Of food, which is the music of love. Or something.
In a rather half-arsed manner, I have been attempting to take part in Karen‘s ‘Pimp My Menu’ project. I say half-arsed, because so far my part-taking has consisted of thinking ‘oooh, what a good idea’, and making an ill-suited chocolate cake. (Though this is the bit where I throw dirty-yet-mildly-vindicated looks at Turquoise Lisa, who is no better than I am, with her packet curries and her biscuits.)
However.
Here beginneth a new phase. Karen’s idea was not just to try out new things, but also to revisit old favourites passed over in recent times because of laziness/habit/short-term memory loss, and in that spirit, I have been revisiting pizza. Ahh, pizza: champion of sofa-dwellers the world over. Also, I learn, pretty good for small people to poke at (the dough, that is).
Ours goes thusly:
Pizza
Wossinit?
Base:
10 oz self-raising flour (As an aside, does the US have this? All my American recipe books say things like ‘all-purpose flour and baking soda’ or something similar.)
A good slug of olive oil
A fistful of oregano
A fistful of garlic, either chopped and fresh, or dried and powdered
Enough milk (be it goat, cow or soya) to achieve a workable doughy texture (I think mine was about half a pint, from memory.)
Then…
Whack the lot in a bowl and mix it with your sticky little paws. (If they weren’t sticky when you began, they certainly will be very shortly.) Oil a nice greedy-looking tray (ours is about fourteen inches long, and, say, eight or ten wide), and pummel the resulting doughy concoction into submission; the thinner the base, the shorter the cooking time to avoid doughy hell, and the crunchier the results. It is shaming to confess that I now rather like the squareness that our tray results in, and even pass over our round (and specially designed) pizza tray thingy.
When you’ve reached a suitably flattened look, or, rather, when the base is suitably squashed but you live on, courtesy of a glass of red wine, turn your attention to the sauce (and lay off the other sauce, at least temporarily, if you are to avoid burning the aforementioned sticky fists on something warmer than you’d like).
Beg, borrow or steal…
Sauce:
A slug of olive oil
A chopped onion, of the large persuasion
A tube of tomato purée (or a tin of tomatoes, drained and probably de-seeded if you want to be all particular about it)
A stock cube or two
A good wodge of oregano, mixed dried herbs, garlic powder and whatever other herby things suggest themselves
A teaspoon of honey, to take the edge off the acidity
About a half-pint of water, to get the consistency right
Then…
Sling the onions in a pan and fry them for a wee while until they begin to capitulate, before chucking the rest of the stuff in. Stir at will, while prancing around the kitchen to the dulcet tones of Spiro‘s Lightbox (this last bit is optional, I hasten to add). Realise that one’s small girl is dancing too, and laughing at you while she’s doing it. Cook the sauce for about ten minutes or so, to make sure the onion’s not too crunchy.
Spead the sauce on the base, and then chuck on whatever you fancy, really; our favourites seem to be cheese (obviously), red onion slices, courgettes cut into large chunks, sweetcorn, more cheese, and pepperoni, with sunflower seeds sprinkled on the top for added crunch. (Sunflower seeds are my favourite addition to the top of most things; I love love love them on top of hovel pie, a lentil-based version of cottage pie which we ought to eat more often, and which might form the next part of this menu-pimping malarky, come to think of it.)
Although I feel content, generally, with the sort of things we eat, it’s always nice to come across new favourites, so I ask you, lovely readers, what am I missing out on that I should be eating EVERY SINGLE DAY? What can motivate me to lurch out of the rut that we normally inhabit, lovely though that rut might be? There’s nothing like a new recipe to look forward to…
I was in a similar rut of cookinglessness until I came across colouritgreen.wordpress.com who decided to try to cook 52 things she’s not tried before. At first I thought good grief – that’s a lot, until I realised that it is only one new thing a week so decided to do likewise.
It has really spurred me on to try new things. Like your pizza – might be trying myself a pizza this weekend when my youngest comes home from camp – thanks for recipe!
It i pretty common now to find self-rising flour in US markets. When I first brought home UK cookbooks 12 years ago I had a hard time and would have to mix my own, but it seems to have caught on.
And what I do to avoid forgetting all the things we like to have is a simply spreadsheet. It just says the name of the dish and a list of ingredients. I find that is enough to trigger my memory and makes it easy to be sure I have everything. It’s up to 79 things and it helps me to not cook in a rut.
What should you be eating every day? Chocolate, obviously. Keeps the brain healthy.
Oh, pimping menus is such a good idea. I have just confessed my culinary sins to Karen and copied her cabbage recipes and shall now endeavour to improve matters on my kitchen front. Due to sloth, getting home late, miserable weather and hunger I have been eating a LOT of beans and/or cheese on toast. And cake, even more lots of cake.
As to good things you can eat daily – when I am motivated to cook something that takes longer than 3 minutes a simple pasta sauce is always a good standby:
[Use quantities to suit taste and the number of consumers] Gently fry chopped onion and garlic in a suitably sized pan, add tinned tomatoes (blended first if preferred); add assorted herbs and spices (personally I like oregano and a bit of paprika and drown everything in black pepper) plus a dollop of tomato puree and/or wine/worcester sauce/soy sauce or similar; chuck in whatever other vegetables you want – sweetcorn and broccoli; leek and mushroom; whatever is mouldering in the bottom of your fridge or vegetable box and cook till vegetables are done. You can add anything* so it never tastes the same and you cook the pasta at the same time. And it does make you feel virtuous – in fact, I shall do it tonight.
