Saturday night we invited some friends over for a pizza party. Not unlike the ravioli party, we provided the dough, cheese, and sauce, and asked everyone to bring a topping…

…And everyone brought something different. We had pepperoni, pancetta, fancy mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, zucchini, sun-dried tomato pesto, chili peppers, fancy cheeses, artichoke hearts, spinach, caramelized onions, and pears. Stephanie even had some anchovies on hand.

Though we had the capacity to produce 15 pizzas, it turns out it only took 4 to feed the ten of us. So we didn’t manage to incorporate every possible topping (sorry, no anchovies), but we tried. Here was the menu for the night:

1. Pepperoni
2. Fancy mushrooms and pancetta with fresh tomatoes and garlic
3. Caramelized onions with pears and blue cheese
4. Garlicky spinach with artichoke hearts

I was thinking pizzas would be easier than assembling raviolis (and they are), but after doing some research I realized that proper use of a pizza stone required preheating it for an hour at 500°F—which, thanks to our lovely gas oven, meant the kitchen felt like a furnace all night. Didn’t stop folks from braving the heat to lend a hand.

I made a day-of decision to make my own pizza dough (rather than using the pre-made bags from Trader Joe’s). This was a risky proposition, as it was something I’d never done before (involving yeast), but I was happy I did. There’s just something transcendent about biting into homemade bread. It didn’t just feel like we were eating Pizza, it felt like we were eating something we made, soup to nuts. Which feels pretty good.

Here’s the recipe I used, which makes enough dough for two New York-style 14″ pizza crusts.

1. Dissolve 1 tsp sugar with 2/3 cup of 110°F water
2. Stir in 1 packet of yeast, let sit for 5-10 minutes
3. In a large bowl combine 3 1/2 cups of bread flour with 1 1/2 tsp of salt
4. Combine the activated yeast with an additional 2/3 cup of water with the flour
5. Knead for 5 minutes
6. Put in a bowl, cover (with cloth or saran wrap), let rise a warm place for 45 minutes

So we cooked, we ate, we drank, we talked, we drank, we laughed, we drank! Oh yeah, there was wine too. And Dawn brought homemade lemon scones! It was a time. Here are some pictures:

Two days ago I got an email from Mi Ae Lipe who told me she’d included my Roasted Garlic Hummus recipe in an “organic fruit-and-vegetable cookbook” called Tastes from Valley to Bluff: The Featherstone Farm Cookbook. She self-published it to “provide flood relief for some of the hard-hit southeastern Minnesota farms:”

A portion of the cookbook’s proceeds will go toward the Sow the Seeds Fund. In August 2007 many farms in southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin, including Featherstone, were in ruins after storms and heavy flooding devastated the area.

Featherstone turns out to be a cooperative CSA, just like Capay Organic’s Farm Fresh to You that I’ve been writing about lately.

Anyway today I got my copy, and holy cow, it’s thick! Nearly 400 pages long. For a collaborative, self-published cookbook, I found the recipes contained within—organized by both season and produce, with lots of supplementary sidebars—to be quite professional. I’m looking forward to flipping through it for culinary inspiration.

Here’s how it looks:

And here’s how my recipe looks in print:

Thanks Mi Ae!

After thinking about what to do with that red chard in our veggie box this week, I decided to use it in a quiche. I also had a little leftover roasted chicken breast which I cubed and browned. And we actually had a block of cave-aged Gruyère that we’d just opened the night before, so that went in too.

Quiche is so easy to make, and so adaptable. And so tasty. Ham and Gruyère is classic, but really, you could put just about any veggies and meats in a quiche. Other Gruyère-like cheeses include Comté, Emmental/Emmentaler, and Jarlsberg.

