From the garden

Okay, my garden happens to be under two feet of snow and ice at the moment, but there's someone out there supplying the world with veggies right now, and thank goodness! Because I'm in the mood for a little vegetarian extravaganza right now.

There are two problems with a veggie pizza most of the time, but those problems have the same root. A lack of imagination.

Problem #1? Often, a veggie pie just isn't very good. Usually, it consists of the four basic vegetables in any pizza joint: mushrooms, onions, peppers and olives. There's nothing wrong with those vegetables at all, but are they fresh? Frankly, I believe canned mushrooms on a pizza should be a hanging offense. Black olives must be canned, but they also can't be old. And the onions and peppers are also a conundrum. Raw, and the pie can cook before they do, giving an unpleasantly jarring difference when eaten. Cooked, or more to the point, overcooked, and you've got a wet, limp mess.

Problem #2? Mushrooms, onions, peppers and olives may be the four things on a pizza menu, outside of anchovies, that are hardest to convince a kid that can't even be helped by melted mozzarella. And all the reasons in Problem #1 are exactly why.

There is also an intrinsic complication to a vegetable pizza, should you break outside that mold and embrace new and interesting plant life. When you cook a vegetable, it releases water. The only thing worse than water on dough is water on bread. Sog sog sog.

So what do you do? Give up the idea? Abandon vegetables entirely? Let the kids win? Don't be silly.

Roasting your veggies solves all your problems at once. A drizzle of oil and seasoning, a trip through the oven, and you've got tender, sweet bites of vegetables your kids love, maybe one or two new ones to try, plus you've tamed the liquid inside, preventing a pie that needs a life preserver.

"Where's the Meat?" Pizza

1 pizza crust

2 c. mixed fresh vegetables (Use your imagination. There is a world of vegetables that work just fine on pizza outside of the your standard peppers, onions and mushrooms. Tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, snow peas, even fresh green beans all work beautifully.)

3 T. olive oil

Salt and pepper

1/2 c. tomato sauce

1 c. shredded mozzarella (This is also a good place to use the fresh stuff, but only if the kids are going to appreciate it. While pushing veggies that might be a stumbling block, you might want to stick with the cheese that won't be a struggle.)

¼ c. grated parmesan

1 T. parsley, chopped

1 T. fresh basil, chopped (or 1 t. dried basil)

1 T. olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Clean and cut vegetables into bite-sized pieces. What veggies are you using? Harder varieties like carrots should either be in very small pieces, like the pre-cut, pre-washed matchsticks for salads. Cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus, green beans, etc., don't need tons of cooking, so they can be left slightly larger, but it's nice to have all your veggies in a uniform size. Also, don't forget to take into consideration how much your kids like a vegetable cooked. My son, for example, likes his broccoli raw or cooked to death, nothing in between. Oh, and if you are using fresh tomatoes, make sure you seed them to keep your pie from getting soggy.

Toss the veggies with 3 T. oil and salt and pepper. You can experiment with more seasoning if you like and your kids will tolerate it. I like dill, garlic and rosemary. Spread on a sheet pan (make sure this pan has sides or the oil could cause problems) and roast in oven. This is the part I can't give you numbers for. Depending on the veggies you pick and how cooked you like them, this part could be 10-15 minutes or more than 25-30. Check them regularly, and remember they will get more cooking time on the pizza, so don't let them brown too much.

Spread sauce on crust. Start with half, adding more if necessary, or saving some to serve with the pizza. Top with vegetables. You can either arrange one variety at a time, or toss them together and scatter them evenly. Add the cheeses and finish with herbs. Drizzle crust with olive oil.

Bake about 15-20 minutes, or until cheese is melted and golden and crust nicely cooked.

EXTRA EXTRA!!!

Deadly Dinner – For hundreds of years after being discovered in the New World, Europeans and American settlers believed the tomato was poisonous. Not only was it closely related to the deadly nightshade plant, but the highly acidic tomatoes actually did kill wealthy diners who ate off pewter plates. (The acid caused lead to leach out of the plates. It was really the lead that did people in.) The tomato’s reputation was saved by Colonel Robert Gibbons Johnson, who munched a ripe, red fruit publicly in Salem, N.J., and lived to tell the tale. (Source: Encyclopedia Brittanica)

Going for a dip

January is a time for Crock-pots. And nostalgia. Here, we bring you both.

When I was little, we always had roast beef on Tuesdays (yes, today IS Tuesday, isn't it?) because I had Brownies after school, and Mom had been tricked into being Scout Leader. Throwing a roast in the Crock-pot made sure we had dinner ready when we got home. That was great. I loved my mom's pot roast, with those beefy potatoes and carrots that soaked up all that lovely broth all day. But the best part wasn't until Saturday.

