New Year, new pizza

This pizza has to start the day before. By taking the baby bella mushrooms and hot Italian turkey sausage out of the freezer. Look at the internal shapes, like rock formations.

The crust can come out of the freezer the day of.  Misfits organic crust, not my own make, but very good anyway.

So today seemed like a good day, a snowstorm in the offing, to make a pizza.

First cooking the mushrooms in butter and olive oil, until the liquid is almost absorbed and they smell lovely. 

Then removing the mushrooms and putting the chunked up sausage meat to brown in the same pan, so mushroom flavor adds to the hot sausage spice.

I wouldn't call this cooking, so much as assembly. Two views of Mt. Stovetop.

The base is  spritzed olive oil, then basil tomato pesto, which was accidentally packed into my Misfits box recently and is working out well. Maybe it was a sideways form of marketing.

Then a quarter of a fresh beefsteak tomato, and the mushrooms and sausage, I could have made two pizzas with this amount of topping, and Parmesan and cheddar cheese strewn about. I don't like too much cheese on pizza. Just enough to know it's there.

If you want fresh herbs, you have to do it yourself. Here's the pot of curry leaves in the living room, a gift of neighbor Amitha.

And the Thai basil plant in the kitchen. 

I've been growing this from saved seed for several years, since a friend, Lakshmi,  moved away and gave me her plant.

Curry leaves, despite the name, are not spicy. They have a lovely pungent flavor depth, and I replaced bay leaves with them years ago. Indian vegetarian friends use them a lot for flavor. You can freeze them.

Thai basil has a licorice type of flavor. A bit like fennel.  So a few curry leaves and basil leaves torn and tossed on.

And this all worked out nicely. 

One slice was plenty for lunch. 

Three more for future meals.

And now for an afternoon of tea and Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House.

No snow yet. 

Saturday, so pizza

I decline to worry today about any damn thing. Biden's taking the evening off, and I'm taking the whole day. 

Not knowing exactly what to have for lunch today, I thought, ah, I have mushrooms and sausage, in the freezer,  that suggests pizza.  So I made a batch of that yogurt dough I made once before, and set to work.  Skinned and chunked the sausages,  lovely hot chicken ones, mushrooms I'd sliced before I froze them, red onions and garlic cooked till nicely almost brown, tomato ketchup and paste mixed as a diy tomato topping, parmesan cheese grated ready.
 

 Here's the dough, kneaded, enought for two pizzas, resting under plastic while I get on with the toppings

Here's the first pizza dough ready to transfer to the sizzling hot castiron pan. I used all three of them for this adventure, and notice my bench scraper in the background. I got two of them, they came in a set, very cheap, from a catalog, and I have had amazing use out of them.  I feel like a carpenter when I use them, too.

Mushrooms sauteing in butter and olive oil, added Thai basil and a sprinkling of flour to make a sauce, sausage browning in the background, onions and garlic in waiting.

First side cooked, then turned over, toppings added, cover clapped on to let it cook about five minutes till everything's done. The second pizza I did likewise, to the point where the toppings are on, the second side still needs to cook, so it will be a fresh pizza when it comes out of the freezer, better than a warmed up one. I even remembered to leave a note to self reminding me what I'd done.

And a great lunch, after which I lay about like a python for a while.

Then tonight's viewing pleasure Gosford Park, which I've seen at least twice, but there are always more things to notice, and the production is beyond brilliant.

Not to mention that the cast is A-list start to finish. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Colin Firth had a walk-on part as an underfootman in this context..and Jennifer Ehle was understudying the housekeeper's assistant.

So there's where we are chez Boud this freezing cold January night.

Celebration pizza, comfort food pizza

 Yesterday, after a restless night of worrying about the outcome in Georgia, and waking to the good news that the Senate is turned, and two iconic people will be the Democratic senators from Georgia, I thought a nice celebration veggie pizza would fit the bill.

So I made the dough, only this time instead of all wholewheat, I included some pastry flour with the baking soda and yogurt.  This was a good idea, very good crisp dough.  The only thing is that the recipe may have been mistaken in the amount of flour.  It was way too wet, impossible to knead, and I added more and more flour until it made a good dough.  Then I thought maybe resting it would be good, too.

Meanwhile, the new phone rang, while I had my hands in dough, and I let it go to voicemail, then tried to access it.  This is when I decided to rest the dough.  Voicemail would not work.  Would not load, Help function just shrugged and said, we dunno, we only work here, talk to your carrier.  Ah. I realized I had to set up the voicemail from scratch, and Googled on my question, adrenalin a bit charged up, didn't need any further excitement.

And found the code I needed to enter, and I had my password already noted on the old phone, which carried over, to my amazement.  And I got into the voicemail and retrieved the, not very important after all, message. So that was good.

And the pizza was, too.  Seen here as it bubbles up in the pan, first side cooking.

Then you turn it over, and add in the toppings, cover it and cook another few minutes till the cheese melts.  I had mushrooms, which I'd cooked earlier in butter and oil, scallions, broccoli.  The tomato base, since I had no sauce nor makings, was ketchup cut with tomato paste, and worked fine.

 So here's the celebration lunch,which was before the riots and the afternoon of terror started at the Capitol

And since the recipe made enough dough for two small pizzas, there's another one for next time I would like pizza

Which has now become comfort food for today, to digest all that happened yesterday, from heaven to hell in a few hours.  And maybe struggling back again, since the count was done, despite the best efforts at disrupting it, and the constitution prevailed.

I'm hoping for a lot of arrests including investigation of the Capitol police force who clearly aided the rioters in getting into the buildings.  They were part of the plan.

That was the most upsetting part of the whole day to me, that the supposedly closely guarded buildings, where the general public is called out for literally standing too close to something, suddenly it's open house, and armed rioters are invited in to where our entire unarmed government is sitting in conference.

I hope Merritt Garland will bring charges and investigate.  Now that Biden's picks will most probably prevail, we can count on a few more things being taken care of. I hear that the cabinet had a meeting yesterday and the question of the 25th Amendment came up.

For people not familiar, it's the amendment to the constitution which allows for the removal of a President shown not fit to be in office, physically or mentally. It takes some doing, but I hope we do it. Fast.

Artisanal pizza

So I wrote a long post about the pizza caper that happened today, complete with pix, comments, valuable historical insights, priceless bon mots, and after 45 minutes' labor, my tired dothery finger jerked down and hit delete. Which it did. All except the title.

So after some loudly expressed dismay, I remembered my mantra: it's a chance to do it better.

So here we are. I found a recipe using yogurt and flour for pizza dough. They used self raising. The one time I tried it, i found it too salty. So here I used ap and subbed half a tisp salt and baking soda, works fine.

It's delicate dough, wants to stick and tear, so it looks a bit artisanal. And there's enough for two small pizzas, one to cook on top of the stove, one in the oven.

I had the idea with no shopping possible, so here's the cast of characters, some invention required

Once you've mixed and kneaded and rolled and persuaded the dough into the sizzling oiled cast iron, I used some spicy oil left from another recipe, good time for it

Then you flip it once browned, which is no time at all

Add the toppings, clap on a lid, and in a couple more minutes you're done.

 And I have a pizza kit for using the other half of the doings, dough wrapped in plastic bag

And the debris YouTube doesn't want you to know about.. there's also the floury surface I made the pastry on.  For a "quick" meal, this certainly created some cleanup.

I'll report back on the number of stars it gets.