Combining two good ideas into one.

As you can probably tell, tonight's post is about pizza. Delicious, cheesy, smokey, awesome pizza. I came across this post over at Macheesmo today at work while trying to come up with some ideas for dinner that would resolve the massive cheese craving that I was having. As soon as I saw the Fire/Smoke pizza I knew I was going to make it for dinner. Smoked Gouda? One of my favorite cheeses? On pizza? Um, yes plz!

So after fighting with the Monday night crowd at Kroger in desperate search for chipotles in adobo sauce (god why do I always go to Kroger on Mondays? I HATE Kroger on Mondays!) I came home and immediately went to work. I decided to try the pizza dough recipe from the Bread Lovers Bread Machine cookbook (recipe 2 down!) because I had this funny idea I might actually go to the gym while the dough was working. Yeah, right. The only place I hate more on Monday nights than Kroger is the gym.

Things I liked about this recipe.

1.) The basic marinara. His base recipe for sauce is just fantastic. It's flavorful, light and so damn easy to make. I'll never cook pizza sauce again as this will be my go to standard. Fortunately his recipe makes quite a bit so I've got some saved back for future pizzas!

2.) The cheese. The smoked gouda (and smoked provolone, it was on sale so I grabbed it too) just really added a lot to this pizza.  It's not a cheap pizza thanks to the special cheese, but it is damn tasty.

3.) The simplicity. Roasted red peppers and caramelized onions (I didn't have red onion and I prefer my pizza onions cooked). I'm usually a die hard pepperoni fan, but the spiciness from the chipotles made me not miss them at all. It was just perfect with the peppers and onions.

4.) The dough. I didn't use his dough, but the dough I did make was pretty good. It was light and chewy on the edges but the bottom crust had a nice bite to it. I'll definitely make it again next time I feel like waiting 2 hours for pizza. That was the biggest draw back. I didn't realize the dough setting on my bread machine too so damn long until it was too late.

All in all, this recipe is awesome and I recommend you make it if you're into spiciness and smoked cheeses.

Slacking off and new inspiration

So I've been slacking off on this poor food blog for far too long. It's not that I haven't been cooking. I have been and I've found loads of new recipes and most of them were pretty tasty. I just got lazy about taking photos and updating with reviews. I've got a few meals saved up that I can go back to update and I'll get around to that eventually. Maybe now that it's cold out and we're not doing as much I'll have more free time to do so.

But the subject of today's post is bread. Fluffy, yummy, bready goodness.



Bread.

I received a bread machine for Christmas. I'm excited about this for a number of reasons. 1.) I LOVE bread. 2.) I really, really LOVE bread. 3.) I don't care much for making bread. I don't have the patience for it. This machine makes things so much simpler.

To go along with my fancy new bread machine (and by fancy, I mean it's a fairly basic model) I got The Bread Loves Bread Machine Cookbook. My ultimate goal is to make one loaf a week, mostly referencing this cookbook for recipes.

I did my first loaf last night. I started simple with the Country White Loaf. Just your basic white bread. I had to go to the specialty granola health food store to buy one ingredient (vital wheat gluten) but had everything else on hand. Non fat dry milk, honey, water, bread flour, salt and yeast. Nice and basic. The recipe is very clear and explains each step in very thorough detail. I was kind of a dumbass and forgot to put the kneading blade in before adding my ingredients (duh!) and I only made a 1.5lb loaf and forgot to change the loaf size setting on the machine right away but despite those hiccups this loaf came out great.

I sliced off a couple of pieces while it was nice and warm and ate it with butter. The crust was nice and chewy, the middle soft and fluffy and the taste was much better than what you get with your grocery store white bread. The size of the loaf will take some getting used to. It's a tall loaf so your slices come out fairly large but that just means more yummy bread to eat. The slices also won't fit into my toaster. Kind of annoying but we do have a toaster oven so it's not the end of the world.