That was when we had leftovers, yummy hot roast beef sandwiches dripping gravy. I still feel all gooey inside when I see them on a diner menu, but it wasn't long before I discovered something just as good in a different way. The French Dip. All the steamy heat of the sliced meat, piled on crusty bread instead of sliced white, with your own little cup of broth to dip in.

Sorry...I have to wipe off my keyboard. I'm drooling.

This would be a time where making a pizza doesn't just make a cute presentation and a convenient dinner your kids will eat without protest. I mean, sure, it does all that. But it also lets you create a hybrid between the comfort food of your childhood and the sophistication of what you've found since you grew up.

Oh, and the best part? With deli roast beef, you don't have to wait for leftovers.

Hot French Beef Pizza

1 pre-baked pizza crust

1 T. butter

1 large onion, sliced thin

Salt and pepper to taste

¼ c. beef stock or apple cider

1 t. sugar

1 pound thin-sliced deli roast beef

1 ½ c. beef gravy (homemade or bottled...I use homemade but I'm not a snob. Better to use a jar than miss out on a great pizza. But give your grocery store deli a check. Wegmans has great prepared sauces, including a lovely beef gravy, with its ready-to-go foods.)

½ pound provolone cheese, sliced

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place pizza crust on baking sheet.

Melt butter in skillet. Sauté onion over medium heat until translucent. Add salt and pepper to taste, beef stock (or cider) and sugar and reduce heat. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until mixture is reduced and onions fully cooked.

Slice roast beef into ribbons and place in a bowl. Pour ½ c. gravy over beef and toss. Spread over pizza crust. Arrange cheese slices over beef, and top with onions. Bake 15-20 minutes, until beef is hot and cheese is melted. Heat remaining gravy and serve drizzled over each slice.


EXTRA EXTRA!!!

The Best in Beef – While shopping for steaks and roasts, many people look for the most lean meat, with very little white fat, but they might wonder why restaurant steaks taste so much better. It’s all about the fat. The very best grade of beef is Prime, a quality sold almost exclusively to restaurants. It is well-marbled with the fat, giving the meat a tender quality and rich flavor throughout. Choice and Select grades available at grocery stores have less marbling. The most expensive beef in the world, Kobe beef, has the most marbling, and it should. The pampered Wagyu cattle are fed beer every day, massaged, and brushed with Japanese sake! (Source: Giant Eagle, Inc.)

Pickin' on shrimp

For our Dinnertime Tuesday, I'm taking you all to my house on Christmas Eve.

Our dinner is a quilt of my husband's traditional Italian fish extravaganza, and the ironically Italian food my German family has made for Christams Eve for years and years.

For my husband, Christmas isn't Christmas without a table groaning under the weight of an ocean of fish. From fried chunks of succulent baccala to curly magenta tentacles of calamari, from salty anchovies to silvery smelt, there isn't a water-breathing beast safe while my husband is around. Especially juicy pink shrimp, which he pines to slather in a cocktail sauce so laden with horseradish it burns behind your eyes and makes you breathe so deeply you can feel the oxygen molecules in your blood.

At my house, Christmas Eve was usually lasagna or stuffed shells. Something more special than spaghetti, but easy to throw together hours beforehand and toss in the oven, forgetting about it until starving people gathered around the table. Then with a couple of quick steps, bubbling cheesy noodles are there like magic to satisfy the masses.

On Thursday, people will be gathered around my dining room table shoveling both traditions into their mouths as fast as they can. But in this post, you get the best of both in one lovely quick-to-make, easy-to-please pie.

Shrimp Scampi and pizza. Italian as the Mona Lisa, and great complements to each other. Shrimp, butter, garlic. What’s not to like? How about the expense? Instead of serving lots of pricey jumbo shrimp as a main dish, or using tiny, water-logged salad shrimp, stretch your shellfish budget by using good quality, middle-sized shrimp. Serving them on a crispy but filling crust means you can get away with fewer shrimp per serving, but everyone can have a real treat.

Buono Natale!

Shrimp Scampi Pizza

1 pizza crust

1 T. butter

1 T. olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 small sweet onion, chopped fine

1 lemon (zest and juice)

1 pound shrimp, peeled and de-veined (I use the 31-40 shrimp, meaning there are that many to a pound. If I can find bigger shrimp for a good price, I use that, but this isn't a place where you need the biggest you can find. It's also an easy recipe to cut down if you find good quality frozen shrimp in a 10-ounce bag. No one will really notice a few missing shrimp.)

½ c. white wine (No wine? Cheat. Use apple juice. It won’t be as dry, but it will still be darn good.)

Salt and pepper to taste

½ c. parmesan cheese

Fresh parsley

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place pizza crust on baking sheet.

