probably won’t follow the recipe to the letter next time. My regular pizza dough is a little different than this recipe, but I like it just as well.  And I might use a different cheese, or another herb besides basil (though the basil is very good). However, I’ll definitely keep the lemons and I’ll definitely soak the lemon slices!

Want to read more about pizza? My press, Reaktion, has Pizza: A Global History as part of its Edible Series. Did you know that pizza wasn’t really an “Italian” food outside of Naples until well after World War II?

November pumpkins, apples and pears

It turned into November here around mid-October, before I even had time to celebrate that wonderful month in this blog (but I have been celebrating the birth of my grandson, Levi, in mid-October!).

Still, even in November, there are the sights and smells and tastes of autumn.

Bread box with squash, Anjou Bakery, Cashmere, Washington

Cool rainy weather inspired me to go back to the old staples. The minestrone soup, the leek-potato soup, the roasted vegetables and baked squash, the mushroom risotto, the slow-rise bread and any-night pizza.

Slow-rise bread with rye, wheat and various seeds

I often keep pizza dough in the fridge so I can make this in a jiffy. Roasted red pepper spread often stands in for pizza sauce.

It’s also still a wonderful time for apples and pears.  At the farmers’ market in Port Townsend, I was thrilled to find Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, a wonderfully flavorful apple that is rarely grown in the U.S.

Cox’s Orange Pippin, apple of choice in the UK

We visited friends in Cashmere, and Maggie and Scott gave us Bosc pears and King David apples (a variety I’d never tasted before — and it is a fantastic apple: crisp and juicy with a delicious tart-sweet flavor).

Bosc pears and King David apples

Four of the pears ripened at once. We ate two of them for dessert last night; then this morning, I peeled and sliced the other two and sauteed them with a touch of sugar and cinnamon, then laid them in a skillet and poured over an egg-y batter to make a Dutch Baby.

Yes, you read that right. It’s a type of pancake that’s cooked in a skillet inside the oven, where it puffs up into a golden wonder, like a giant popover. (The name derived from the German-American immigrants known as Pennsylvania Dutch, “Dutch” being a corruption of the word “Deutsch.” The “baby” part is said to have been coined by a Seattle restaurant in the 40s.)

Dutch Baby with pears

My dad used to make this for a Sunday breakfast or light supper (we always just called it “oven pancake” or “German pancake”).  Not only is it easy to make, but it’s so impressive when it comes out of the oven. Any way you make it –with fruit on the bottom (apples are more traditional) or atop or not at all– it’s a keeper.

Here’s Marion Cunningham’s recipe for Dutch Babies, from The Breakfast Book

• 3 eggs, room temperature
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• Confectioners’ (powdered) sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Butter one 12-inch skillet or four 6-inch small skillets (with ovenproof handles) or pans (you can use small pie pans or cake pans).
2. Break the eggs into a small mixing bowl and beat until thoroughly mixed. Add the milk and blend well.
3. Sift the flour and salt onto a square of waxed paper. Lift the waxed paper up by two corners and let the flour slowly drift into the egg and milk, whisking steadily. Or slowly sift the flour and salt directly into the egg mixture, while whisking to blend and smooth. Add the melted butter and mix briskly so the batter is smooth.
4. Pour the batter into the pan or pans and bake for 15 minutes at 450 degrees. If you are baking small pancakes, they will be done after 15 minutes. If you are baking just one big pancake, reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake another 10 minutes.
5. Sprinkle lemon juice over the pancake (or pancakes) and dust the top(s) with confectioners’ sugar. Serve at once.
   

   It was a little messy and so delicious

It’s (almost) always time for pizza

Passover is coming up, which means…. eight days (at least) without pizza! That’s a long time in this household.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve made my own pizza. When my son Zak was young, he preferred frozen pizza. Good grief. Now, however, he not only appreciates homemade pizza but he makes the best pizza ever! And I’ve learned a lot about pizza from him…..

