books about feelings and shaksuka pizza

"The other women discovered not only that she was from Barnard... summa cum laude, parbleu!... but that she had the most adorable little cracked voice, like a boy's. It was perfect with her hair, so short and boyish too, and by the end of the second week three of the teachers were writing passionate notes to her."
-MFK Fisher

Ah, is there anything like picking up a book that you had previously discarded as inert and finding, well, yourself? I am loving The Measure of Her Powers. All of the stories are about somebody paying too much attention to their senses, which is how I feel basically all the time, so it's both a intimate window into someone's beautiful life and a private validation of feeling and noticing (too) many things.

Reminds me of a production of In the Next Room that has been haunting me since I saw it a few weeks ago-- something about two-thirds-finished women and a race of poets. A therapist once told me that I have "a certain capacity for emotionally intense states" and I think that's right. I think Sarah Ruhl's characters do too-- not in a stylized manic pixie dreamgirl kind of way but the kind of way that feels genuinely radical. Which is all to say that I was rereading some old entries and I am a little sick of my refrain that I am some kind of failure at adulthood. Unfinished paintings, Ruhl's painter says, are truer to life and nearer to God.

I think in the age we live in, raw emotional intimacy is far more radical than physical intimacy or selling sex, which we see on every block. We see radical emotional intimacy far less frequently.
-- Sarah Ruhl

Anyway, I have no good segue, except that I invented a really good pizza. It's based on the Israeli egg dish shakshuka, which are eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce. Ideally, of course, you make your own tomato sauce. I've even said on here that there's no reason not too. But listen, even a jarred-tomato-sauce hater like me sometimes has some in the house and wants to make a pizza and doesn't know what to put on it. Eggs. The answer is eggs.

SHAKSHUKA PIZZA

--Pizza dough
--Tomato sauce (homemade or otherwise)
--Garlic, one or two cloves minced
--Red pepper flakes or chopped hot peppers. You could also use jalepeno or anaheim chiles (I used about 2 T worth of dried Japan peppers, chopped)
--Olive oil

+ Preheat the oven as hot as it will go.
+ Heat a little bit of oil with the garlic and pepper. If you do this in a cast iron skillet you can use that as your pizza stone: bingo. You don't need too much oil, just enough to give the spicy stuff a medium. You could probably skip this step and just use some hot sauce for some legit semihomade style Sandra Lee action. But it is really fast to make your own "hot sauce" so. yeah.
+ Then stretch you dough, spread LIBERALLY with tomato sauce and the spicy garlic oil. The eggs will get less rubbery if they are nestled in the tomato sauce, so use way more than you would for a normal cheese pizza. Bake for 4 or 5 minutes.
+ Then crack 2 eggs on top. Bake for another 8 minutes or so, until the whites are set.

overnight pizza dough

Well my dears, the dust has settled. All projects (except, you know, the long term phd-y ones) are done and I have gone back to buying root vegetables and whole grains after a month or two or three of 4 dollar kombucha and bagels from the coop. In some ways its good-- more food out of the house means more time out of the house might mean making meaningful theatre-things happen or at least interacting with other human beings not through a screen (BOWLING TOGETHER). But it also means I look at my bank account and am like-- 30 dollars at Rock Bottom? TWICE IN A WEEK?

None of this, though, is news to the army of thoughtful diligent people who get home at 5 every day or live in a major city where takeout is a thing. Such folks, I imagine, have have already figured out how to calibrate the line between spending a whole day making a cake and hoping that there will be snacks at an art opening to eat for dinner. But some of us are still figuring out the sweet spot between extreme homebodydom and eating fake Mexican food at sad chains, ok?

If necessity is the mother of invention, then I am glad that my navel-gazing post-adolescent search for both a homemade life and a performance-person's schedule led me to this pizza dough. It is really wonderful and keeps for a few days so that you can bake off a quick pizza whenever.

Pinapple feta, cheddar&peas&hotsauce. This recipe makes enough pizzas that you can figure out new and cool and weird toppings your own damn self. Do try a simple pineapple/feta pizza though, especially if you are a fruit on pizza naysayer-- this combo recently converted me.

Overnight Pizza Dough
(makes enough for 6 big personal pizzas, but you can freeze some)
(adapted a little from Peter Reinhardt via 101 cookbooks)

+ 4 1/2 cups flour
+ 1 3/4 t salt
+ 1 t instant yeast
+ 1/4 cup (2 ounces) olive oil
+ 2 c water

-- Combine ingredients and stir/flop your hand around in the bowl until the dough comes together.

-- Knead for as long as you can stand it. 7 minutes? The dough should be tacky and almost sticky and have that awesome elasticity and sheen that dough gets when you knead it right. Yes! If not add more water. If it is too wet and sticks to the bottom of the bowl add a little more flour.

-- Cut the dough into 6 blobs and coat them well with olive oil. Let them hang out on a baking sheet in the fridge overnight covered with plastic wrap. They will keep in the fridge for like 3 days. If you aren't going to eat 6 pizzas in 3 days (uhhh) you can freeze the blobs in plastic wrap after a day, no bigs.

