Success through Failure: Homemade Pizza

Marshall loves pizza.  I like pizza, but Marshall loves it.  It's one of those foods he could eat all day every day without ever getting tired of it.  I can only eat pizza when I'm in the mood for pizza.  Now, show me something like Japanese or sushi or Chinese or Mexican - I can eat that nonstop.  We all have our go-to food and pizza is a big thing for Marshall.  A couple of years ago, he was on a homemade pizza kick and so for his birthday he got a pizza cookbook, a pizza peel, and a ceramic pizza stone.  After our first foray into making our own pizza dough, we broke our pizza stone.  According to the almighty Alton Brown, the way to get a good crunchy-but-chewy dough, is to heat up the oven really hot and then make a steam bath at the bottom of the oven, so it's not a super dry heat, but it has a bit of moisture to chewy-up the dough.  Well, this made our pizza stone crack right down the middle.  Who knew?  We tried again, but we both agreed it seemed like too much work, even if it was rather tasty.

Fast-forward to the present time, I kept hearing from my mom and my sister how easy it was to buy the raw pizza dough from Trader Joe's to make homemade pizza.  This sounded great because the most time-consuming part of making pizza is getting the dough made.  This cut out that almost full day of mixing, kneading, and proofing before you can even think of eating it.  We got the dough.  It seemed a little more wet than than we had expected.  So, we thought we'd add a little flour to it and knead it.  It still was super sticky and not like the pizza dough we had worked with before.  We both worked to get this dough into a pizza shape.  Once shaped, we piled on the toppings.  Both of us love pizza with lots of toppings:  sauce, cheese, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, mushrooms, onions, and olives.  We get ready to slide it off onto our [metal] pizza cooker, which had been sitting in the oven getting nice and hot and the pizza won't slide off the peel.  That peel had cornmeal and flour and we were both stumped as to how it was still stuck.  With the oven wide open and all the 500F heat escaping into the kitchen, we grabbed all the spatulas we could find to get the pizza into the oven.  We finally did and this is what we ended up with:

Yeah...we ended up with a very ugly, half-assed calzone, rather than a pizza.  Granted, it tasted really good, but when you're looking for pizza and this is what's on your plate, it's rather disappointing.


Marshall really wanted to get this pizza right, though, so he dug out our copy of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food (2004) and looked up the pizza dough recipe we had used long ago.  He prepped the dough:  mixed it, kneaded it and proofed it.  Everything was going well.  We learned from our original failure and when it came to topping our pizza, we scaled things back a bit.  This time we went with only a few toppings:  sauce, cheese, spicy Italian sausage and bell peppers.  It stretched correctly and wasn't sticky.  It slipped right off the peel into the hot oven and we finally got a pizza.  It was delicious.  I like Brown's pizza dough, which is the thin crispy type of pizza dough and not thick at all.  There is a bit of chew, but it's not too chewy either.  It was apparently too delicious to photograph and we devoured it before we could snap a photo of its beauty.  Just imagine a lovely pizza topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, crumbled hot Italian sausage and green bell peppers - delicious!


We can only learn from our past failures.  If we don't fail at least once, how would we know how much we've learned?  I've had those nights were dinner just didn't go right at all.  The recipe wasn't written well or I was too tired and misread a step.  I remember one night trying to make miso soup all from scratch, even down to the step of making my own dashi.  I ended up with a kitchen full of random packing and bits of chopped ingredients scattered about and a soup in a pot that just didn't look right at all.  It was just enough to push me over the edge and I dumped everything and we ordered take-out.  A few weeks later, I tried again and it came out like it should have.  Granted, I don't think I will attempt to make it all again, unless I was truly into it, but the point was I dusted myself off, got back up and tried again.

Here's to more learning experiences!  :)

Good Food from Friends: Shrimp with Green Sauce and Zucchini Ribbons

Perhaps this will bit me in the butt later in life, but no matter what the issues with cholesterol, I love shrimp.  I'll eat shrimp any way I can and I'll be happy to cook it.  One of my favorite ladies at my local butcher taught me the easiest way to clean and shell shrimp.  Once I learned how easy it was (essentially take kitchen shears or scissors and snip right up the back of the shrimp; this allows the shell to peel off easily AND cleans out the vein), I was on my way to become a shrimp-cooking fiend.  Shrimp is so easy and it's very versatile.  Yes, I could go on and on like our good friend Benjamin Beauford Blue, or "Bubba", and tell you all the ways you can cook and eat shrimp, but I think I'll move on while I'm ahead.

Charisse, a friend of mine from high school kept in touch with one our close friends, Nicole.  Nicole was the one who introduced me to Charisse and her husband's food blog, foodies @ home.  I thought it was a great blog.  I had just started getting into reading cooking and food blogs and I liked their style.  I also liked the dishes they were making.  I say "we" because they both switch off cooking and writing.  Plus, their photos are great and make their dishes even that much more mouth-watering.  After following them for a few weeks, I decided to try out one of their dishes:  Shrimp with Green Sauce and Zucchini Ribbons.

Like Charisse, I love zucchini.  My mom used to prepare zucchini in the most simplest of ways:  broiled in the oven with Parmesan cheese, pepper and olive oil, and, of course, she used them in frittatas.  I am always up for trying new ways of cooking old favorites and this dish seemed right up our alley.  The recipe was really easy to follow and the end result was delicious.  It was fresh and flavorful and, for a pasta dish, was not too filling at all.  We really enjoyed it here and I'm looking forward to what else Charisse and her husband keep cooking up!

Ya Mon! - Jerk Chicken with Grilled Banana and Onion Salsa

Let's quickly address the rather large pachyderm in the room:  Yes, it has been a while since I last posted.  There, issue addressed; let's move on, shall we?

In the interest of time and preserving my dignity, I will not divulge when this meal was cooked and eaten.  What I will tell you is that it was a delicious meal.  I will, though, apologize for the lack of chicken-prep photos, which were Marshall's responsibility and in the joy of grilling the chicken, he forgot.  We also grilled the chicken a night ahead, due to an even or something.  We have a schedule when we eat.  We are creatures of habit and keeping a "cook Monday and Wednesday; eat leftovers Tuesday and Thursday; figure out something Friday through Sunday" is easy for us to make sure we're eating more at home than coming up short on what to eat and ending up going out.

Anyway, all that aside:  this was exactly how the editors of Cook's Illustrated described this chicken:  easy, as well as being very tasty.  It also wasn't really super spicy, which anything labeled "jerk" tends to be.  The marinade/rub does contain habenero peppers, but they aren't there in the forefront.  What you get is an extremely flavorful and juicy chicken with a very nice warmth, which only suggests the pepper's presence.  What really stands out in this meal is the side dish:  grilled banana and red onion salsa.  We treated this more like a salad, rather than a salsa.  But, it's a great dish and it packs so much flavor and it's a refreshing counterpart to the spicy and warm chicken.  The grilled bananas and red onions are sweet, but not too sticky.  The dressing is minty and with just a spark of rum ties everything together.  Considering I've never been to Jamaica before, I can't say how this stacks up to what you would find on the island, but I can only imagine it holds its own against the authentic birds being fired up on the street.  Is it bad that I wanted to construct my own charcoal grill out of a discarded oil drum and cook my chicken just to get that close to authentic?  :)