Pizza night!

We made pizza the other night, when I came back from Costco with two pounds of mozzarella, that was just begging to be shredded and put on pizza. The crust was pretty straightforward, ~1C warm water, ~2tsp yeast, ~2tsp sugar, and then enough flour to make a pretty slack dough. We let it rise maybe half an hour, while we prepped the stuff to go on top of the pizza, and then rolled it out. I like my pizza crusts super thin and crunchy (french style, or something like that), Ed likes his pizza puffy. We ended up using tomato sauce, broccoli rabe, oyster mushrooms, and anchovies as toppings. Pretty good, once it was all together on the pizza.

I also made a calzone with one of my allocated pieces of pizza dough. It was awesome for lunch the next day, warmed up in the toaster oven - the outside got all crispy, the inside got warm, but not so hot that it burns your mouth. Awesomeness.


And of course, more pizza was made last week at the Sierra ski-o, but since Ken sr. only eats spaghetti (as far as I can tell, anyway), I made part of one of my pizzas a spaghetti pizza. It actually wasn't bad.

mmm, spaghetti pizza...

Scromelet

A scromelet is a mix between an omelet and scrambled eggs. Usually, it starts out as an omelet, but turns into scrambled eggs, just because I'm too lazy/impatient to wait for the eggs to do their thing into an omelet. This is one of those easy, one-pot meals, which makes it perfect for breakfast, or dinner, or whatever. Deliciousness is the result.

Start with some veggies. Chop them up, and cook them. In this case, I've got half a sweet potato, half an onion, half a zucchini, one big leaf of swiss chard, and two leaves of kale. I generally start cooking things as I keep chopping everything else. The smaller you chop things, the faster they'll cook, which is your desired outcome.

Cook the vegetables. In a frying pan. With some olive oil. You can cook any vegetables, or meat, or anything you feel like adding.

Crack in some eggs. Two works for me, some people might like more than that.

Scramble the eggs. Try to not scramble in too many veggies, mostly just scramble the eggs.

Once the eggs are somewhat cooked, scramble in more veggies. This is when you would add cheese, if you had any. I admit, the ratio of eggs to veggies might be weighted a little too far towards the veggie side in this case...

Once they're done, I like stirring in some ricotta. Totally unnecessary, but it tastes good. Enjoy breakfast!

Crunchy Seed Braid

Just because I haven't posted anything since Alaska doesn't mean we haven't been eating... or cooking. I just burned out from too much eating PRO on the go. I took home the rest of the white whole wheat flour that we had up there, and figured I should use it up, so went perusing through King Arthur Flour's whole grain recipe section, and wound up making their crunchy seed braid. It was good, although I made a few changes - like adding giant flakes of sea salt to the seed mixture. And I actually think that it might have been better if I put the seeds on the braid after braiding it, because when you put the seeds on first, like the recipe says, you end up with little lines of seeds inside the bread, which means that its a little less coherent. I don't know if thats a good thing or a bad thing, it really depends what you want to do with the bread. I can tell you now, its not so great with jam. More of a butter or soup kind of bread.



I've pasted the recipe below, with my changes.

Crunchy seed braid

1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
3 Tbs vegetable oil
2 tsp instant yeast
2 Tbs sugar
2 cups King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour
1 1/2 cups King Arthur Whole Wheat Flour, white wheat preferred
1/2 cup seeds - flax, black sesame, poppy, sea salt
1/2 cup traditional rolled oats - skipped this as I was out of oatmeal, used more whole wheat flour instead
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup nonfat dry milk

Topping:
1 large egg white beaten with 1 tablespoon cold water
generous 1/2 cup mixed seeds

Mix together the water, oil, sugar, and yeast. Add everything else, knead. It was fairly dry, and very dense. Took lots of kneading. Let it rise for 1-2 hours. It didn't get all that puffy, I think that's ok. After it's risen, punch it down and divide into three equally-sized pieces. Roll these into snakes, the longer the better, about 2 feet each. Coat each log with some beaten egg white and roll it in seeds, then let them sit for 15 minutes. You want pretty good coverage with the seeds.

Pinch together the ends of the logs, and braid them. Then fold under the ends. Pour the rest of the seeds over the top. Cover the braid, and let it rise another hour.

Preheat the oven to 425F. Transfer the braid to the oven when its preheated, and after 15 minutes, cover it with foil so that it doesn't burn, reduce the temperature to 350, and cook another 10-15 minutes. It should be golden-crusted and the seeds should be all crunchy and delicious.

Spicy roasted almonds

We were watching a Good Eats show, and Alton Brown made a batch of roasted ginger almonds. They looked pretty good, so we thought we'd give them a try, having just gotten back from Costco and now armed with 10lbs of almonds.



Well, they weren't quite what I hoped. Tasted too much like soy, and not enough like Worcestershire sauce. Or something like that. Luckily, I really like the texture of roasted almonds, so they'll get eaten anyway. Next time, I'll add some honey, or at least sugar or something. It was worth an experiment. Actually, next time might just be chex mix with almonds in it...