Cheapskate Rural Dweller: pizza

Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts

This Week's Menu: Barbecued Pizza and Buttermilk Pancakes

Nothing says summertime like cooking outside. Pizza is a baked item but no one wants to turn on a hot oven in the kitchen during this hot season...especially in our neighborhood where over-100 temps are the norm this time of year.

But pizza is still a great summer food, especially with an ice-cold beer in your hand. If you have a gas grill with a lid, you've basically got an outdoor oven...perfect for baking.

We'll use that to make our pizza.

For breakfast, we put up our third pancake recipe, this time it's the very classic buttermilk pancake recipe.

Everything you need are at the links below.

BREAKFAST: Buttermilk Pancakes

DINNER: Barbecued Pizza

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

DINNER: Barbecued Pizza

Well, technically, grilled pizza but we're cooking it outside on our gas barbecue grill.

Dough is premade from Trader Joes and so are the canned San Marzano tomatoes (which I substitute for fresh tomatoes in our regular pizza sauce recipe...click on that link).

After rolling the dough and spreading it out on the baking pan, I ladle on and spread the San Marzano tomato sauce evenly on it.

A layer of shredded prosciutto, mozzarella, and Parmesan go next.

Finish with another layer of mozzarella and Italian sausage.

Get the temp on the grill to 400. This is a little hot so we need to turn it down a bit.

Put pan on grate.

Cook covered for ten minutes.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Tuesdays with Letty: Avanti Bistro - Pasadena, California

With our son using a wheelchair, we have a need for adaptive equipment such as a lift for our van. That lift sometimes breaks down or needs maintenance. The closest service facility is MobilityWorks in Pasadena.

It's not in the part of Pasadena that's full of great restaurants and places to wander around, it's in a fairly industrial and residential part of East Pasadena on Altadena Drive...though the Rose Parade passes within about a hundred yards of it.

That means we don't have a lot of selection of places to eat while we wait for the lift to be serviced. There's a subpar taco place and donut shop across the street, Wonder Burgers is a decent place for breakfast two blocks away, Super Burger on the other side of the 210 Freeway makes incredibly good burgers in a run-down shack, and the oldest existing and operating In 'n Out is about a half mile away.

Any will do for a quick bite but one time we wanted something a little more. Lucky for us, Avanti Cafe...known for it's wood-fired pizzas on Lake Avenue...opened another branch only a block away from MobilityWorks. This one is more upscale and called Avanti Bistro.

It serves very good pizza and Italian dishes at prices that will make you skip a breath or two but they do have a very fun and reasonably priced happy hour from 3-6 on weeknights.

Once in awhile, Letty and I will come here to take advantage on Tuesdays. It's also the night a roving band of real estate professionals show up (they hit different happy hours each night after work). They're a fun and friendly group and we crowd into the little bar with them.

There's a drink of the day special plus discounts on wine and beer. The happy hour dishes are very good and cheap, too.

We each get a personal pizza, which is only $8 and share a plate of calamari which will set you back $5.

It's a fun and easy place to get to but beware that outside of happy hour, the prices can give you a bit of sticker shock.

Avanti is at 187 N. Sierra Madre Boulevard at the corner of Foothill, just a bit south of the 210 Freeway.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

This Week's Sunday Menu: Chilaquiles and Pizza

Time for another Sunday of food. Today's recipes are a little more involved than our usual ones but they're still pretty easy.

Breakfast is one of my favorite Mexican dishes while dinner is something everyone loves.

Recipes at the links below...

BREAKFAST: Chilaquiles con Huevos y Salsa Verde

DINNER: Pizza

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Pizza!

Originally, I was going to do this on my gas barbecue but my pizza pan wouldn't fit with the lid closed so it was off to the kitchen oven to cook.

There are two time consuming steps to this but this is another one you can do a few hours ahead of time and stick in the fridge until it's time to cook. The first step is the sauce and the next is rolling out the dough, which not only takes time but is pretty labor intensive, too.

Except for the sauce, I bought all the other ingredients premade at a local Italian deli, Capri in Covina, California. That makes things a bit easier.

INGREDIENTS
16 ounces of pizza dough (you can make this yourself but I just buy it premade at a local Italian deli. You can also find it at Trader Joe's and other stores)
6 medium Roma tomatoes
1 teaspoon oregano
3 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 links Italian sausage
1/4 pound prosciutto
1/2 pound mozarella cheese
1/2 cup shredded quattro formagio (four cheeses, available at most supermarkets - substitute with a high quality shredded parmesan if you can't find it)

Sauce
Take 5 tomatoes (you may want to cut them in half first) and puree in a blender with 1 cup of water.

Cut the 6th tomato up into cubes.

Put 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauce pan. Pour your pureed tomatoes on top of that and bring to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes, then set to low to simmer. Put your tomato chunks, garlic, oregano, salt, and sugar into the mix and stir. Simmer for 2 hours or until reduced by two thirds. Stir occasionally during this time (maybe every 10 or 20 minutes). Taste a spoonful occasionally to see if the taste would be good on a pizza. Add ingredients to adjust, sparingly, until you get your perfect tast.

When sauce is thick, a little thicker than you'd want to serve on pasta, take it off of the heat.

Pizza
Preheat oven to 450 -500 degrees...very hot!

On a large, wooden cutting board, sprinkle about a quarter cup of flour and spread out over the board. Place dough on it and roll out flat. This will take quite some time as the dough will keep wanting to snap back to its original shape. Keep at it and, eventually, the dough will lose its elasticity and you'll have a flat dough. be very careful not to tear your dough.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil and coat it with a paper towel over a round pizza pan. Transfer your dough into the pan and, carefully, spread it to the edges.

Using a ladel, spread your sauce over the dough, leaving about a half inch clear around the rim to be able to hold your pizza slice later. Put a think layer of mozzarella over the sauce. Put on your toppings (we're using Italian sausage and prosciutto but the sky's the limit on what you'd like to put on it). Sprinkle quattro formagio on it.

Cover with another layer of mozzarella (I'm using a mozzarella ball for this and laying slices of it around the pie).

Put in oven and bake for 10 minutes.

RECIPES FOR A CHEAPSKATE: Cherry Tomato Pie

I've been blessed with a lot of cherry tomatoes so I'm going to use them. I picked sixteen off of the plant today.

I'm going to make a cherry tomato/bacon pizza pie with them.

First, I slice each one in half.

Then marinated in olive oil for a day.

With a can of San Marzano tomatoes, some salt, garlic, and oregano (also from the garden), I boiled it for 20 minutes, then simmered for 2 hours. Near the end, we added a teaspoon of sugar.

I was going to buy a premade pizza dough from our local Italian deli but my wife insisted on making a homemade dough. Also, my son insisted on pepperoni on top, so what started as a tomato pie ended up being a pizza with a really delicious, fresh tasting sauce.