pizza

bread flour crust + pizza-shop style sauce + mozzarella and sharp cheddar + pizza-shop style toppings = no leftovers 

Shrimp Scampi Pizza

This evening I wanted to use shrimp and spinach on a pizza, and I wanted to achieve the optimal results for doing so. I also thought it might be fun to try adding honey to my pizza crust. I googled "honey pizza crust" to make sure it was okay to use honey in pizza dough. Food.Com's "The World's Best Bread Machine Pizza Dough Recipe" came up. I noted quickly that the recipe included both honey and sugar. I also included both in my own pizza dough recipe. I thought maybe if I added only honey the yeast might not do right since the yeast usually eats the sugar. Anthony, Shastya, and I went for a walk while the dough was being taken care of in the bread machine. When we returned, I threw together some shrimp, olive oil, lemon juice, black pepper, salt, and onion in a skillet to saute them. I added fresh chopped spinach at the last minute. Then I just did the usual dough, sauce, cheese, topping thing. The flavor of our pizza was reminiscent of shrimp scampi.

pizza & granola bars

I found a new recipe for granola bars: the Kitchn's Hazelnut-Cocoa Granola Bars With Dried Figs. I just about completely changed the recipe to use only items I had on hand in my cabinets. I also tried not to add too many ingredients from the cupboards. I was selective. They turned out great.

PBJ Granola Bars:

3/4 Cups Raw Peanuts

2 Cups Quick Oats

1/2 Cup Dried Cranberries

1/2 Cup Maple Syrup

1/2 Peanut Butter

1/2 Tsp Cinnamon

1/4 Tsp Salt

 

 

 

deep dish pizza

It's spring break for my husband. Tonight I wanted to do something other than rice for something different to kind of have fun. I decided on pizza. Then I thought I'd make my pizza deep dish since I have never done that before, and I have been wanting to. I made my own crust recipe and sauce recipe. Then I googled "chicago style pizza recipe" to check on layering my "Chicago-style" pizza correctly. The first and only recipe I looked at was Food Network's Chicago Style Pizza. Sure enough, it was as I thought, the cheese goes directly on top of the dough. The sauce goes on top of the cheese. The toppings go on top of the sauce.

Anthony and I had some pretty interesting dinner conversation. We both agreed that perhaps an Indian chicken curry pizza would be good sometime, or a cauliflower curry pizza. I was going on about what I should name my deep dish pizza, and something about it being pizza with an identity crisis. It was almost too thick to be a Chicago-style crust, and the pizza had Philly cheese-steak toppings. Then I extrapolated about inventing a new pizza genre, the Clemson-style pizza. It would have to be new and different. Maybe instead of the NY-style (crust, sauce, cheese, toppings) or the Chicago-style (deep dish crust, cheese, sauce, toppings) my future Clemson design could be crust, toppings, sauce, cheese.

Full of ideas, I asked Anthony for our next trip if we could go to Mars. We went to China last year. I've been to Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and Canada. I said maybe we could go for research or something. I was pretty much joking of course. He said that there is a company that is actually working on sending some people to Mars to settle there. Anthony said that it takes 2 1/2 years to fly/shuttle there. He said it would be quicker to go to the moon. It only takes 3-4 days to get there. I said maybe he could do some 3D printing research up on there. I could run a Clemson-style pizza shop on the moon, and everyone would love it because it would be the only pizza shop up there.

Pizza Steaks & Sandwich Cookies

I made pizza and cookies for Valentine's Day. I was out of yeast and tomato sauce. I found a new quick pizza dough recipe that did not use yeast, and made that. I created my own tomato sauce recipe. It turned out lovely.

I found a basic oatmeal cookie recipe, and then changed it up . . . a lot. I was out of brown sugar and vanilla flavoring so I used granulated sugar. I had raisins but I used dried raspberries in place of raisins because I thought they might be nice with the filling I was going to make for the cookies. I love sandwich cookies so I made a papaya icing to go between the oatmeal/sugar raspberry cookies. My sandwich cookies were outstanding in a good way.