Our Recipe

Just beat 3 eggs (Stephanie likes to add a fourth yolk) with a cup and a half of heavy cream (12 fluid ounces). Meanwhile pre-bake a 9″ frozen, store-bought pie crust for 10-15 minutes. Once it’s golden, put all your pre-cooked meats, veggies, and 6 ounces of grated cheese (this is important, don’t skimp on the cheese!) on the bottom of the pie crust. Then pour the egg-cream “custard” over it all. There may be some leftover custard depending on how much filling you’ve added. Stick it in the oven at 350°F for 45 minutes (or until the surface starts to brown) and you’re good to go.

Though I took steps to learn more about wine after moving to California, I still don’t have a good memory for specific vintages. I’m not even sure I have a great palate for wine in general. I tend to appreciate the qualities of different wines more any single varietal. I’m told that the baseline of all wine has improved to the point that—thanks to science—it’s hard to find anything that’s truly undrinkable, unless it’s “corked”. I’m also told that most California wines are so “fruit-forward” and high in alcohol that it’s doubly difficult to discern one from the other.

Anyway, I was thinking about this last night as I was sampling my latest lemonade, like one might sample a fine wine: sniffed it, sipped it (at room temperature), let it roll around in my mouth, felt the pores on my cheeks open up, and then swallowed. Ah, the interplay of sweet and sour. The funny thing is that the base recipe is always the same, a simple syrup made with 1 cup of water and 1 cup of granulated sugar, 1 cup of freshly squeezed citrus (usually some variety of lemon or lime), 4 more cups of water, and optionally the juice of any other freshly squeezed citrus (usually grapefruit or some variety of orange).

What strikes me about this simple recipe is how much room for variation it contains (some of which being out of my control). The lemons could be standard or Meyer, they could be very juicy or kind of dry, they could be sweeter or sourer. I could squeeze slightly more or less than a cup. And any additional citrus adds this intense fruitiness. The juice even starts to age. It’s best right after it’s made, especially if you like it sour, but a day or two later, the tartness mellows and the sweeter, fruitier notes show through.

Now contrast this with a carton of lemonade or orange juice you might get at the supermarket. I love juice, but I’m coming to realize just how much these supermarket products have the variation engineered right out of them. I have no idea how Tropicana manages to maintain such consistency with a single organic (as in living) ingredient year after year. Their juice is very good, but it’s never as sublime as a glass I squeeze myself. And a glass I squeeze myself can vary widely, anywhere from great to amazing.

Twice this weekend I made tomato sauce (out of season no less, I can’t wait for the summer heirlooms!)—first as a base for the paella (known as sofrito), and then on its own to accompany some Sardinian pasta. All it took was a little garlic sauteed in olive oil, a diced onion, some grated or pureed tomatoes, and then seasoning, fresh basil if you’ve got it (or herbes de provence) with salt and pepper. It occurred to me that this is no different than the lemonade. I keep writing about eating with the seasons recently, but I think what it really comes down to is a reaction against the consistency of the pre-prepared supermarket offerings and a rediscovery of how fresh ingredients taste together. The best part: it varies.

This weekend I wanted to make paella. The first (and last) time I made paella was just before I moved to San Francisco. But after walking through the farmer’s market I realized that two major ingredients were not in season: tomatoes and bell peppers. So unless I wanted to make carrot-tangerine paella, I was going to have to go to the supermarket.

I’ve got nothing against the supermarket. I just got back from one tonight. I go to one every 2-3 weeks. But this was the first time I felt a twinge of guilt for not being able to use seasonal ingredients in something I wanted to cook. I blame Michael Pollan. Going to Whole Foods would be like admitting defeat. Like cheating. Seriously though, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is amazing.

I could have adjusted course and made something other than paella, which is a late summer Spanish dish anyway, not an early spring dish. But nothing else was really striking my fancy, and cheating was so easy. So I picked up two perfect bell peppers that came all the way from Mexico, and a bunch of vine-ripened tomatoes from who knows where. I wish it wasn’t so easy to cheat. The price of fuel and imported food may start to change that. We’ll see. Next time maybe I’ll make carrot soup.

In any case, the paella turned out smashingly. We made a ton, which thankfully Ivan and Erini came over to help us eat.