Pizza Pie

I have never made pizza before and, as you all know, the past few weeks have found me in the kitchen, experimenting with recipes/cookbook/forgotten kitchen equipment.  I decided that pizza was an important stop on my journey to learning how to cook.

The other day, on television, I saw a recipe for a pizza dough made with whole-wheat flour and sweet potatoes.  I tracked the recipe down on the Internet and made myself some pretty decent (and surprisingly healthy) pizza. 

The dough is easy, if a little time-consuming.  Peel, chop, and boil a large sweet potato until past fork tender.  This should take between 15 and 20 minutes.  Drain the potato and mash it immediately until smooth.  Put the mashed potato in the refrigerator (or, if you're in a rush, the freezer) to cool.  

While you're waiting, you can always make an easy tomato sauce.  It amazes me how readily most Americans fall back on canned tomato sauce when making one's own is so incredibly easy.  I like to use a combination of diced and crushed tomatoes (crushed tomatoes are close to a puree in consistency) for better texture.  Make a base with olive oil, garlic/white onion/shallot/a combination of all three and once the veggies have become translucent add your canned tomatoes.  Last night, I used only diced because that's what I had on hand.  Add spice.  I ripped up some fresh basil and added dried oregano, salt, course ground pepper, and red pepper flakes.  Add alcohol.  What I happened to have open was Amontillado, a dry and nutty sherry.  Add a dash of balsamic vinegar for depth.  And last but not least, add some kind of sweetening agent to balance the acidity of the tomatoes.  I threw in about a tablespoon of agave nectar, but any sugar or sugar substitute will do.  That's it.  Leave the pot uncovered to thicken for about 10 to 20 minutes and you have a better sauce than Ragu could ever produce. 

Moving on.  Once the sweet potato has cooled, put it in a large bowl and add to it two cups of whole-wheat flour and two teaspoons of baking powder (this will allow the crust to rise slightly).  Also add some kosher salt to taste, ground black pepper, and dried oregano.  Mix this together either by hand or with a wooden spoon.  Once it comes together, add nine tablespoons of cold water mixed separately with two tablespoons of olive oil.  The dough should be moist, but not sticky.  If it is sticky, add a bit more flour.  

You can use the dough right away or you can coat it with a thin layer of olive oil, cover it with plastic wrap, and refrigerate it.  For my pizza, I used only 1/3 of the dough.  Half the prepared dough would yield a large pizza.

Place the dough on a floured surface and roll out from the center.  I like a very thin crust, so I rolled out until it was quite large.  Place rolled dough on a baking sheet that has been oiled or sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.  In order to prevent soggy pizza, I recommend par-cooking the crust first, about five to ten closely-watched minutes in a 400-450 degree oven.  Once the pizza looks slightly brown at the edges, remove it from the oven and top with sauce, veggies (I used red onions and orange and yellow peppers), fresh basil, and thinly sliced fresh mozzarella.  Cook until the cheese melts and the vegetables wilt at 375 degrees.  

You can freeze leftover dough for another occasion, or you can pre-prep a second crust for the next night's meal.  I left my ball in the refrigerator for use later in the week.  The crust didn't taste like sweet potato at all, and although it wasn't quite as toothsome as the pizzeria variety, it went down just fine.  

Wedding Gift

My cousin, who would never by any stretch of the imagination consider herself a foodie and who does not, for all intents and purposes, enjoy cooking, is getting married.  She's getting married to a man who kinda cooks but neither one of them feels this pull towards the kitchen the way I do.  They don't like getting their hands dirty. 

I decided that part of my wedding gift to my cousin would be cooking lessons.  She could choose the dish and I would teach her easy techniques, how to cook without recipes, and how to work with what you have.  I actually chose the first dish because I knew it would be something she'd like and because I knew we'd need a little advance preparation for lesson one.  

I chose chicken parm.  But part of my goal here is to turn ordinary dishes into really good dishes and, as an extension of that, to make empirically unhealthy dishes very healthy.  So the first thing I made her do was make breadcrumbs.  By hand. 

I wouldn't have made her crush the crumbs by hand if she'd had a food processor, but she didn't.  So, instead, I told her to toast four pieces of whole-wheat bread to deep brown, a firm toast.  She removed them from the oven and broke them into crumbs with her hands.  We mixed that wheat crumb mixture with a quarter cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese, good old Italian seasoning from the bottle, salt, and pepper.  

She said, "We have tons of tomato sauce in the cabinet."  I said, "You're going to learn to make your own."  I showed her how to chop a shallot and how to bruise garlic with the back of a knife.  I added a tablespoon of olive oil to the bottom of a saucepan and sweated the two down.  "This is what they are supposed to look like," I told her.  

"Clear?" she asked. 

Exactly. 

Next up, two large cans of peeled Italian tomatoes, salt, pepper, wine (I brought a Chianti), a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a tiny bit of sugar (I would have used agave nectar, had I thought better of it), fresh basil, and fresh oregano.  They had no bay leaves so I skipped the step.  I left the pot uncovered.  She asked if the sauce was supposed to be shrinking.  I said that was exactly what I wanted it to do. 

We bought a head of broccoli.  She had never cooked fresh broccoli before.  "Break off the florets," I told her.  "Put them on a baking dish."  Her engagement gift spice rack of filled spices gave us chili powder, coriander seeds, and cumin.  She covered the broccoli with, admittedly, a little too much olive oil.  I sprinkled the spices on top.  