In a large skillet, melt butter in olive oil over medium heat. Add garlic and onion. Add lemon zest, juice, shrimp, wine, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring often, until shrimp is pink and firm, about 3-5 minutes. Spread on pizza crust. Top with parmesan cheese and parsley. Bake 8-10 minutes, just until cheese is melted. Overcooking will make shrimp tough.


Extra! Extra!!!

Statistical Slices – Americans are eating twice as much shrimp today as they did in the 1980s, more than a billion pounds a year. The only seafood more popular is tuna. (Source: Earth Summit Watch)

Bigger than a bread box?

Not everyone who wants fresh homemade pizza wants to deal with mixing and kneading with her own two hands. Frankly, just thinking about the sticky, gooey feeling of a yeasty dough on my hands, where it dries into a tight, plastery mess makes me frantic to wash my hands.

But I love to make fresh bread. Oh, the quandry.

And that is why I love my brother. In a Christmas related tangent, several years ago, he bought me one of my favorite kitchen tools. My bread machine. (Insert delighted sigh here.)

My bread machine lets me make fresh bread on an almost daily basis. Everything from crusty Italian for my husband to "school made" rolls for my siblings to my updated version of my grandma's traditional Swiss pear bread, bitterbrot. And it doesn't require anything more than throwing things in the pan and pushing three buttons. No mixing. No kneading. Absolutely no icky hands.

Now...should I want to make rolls, or sticky buns, or...oh, I don't know...pizza? Then I have to get up close and personal with the dough, but by that point, it's an elastic, springy mass, perfectly pliable and non-gooey.

Making pizza dough in the bread machine doesn't just mean less mess. It can mean more flavor. Even a simple cheese pizza can get an influx of flavor by adding great ingredients to the bread dough itself rather than putting on toppings. And picky eaters might be more likely to try olives in the crust than seeing black polka dots on top of their cheese.

1 c. warm water

¼ c. milk

1 T. sugar

1 t. salt

1 T. oil

3 c. bread machine flour

2 t. bread machine yeast

Layer ingredients in bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Place on dough setting and let the machine work its magic. In about an hour or so, depending on model, you’ll have all the benefits of homemade dough without the work or sticky hands.

Variations are even easier in a bread machine since most models have a built in beeper that tells you when to throw in extras. You can try the ones here, or go for something different. There are things I will attempt with a bread machine that I never do by hand.

Variations:

Olive Pizza Dough - Add ¼ c. sliced black olives to dough when your machine permits, or during the second kneading.

Red Pepper Dough - Add 2 T. coarsely chopped roasted red pepper.

Spicy Pizza Dough - Add 2 T. crushed red pepper flakes, ¼ tsp. cayenne pepper and 2 T. grated parmesan cheese.

Pepper Jack Dough - Add ¾ c. shredded pepper jack cheese.

Extra Extra!!!

The Best Thing Since What? – What’s the big deal about sliced bread? Well, until the 1928, nobody ever saw a whole loaf of sliced bread. Bread, if you didn’t bake it yourself, came to you from the bakery in one whole unsliced loaf. Otto Frederick Rohwedder initially built a machine in 1912 that sliced bread, but no one was interested because of fear the slices would quickly become stale. Sixteen years later, his upgraded model that both sliced and wrapped the loaves was first used in a Missouri bakery. No one is quite sure when “the best thing since sliced bread” was first uttered.

Grandma's Old Red Devil

Welcome to Saturday, the first in The Pizza Principle's "Special Request" series.

I got a lot of great feedback after yesterday's post on the day-by-day reformatting of the blog. So thanks so much for that.

The girls at the NestBump (Hi, Nesties! Hi, Bumpies!) have asked to see some of my non-pizza recipes. With Joseph's birthday (The Big 2) coming up next weekend, I mentioned the chocolate cake he'll be having for his special birthday dinner, and it's going to be our first "request."

My grandma made this cake ALL the time when I was a kid. And when my dad was a kid. And probably when she was a kid. It's a really old recipe, and as far as I'm concerned, it's absolutely perfect.

Grandma's Red Devil's Food is plain and simple, a moist, chocolaty cake that isn't too rich or too heavy, and is utterly perfect with a simple white icing. Grandma usually made hers with melted New York vanilla ice cream instead of butter and milk, just thickening it to a spreading consistency with powdered sugar. Absolutely divine.


Grandma's Red Devil's Food Cake

1/2 c. cocoa
1/2 c. boiling water
1 c. butter
2 c. sugar
1 T. vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/2 c. flour
1 1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1 c. sour milk (I've also used sour cream. It's good, but a little richer. Not a bad thing, but not Grandma's. If you don't have sour milk, add a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk.)