So far so good and I'm looking forward to the next loaf. I can't wait to make some really crusty french bread or maybe something with cheese and garlic or herbs in it. The possibilities are endless! This is going to throw a serious monkey wrench into my weight watchers program...

Sundried tomato pasta w/steak and lemon butter asparagus.

 

Tonight for dinner I got a little ambitious. I didn't mean to be so ambitious. When I was wandering around Kroger looking for the ingredients for the Sun Dried Tomato Mac and Cheese I didn't think about the recipe being difficult to make. And it's not really. But it is kind of time consuming and it dirties up a lot of dishes. And I'm never very confident in my cheese sauce capabilities so I'm always super paranoid I'm gonna screw it up, so I don't know why I thought this was going to be super easy and slap dash, but I did.




I think the recipe could've used a bit more sun dried tomatoes (I think I just didn't have enough left in my jar) but otherwise it was pretty good. Very cheesy and not grainy like my mac and cheese usually turns out.

I paired it with some lemon butter steamed asparagus and grilled sirloin steak. All in all, a very tasty meal (and not chicken!).

As a side note, yesterday I made Bacon Pesto Pasta for a side dish to a lunch I was invited to. I added some sun dried tomatoes to that recipe too and OMG it was delicious. I think I like it just a wee bit better than the mac and cheese recipe from tonight, and that's surprising since I'm not much of a pesto fan. Unfortunately I did not get any pictures of it but I plan on making it again so I will be sure to take some next time.


Also, after learning how to make my own szechuan sauce I've gotten hooked on making stir fry. I make it about once a week now and instead of my usual chicken + a shit ton of vegetables I've simplified it with paring it down just to one vegetable and using shrimp instead (to cut back on my chicken intake). I also enjoy having it with vegetable fried right to kick it up a notch from plain steamed white rice.

Food Evolution

As a kid I was a pretty picky eater. The list of foods I did like was probably a lot shorter than the list of foods I didn't like. I didn't like onions, beans, tomatoes, pretty much all vegetables, pears, peaches, strawberries, lemons, limes, berries of any sort, melons (pretty much most fruits except for apples and bananas), peanut butter, meatloaf, turkey, fish and seafood, sushi, salad dressing other than ranch, and the list goes on. It was pretty ridiculous. I didn't eat turkey at Thanksgiving dinner for years.

I've actually grown up a lot as far as food goes. I slowly learned to eat most of the stuff served at Thanksgiving (except for that nasty cranberry sauce). I grew to tolerate more vegetables (squash, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans and many others) and fruits. I'll now happily nosh on strawberries and grapes and I'll even do berries and peaches in cobblers. Once I went to college and moved away from home it's like a switch went off in my brain and I suddenly decided to like food. I saw my friend eat a peanut butter sandwich for a snack once and thought 'hey, I bet that'd be pretty good!' and it was! And so now I eat peanut butter. The strangest thing was the time I woke up one morning with a serious craving for sushi. Sushi was something I had never eaten before in my life and always shunned it as 'bait'. So I tried it and OMG, it was pretty much one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten and now it's one of my favorite foods. I love spicy food now. I'll eat pretty much any sort of ethnic cuisine. I love sushi, mexican, chinese, japanese, indian, ethiopian. I'll pretty much try anything.

My last hurdles of Pickiness have been beans and raw tomatoes (I'll eat them in any form other than sliced raw. I love salsa, spaghetti sauce, and sun dried tomatoes). The whole point of this blog post is that I've overcome one of those hurdles. I think I officially like beans now. I willingly and knowingly made beans and rice for dinner and I ENJOYED it. Sure I've had sweet baked beans as a side, and I've had some refried beans in fajitas. I've had a bite of them here and there and tolerated them but never really sought them out. They weren't the main feature of any dish. Just some minor bit part to play a supporting role to the real stars of dinner. Well not tonight. They were up front and center stage and they were tasty. The bean hurdle has been conquered.