I told her to separate three eggs.  She knew how to do this.  We seasoned the egg whites and dipped the chicken breasts in them.  The breasts went from egg to breadcrumbs to baking pan and into a 350 degree oven along with the broccoli. 

"You're going to make your own salad dressing," I told her.  She scooped a teaspoon of dijon mustard into a bowl and added a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.  

"Give me the whisk," I said.  

"I don't have one," she told me.  

"I'm looking at one," I said.  

"Oh.  I didn't know we had that."  

I taught her to emulsify.  "Pour while I whisk," I said.  "The mustard helps bind the oil to the vinegar to the oil, since vinegar and oil constantly want to separate."  I added salt and pepper and put the dressing to the side. 

Next up, garlic toasts.  I minced four cloves of garlic and heated them in a saucepan with a few turns of olive oil and three tablespoons of a low-cholesterol butter spread the had in the house (good for consistency and only 50 calories per tablespoon).  I added a chiffonade of basil and oregano.  When the mixture was just short of a simmer, I took it off the heat and spooned it over three split whole-wheat English muffins,  and put the muffins inside the toaster.  

Thirty minutes into cooking time on the chicken, I removed the trays, topped the breast with thinly sliced fresh mozzarella, basil leaves, oregano leaves, and an ample helping of the tomato sauce.  I returned the chicken to the oven to melt and continue cooking.  

We served the chicken parm, which, by the way, tasted unhealthy enough, with whole-wheat pasta, our garlic toasts, a simple salad, and the roasted broccoli.  Both my cousin and her fiance seemed amazed that we had conquered it all on our own without screwing up.  My cousin was particularly impressed with my refusal to go by any book or recipe.  I told her that all you need is a general understanding of how things work and you can succeed in the kitchen.  

But the real problem was that she viewed the product of cooking--the actual meal--as the point, and I don't abide by that philosophy.  For me, the trip to the market, the creative process, the time getting my hands dirty, these are all therapeutic elements in and of themselves.  I enjoy the whole process of cooking, from start to finish.  I like knowing that I can be inspired by produce at a grocery store and that cooking doesn't always mean being armed with an ingredient list or a list of instructions.  

I was hoping that bringing her in touch with her food would inspire in her a new desire to want to cook, to want to create things that she could be proud of.  And she did take pride in the accomplishment of the completed meal.  I'm still hoping that the result of this ongoing project will be an increased drive to get her hands dirty, to love food a little more than she currently does.  On that point, the jury is still out.  Stay tuned.  

Tune In, Tune Out

I was supposed to go out last night and I probably would have, but the snow made it difficult to conceptualize a trip downtown in the cold.  There's the ten block trek to the train station, the open-and-breezy elevated train, the pink tape I'm so accustomed to encountering when planning weekend travel.  And so I did what I have been doing since I was a very little girl, a latchkey kid left to her own devices on snow days: I made boxed pasta and ate it with cold, canned tomato sauce.  

I suppose that, when you're talking about comfort food, it could get a lot worse than whole wheat pasta (it was all I had) and almost-fat-free tomato sauce.  Not that I'm trying to pass this off as health food, but still.  I wasn't sitting around wondering how I had conceivably eaten an entire pizza instead of leaving my apartment.  That would be cause for alarm.  

Even the most high-minded foodies have their vices.  Mine tend to be junky and prepared.  I love candy with high fructose corn syrup.  I love diet soda.  I love the artificial cheese on certain kinds of chips (you know which ones I'm talking about).  I love the canned soups that are loaded with MSG and I love canned tomato sauce.  I love it in an entirely separate and different way than I love real, homemade tomato sauce.  To me, they aren't even remotely related.  Yes, they both come from tomatoes, and yes, they both go over pasta.  But one has preservatives, salt, sugar, and those little mushrooms that taste like they come from a can.  And the other tastes like someone actually spent time giving credit to the almighty tomato. 

Foods trigger memory, perhaps more than any one thing.  I remember that when I was a teenager someone told me that the sense of smell was the sense most commonly associated with memory.  Maybe that's true.  Maybe that's why I'm reminded of childhood Saturday afternoons when I walk into a McDonald's.  Maybe that's why cherry Blistex reminds me of my first kiss.   I think maybe taste is just as relevant a trigger.

Like how half-decent pizza reminds me of the drives home I used to make on alternate Sunday evenings with my stepfather, who could be easily convinced to stop at Papa Gino's and who probably wouldn't tell my food-restricting mother about it.  Or how Campbell's vegetable soup--even the low-sodium variety--reminds me of the other part of that journey, Friday evenings in my father's kitchen with the New Yorker, where I'd sit at the table after a flight from Boston reading cartoons that I didn't really understand.  Or maybe I did and my parents missed a good opportunity to enroll me in MENSA. 

So for me, boxed pasta and canned tomato sauce conjures the snow collecting on my back porch when the schools have long-since been cancelled. I know I will have to go shovel the driveway before anyone comes home.  I know I have to go shovel the stairs.  But it is cold and we have cable and for now I can enjoy the most corporeal pleasures from the comfort of the living room: cable television, processed food, a glass of soda from my mother's secret stash.  

I didn't go out last night because it was the type of night that reminded me of my least solitary solitary moments, the quiet of nothing and the responsibility of no one.