Just mix together, a step at a time. The batter will be a little thinner than your typical box of Betty Crocker. That's okay. Butter a 9x13 cake pan, pour it in, bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, until the center is springy.

Frost how you like. I've had it with Grandma's frosting, cream cheese frosting, 7- minute frosting, canned Pillsbury frosting...there's really no bad way to go. But give Grandma's ice cream icing a shot. It really is worth it. (And flexible. Whatever you've got in the freezer will be fine.)

A little structure, please!

Something I've noticed about the bloggers I'm reading is that they've developed a kind of set program for their posting.
My good friend Jenni at The Foster Family (http://nbjenni.blogspot.com/) has her Wish List Wednesdays. (Hi, Jenni!)
Emily at http://under1000permonth.blogspot.com/ has a whole slate of plans for her blog, including FAQ Fridays, where she answers questions about her often controversial lifestyle, and Can You Make Money Blogging, in which she takes you on a tour of how blogging affects her bottom line.
Jen at Cake Wrecks (http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/), one of my absolute favorite blogs, does Sunday Sweets, spotlighting the best instead of the normal "holy crap, what is that?" cakes that make me giggle. She also has a set schedule for her postings, which appear like clockwork every morning. Emily, and others I read, have this kind of commitment as well. I admire that.
And so, this somewhat laissez-faire freelance writer is biting the bullet of structure.
I'm sure my editors (past and present) could confirm that I am a person who absolutely NEEDS a deadline. If I am told I have to submit something by 4 p.m., you will have it at 3:45 p.m. If you tell me to get it to you when it's ready, you may grow old and die waiting for it to show up.
And therefore...a schedule.
From this point on, The Pizza Principle will have a program schedule. Like Fox. Except hopefully with fewer cancellations. (Damn you for your treatment of Joss Whedon and "Dollhouse!" Damn you!!!)
My plan:

• Back-to-Basics Mondays - either building blocks, like crust or sauce recipes, or simple classic pizzeria classics, like pepperoni rolls.
• Dinnertime Tuesdays - taking favorites off your dinner menu and translating them to pizza form.
• Cold Fusion Wednesdays - the very best in salads and sandwiches, with a twist.
• Brunchtastic Thursdays - because there is more to pizza for breakfast than a fratboy fumbling in an old Domino's box under his bed.
• Something Sweet Fridays - more than just the cinnamon sugar breadsticks every pizza chain slaps on at the end of the meal.
• Special Request Saturday - Ask and ye shall receive!

So...what do you think? Give me some feedback, people. I need a topic for tomorrow morning!

Hashing it out

Corned beef hash is great any time of day.

It’s a tasty lunch, a satisfying dinner, even a welcome late night diner munchie after an evening out with friends. (The stories I could tell you about 2 a.m. runs to Denny's...)

But there’s no time like breakfast for hash, particularly when you’ve got a big day that requires some serious carbing up.

And yet, unless you follow "hash" with "browns," a kid can look at you like you are speaking Cantonese when you talk about corned beef. What is that? Beef covered with corn? Is it cooked with corn? Vegetables? Are you giving me pot roast for breakfast? What are you talking about?

For the record, corned beef owes its name to the process that separates it from the same cut of brisket that spends hours in a slow smoker. The meat is basically pickled in a brine, like, oh, a pickle. The "corn" refers to the kernels of salt that draw out the juices and let the flavorful, seasoning sink back in, turning ordinary beeef into something extra special.

And "hash?" Well, that generally means a mixed up concoction. When you mix up chopped up corned beef with the mealy deliciousness of cooked potatoes, you temper the saltiness of the meat, and let the potatoes mellow into a creamy backdrop.

Paired with eggs and cheese, it’s the perfect topping for a morning pizza on a busy day.

1 pre-baked pizza crust

1 ½ c. corned beef hash (canned or leftover)

4 eggs, scrambled or hard-boiled, or 8 eggs, poached

1 c. shredded cheddar cheese

Parsley

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place pizza crust on baking sheet. Spread with hash. Bake 10 minutes, or until heated through.

If you are using scrambled or hard-boiled eggs, arrange over hash layer and top with cheese. Bake 5 minutes, or until cheese is melted. Top with parsley and season to taste. Slice and serve.

If you are using poached eggs, skip the egg layer until after the pizza is sliced. Top each piece with a poached egg. (This is definitely a sit-down version. Drippy egg yolks make for unforgiving on-the-run meals.)


EXTRA EXTRA!!! Her Royal Hashiness – Don’t turn up your nose at corned beef hash just because it is the original leftover dish for yesterday’s meat and potatoes. Not only did Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, Princess Margaret, have a special dish just for their hash (they called it "hoosh-mi") as kids, now she frequently enjoys shepherd’s pie, a hash variation, to use up her Sunday roast at the palace.