*I confess to having made it with sausage and baked beans once for a particularly fussy brat.
Yogurt!
Warm up some milk. Above 130. Let it cool a bit, below 110. Chuck in some live-culture Yogurt. Let it sit out in a warm place (I swaddle mine in dark dishcloths and leave it in the sun) for a while. 8 hours? 4 over an oven that’s roasting dinner? Whatever. Easy, and it is great for milk that’s threatening to go bad. Chuck in some flavoring at the end if you want it.
1/4 the cost of purchased yogurt.
I like many of the recipes at 101cookbooks.com: tasty, vegetarian (I am mostly and my husband is 100% so that’s my default mode of cooking), fairly healthy, lots of interesting whole grains, flexible with regards to ingredients, and mostly FAST, which is always good for people with small children. And many of the recipes are reasonably child-friendly. My son used to eat anything but became the typical picky toddler at about age 2; he’s recovered somewhat but it’s still hard to get him to eat visible vegetables.
Oh, like jo I keep a simple spreadsheet of everything I try, then look it over when I am uninspired. For inspiration and ideas, I use a free software called Evernote which I love–it easily “clips” recipes and images from web pages, or you can also scan things in and take photos; then you can tag everything and search on tags as well as words contained within the recipe. So if I am looking for something that uses quinoa I can search on that word or on the “grains” tag I have appended to certain recipes. Incredibly handy.
Finally, I love foodblogsearch.com for, well, searching food blogs–again, particularly when I have an ingredient I’d like to use up.
If you come across anything else you enjoy, please post it!
Food! Love food…
Two favorites:
Pasta-a-la-cupboard (i.e. what’s in my cupboard and I can’t be bothered to shop): saute onion and garlic (fresh. both. to taste) chop: sundried tomatoes in oil (sub roasted red peppers if desired), artichoke heats, kalamata olives. Stir in chick peas. Loosen with good slog of chicken broth (until it looks nice and sauce-like – add small splash of dry vermouth if desired) and, in winter or to taste, add goat cheese and stir until melted. Toss with cooked pasta – shaped stuff (aka whatever is left in the cupboard after the last pasta meal!)
Bruschetta – slice baguette into rounds (I do it on the diagonal but whether this is due to actual recipe value, laziness, or artistic merit I have no idea). Mix: spring/green onions (about… 2? 3? well chopped), garlic (about 2 cloves or so dep of taste and chopped ditto), diced fresh tomato, salt and pepper (fresh ground if poss) to taste and a good slug of balsamic vinegar, let rest. Sprinkle baguette rounds with olive oil and put in oven until crisp – top with tomato mix. I know it’s totally obvious, but it’s SO GOOD – oh, and a grating of good cheddar or other sharp cheese is totally worth it. Other variations: hummus, diced roasted red pepper, capers; pesto, curl of Parmesan, Prosciutto. And for decadent dessert – smear of Nutella and half a fresh strawberry (or berry/fruit of your choice). Simple, gorgeous.
Your last blog posting on gardening made me think back on when I first started reading your blog and I remember you writing (as a pre child graduate student living in some kind of cozy-english-cottage-construction-site) that you had loads and loads of eggplants and my absolute favorite thing to do with eggplant is this Smitten Kitchen recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/01/rigatoni-with-eggplant-puree/
You roast eggplant and tomatoes and then process them and plop on top of pasta. Delicious. We call it Eggplant Ragu.
Also, something we call African Kale Pasta. Which is a tomato sauce with the normal onion and garlic in it only you also add in loads of lemon zest, lemon juice and a hot little chili, chopped up. And of course cooked chopped up kale. It’s freakishly comforting. And I mean comforting, inexplicably comforting. Bewildering.
Last night, came in hungry with meeting to go to in half hour. Made some meatballs, fried them while chopping an onion, slapped slosh of oil in pan, onions cooked while I filled kettle and fetched pasta. Added slug of red wine and a haphazardly chopped clove of garlic, then stock cube, then tin of tomatoes to onion. Kettle boiling by then, so put water and salt in pan, added pasta. While that was cooking, prepared and cooked veg and for final 5 minutes added meatballs to sauce. Put Parmesan out for us to grate as we went along. On table 20 minutes after start of cooking.
Food to eat every day – I think I could live on kedgeree, which I’m making tonight. And bean or chickpea salad.
Ooh, and masala omelettes – do you make them? Chop a red onion or shallot and fry, add a chopped tomato and a chopped green chilli. Then add the eggs and some salt. Before you put in the eggs you can put in a bit of ground cumin if you like. Wonderful, and only takes 5 minutes and if you have a cold, put in loads of chilli and your sinuses will clear right out. If anyone doesn’t like chilli, just leave it out and put in a bit of green pepper instead.
Oh, and I made eggs Florentine a while ago and couldn’t think why I did it more often – basically, chop and cook spinach, top with poached eggs, then with flavoursome cheese sauce.
[...] project seems to be taking off! Fluffspangle reports a successful sausage casserole; Earthenwitch made a pizza (I mean, made the whole thing! We make pizzas all the time here at Casa Uborka, but we [...]