Who knows...maybe one day I'll learn to like raw tomatoes too. Maybe that will be my ultimate adventure in foodland.

Cooking Experiments

I did two cooking experiments today. I stepped out of my comfort zone a few times and was paid off with tasty foodstuffs to fill my belly with.

First up, bacon, egg and toast cups.  I stumbled across the recipe yesterday and thought it looked 1.) cute and 2.) tasty. I figured it'd be an interesting way to mix up the usual bacon, egg and toast breakfast we have on the weekends. It was technically brunch since I didn't get around to making them until around 2:00 this afternoon. I only made two since Kevin was still in bed hung over. He got to have left over chinese food for breakfast instead.



Aren't they cute? I really liked these. It's kind of like a cheap eggs benedict knock off and would probably be even better with some hollandaise sauce.

For dinner tonight I got ambitious and took on two recipes that were fiddly and time consuming. Both from the Budget Bytes blog (I'm telling you, this girl knows her stuff!). I made her vegetable not fried rice and crab and cream cheese won tons. Both recipes turned out great and went really well together. For the fried rice I cheated and used frozen peas and carrots for my veggies plus half of a red pepper that has seen better days that was sitting in the veggie drawer. I really enjoyed the nuttiness of the sesame oil in the rice and the peas and carrots were a nice touch. It wasn't heavy or greasy like the fried rice you get from chinese restaurants.

I made Kevin help with the rice while I focused my attention on the won tons. They were a gigantic pain in the ass to make (the recipe makes a LOT of won tons so you're stuck stuffing them for awhile) but they were really, really delicious. I used imitation crab meat instead of lobster meat. I also pan fried them using a little bit of vegetable oil instead of non stick spray. I'm convinced the non stick spray I have just makes my pans sticky.



I've got left over crab meat and won tons so I might wind up making these again sometime this week. Or perhaps making the won tons up and freezing them for future use. I think they'd probably freeze ok, yeah?

I definitely recommend trying out both of these recipes. They can be doctored up a bit to your preferred tastes or to whatever ingredients you have on hand so they're nice and flexible. I plan making them again.

A meal that isn't chicken!

Look ma! No chicken! I broke out of the chicken rut and tried my hand at some enchiladas from the Budget Bytes blog.



I did take a picture of my enchilada on a plate but it was a decidedly less appetizing photo. Though if you really want to see it, go here.)These enchiladas were pretty good. Not really a replacement for going out to a mexican restaurant (no endless tortilla chips and cheese dip!) and I actually really prefer the shredded chicken enchiladas from those restaurants. But they weren't bad and I don't consider it a failed experiment. They were pretty easy to put together but I don't know how often I'll make this recipe though. It makes a crap ton of food and unfortunately they don't really reheat well. Kevin and I had the leftovers for dinner tonight and the wraps were soggy and kind of mushy (I even did it the slow way and reheated them in the oven). So that's a downer.

To sum up, this recipe was a nice break from chicken (though it probably would've been better if I made it with chicken) but the left overs do not reheat well.

Honey Lime Chicken

It's usually pretty rare that I have all ingredients necessary for any new recipe I want to try. Trying a new recipe usually requires a trip to the grocery store to buy some specialty ingredient that I would never think to have on hand and may never use in another recipe again. Tonight however there was the perfect storm of ingredients and I actually had everything on hand (namely limes and jalapenos) necessary to make this Honey Lime Roast Chicken in this month's issue of Food Network Magazine. Yes, yes, I know, it's more chicken! But this chicken was 98 cents a pound and the recipe looked tasty so there you go.

The only change I made was that I used split chicken breasts instead of half chickens and I didn't have regular thyme so I used my lemon thyme from the herb garden. Not really major changes at all.

The chicken was delicious and came out looking really similar to the picture (as you can see from above).  I served it with rice and roasted broccoli. Kevin declared that it was 'the bomb'.