You can see photos of Zak making pizza in his little kitchen and small oven here.

He’s got a nice pizza peel to take the pizza in and out of the oven, and a baking stone (which you can get in a kitchen shop or a ceramics supply, as he did). These are nice to have, but even if you don’t have them, you can make great pizza.

Zak also can toss the pizza dough around in the air, something I’ve never learned to do (he says it’s because I don’t practice….true). Though tossing pizza dough is great entertainment, it’s also not necessary for great pizza.

Start with the dough. I usually put 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast and a pinch of sugar in a glass with 1/4 cup or so warm water, and let it sit for 15 minutes or so till it’s frothy.  Then I add it to a bowl with a cup to a cup and a half of water, a teaspoon of salt and enough bread flour so it forms a dough. Knead it on a floured board, adding flour until it is not sticky. Put the ball of dough in a bowl that has a little olive oil, and turn the ball so it’s lightly oiled on both sides.

You can make this dough with a tablespoon or two of olive oil as well if you like your pizza dough crunchier. I used to make it that way, but Zak convinced me that it really didn’t need the oil.

You can let the dough rise for a couple hours — or, as I do, just cover the bowl and put it in the fridge.

When you want pizza, take out the dough and let it warm to room temperature. Zak advises to leave the dough a little on the tacky side, but if need be, you can put some flour on your board before you roll it out to the size you want and put it on your pizza pan. I use either a baking stone or a round pan that has holes in it to let the heat of the oven come up from the bottom. I like to sprinkle the pan with polenta-size cornmeal to give the crust more crunch.

Let it rise on the pan for another 20 to 30 minutes, and dimple the dough lightly with your fingers, before adding the topping.

Ah…the topping. You can use your imagination, but I think it’s best kept to a few ingredients. Zak starts with a garlic-olive oil spread; I often use red pepper spread, or tomato sauce or pesto. Then cheese, which could be mozzarella, pecorino or parmesano, goat cheese, feta…..or some combination or variation.  (I like to keep the cheese layer light, and I’ve made a good marinara without any cheese…) Then maybe one or two of the following: kalamata olives, prosciutto, roasted eggplant, artichoke hearts, little chunks of potato, etc., etc.

Or, my favorite: caramelized onions. Lots of them.

Have your oven heated to 450 (or, as Zak says, 550) and put your pizza in. It’ll take 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the size. (but again, Zak says his pizza never takes more than 10 minutes. And I’ve watched pizza makers in Naples, where they use wood burning ovens with very high temperatures — the pizza is baked in only a few minutes).

In any case, you’ll see and smell when it’s done.

This pizza had pesto (thank you, Laurie), prosciutto and caramelized onions

Basil days….

The season for fresh basil is coming to an end, with frost predicted here tonight….

The basil plant is very sensitive to frost

It seems as if I’ve been meeting a lot of people lately who have end-of-basil-season panic.

Some of them intended to make pesto all summer but never got around to it, for lack of time or ingredients.

Others, like me,  did make some pesto, but now have more basil than they can deal with before the first frost hits.

So, I’ve been offering my stress-reducing solution for preserving that fresh basil in a hurry.

Here it is:  Toss handfuls of basil leaves in the blender, add plenty of water and blend it all together in a kind of green slurry. Now fill ice cube trays with the stuff and stick them in your freezer till solid. Then take out the cubes and put them in a zip-lock plastic bag in your freezer.

Basil cubes are not so pretty, but it's not glamor you're after ...

So–what do you do with these things? Just drop one into a soup or sauce whenever you want some of that summery fresh-basil taste.

I like to add basil cubes to minestrone soup--my cold weather staple.

With that little batch of pesto I did manage to pull together, I made a pesto pizza:

If you were ambitious enough to make a lot of pesto, you could freeze some of that too.

There’s a great video here on Chowhound about making pesto the Italian way. I can see I’ve got a lot to learn. Maybe next summer….

Meanwhile, let the basil days linger on....