-- OK crash for the evening and get up and run errands that you have been putting off for months and tell embarrassingly personal anecdotes in class because you are sleep deprived and daydream about the future. Is it dinnertime? Go home and take a pizza blob out of the fridge. Make sure it is still greased-up and not all dry and cracky. If its dried out a little that's fine, but not the Platonic Pizza Ideal. Flatten it into a disc and let it hang out for up to 2 hours. If you are hungry NOW and can only wait until the oven preheats, well, that's between you and yer stomach. I for one couldn't taste a difference.

-- Crank the oven up to 500 and stick your cast iron pan or pizza stone inside. Stretch the dough over your fists and toss it around until it is the thinness that you want it. I find that stretching a blob to fit a 12 inch iron skillet is usually right on.

-- Once the oven is hot, lay down some cornmeal on your baking surface (the pan or the back of a baking sheet or a peel that you will transfer to your pizza stone, you bougie jerk who owns a pizza peel). Stretch out that dough one last time and dress your pizza up right. Into the oven for 8 minutes, until the crust is brown and cheese is bubbly.

braised fennel pizza

If you know me you know how I feel about pizza. Right? Right. Especially bougie pizzas with no tomato sauce. Brussels sprouts bechamel pizza. Sweet potato pizza. Mushroom goat cheese pizza. There is just nothing like fucking pizza.

Okay, so with that in mind. This is easily the best pizza I have ever made, and potentially the best pizza I have ever eaten. I KNOW! I know. I wasn't expecting it to be so good at all. I bought the fennel on a whim because I was thinking of my grandmother, who used to carry around sliced fennel and eat it daintily for lunch. After a couple weeks of zigzagging around my house and wishing I was somewhere else and sucking up energy from the universe, sitting quietly in one place and just being there and eating something so delicious was really awesome. Wow, holy California, did I just talk about energy? I think I did. But seriously, if this pizza can snap me out of break-up anomie, it's gotta be pretty delicious.

Fennel, shallot & gouda pizza

(makes one small pizza, like lunch for two with a salad or lunch for one with a lot of happy chewing sounds and a tummyache)

-pizza dough
-a bulb of fennel
-2 shallots
-a bunch of mild semi-soft cheese. Trader Joe's fans should be apprised of Panquehue, it is cheap as hell and pretty delicious, especially melted. Gouda, Havarti, or any other laid-back snack cheese would do the trick.

+Preheat your oven to as hot as it can go.
+Slice the fennel vertically and place the slices in a hot grill pan or skillet, get a good sear on them.
+Meanwhile mince those shallots
+OK now throw some stock into the pan and the shallots and let the fennel soften for a bit, like 10 minutes? They should be tender and barely sauce-y.
+Now toss your pizza dough out and put it on a baking sheet or in that same oven-proof skillet, spreading the fennel-shallots on top. Grate the cheese on top, too.
+Bake for 15 minutes or so, until the cheese is melted and the crust is brown.

pizza tossing

oh my dear blog! i'm so sorry that i abandoned you. during paper-writing season i ate nothing but tamales, donuts, and a massive batch of curry i cooked up. now that it's break i am content to eat at all my favorite (sub)urban destinations

and drink hot cocoa.

one thing i did learn in the ten days between thanksgiving and full-throttle-laziness, however, is how to toss a pizza. here's the scoop:

roll out your dough into a kind of circle
arc your right hand in front of you toward your left elbow, with the pizza draped over it
support the back of the pizza with your left hand, open flat as well
fling the pizza in the air by winging your right hand out and right, following the spin with your left hand
dash over to the flying pizza and try to catch it on your fists. awesome! fun!

here's some inspiration:

bbq chicken pizza

Because I can't eat anything that's been cooked near lobster, family vacations to Maine can be a little trying, especially if you are on a tiny island 10 miles off the coast with no cars and 2 restaurants. Maybe in light of that, but probably in its own right, The Novelty is one of my favorite places to eat, ever. A small shingled building with trivial pursuit on every table dishing up pizza that is way better than it needs to be. And microbrews. And ice cream. Amen!

So the other day, when I got hit with a fierce craving for pizza that is 48 hours of driving and an hour on a boat away


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I decided to try it myself. And it was amazing, I have some more dough rising RIGHT NOW for an encore. If this seems like too much work, try to make the dough or bbq sauce individually-- they're knock-out and well worth the effort.

PIZZA DOUGH
(via Mark Bittman)
1 tsp instant/rapid rise yeast (although I think I used active dry and was fine, actually)
3 cups flour (2 cups white, 1 cup whole wheat is perfect)
2 tsp salt
1- 1 1/4 cup water
2 tbs olive oil

Combine half the flour with the salt and yeast. Now add olive oil and water, mix. Add the rest of the flour a little at a time. start kneading when it is too stiff to stir and keep kneading for about 10 minutes-- the dough should be moist and elastic. Let it rise for an hour or so-- if you keep the bowl covered in shrink wrap in the fridge, it can keep itself happy overnight. Cut the dough in half and use or freeze.

BBQ SAUCE
adapted from the molasses jar

1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup vinegar (I used white but apple cider would probably be better)
1/4 cup mustard
1 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cayenne or red pepper flakes
1 tsp hot sauce

Mix in a bowl. Makes enough to store some in the fridge in a clean jar or bottle.


BBQ CHICKEN PIZZA
bacon
bbq sauce
onion
pizza dough
grated gouda cheese (optional, but delicious)
mozzarella or 3 cheese blend (like from a plastic pack)
shredded chicken (from a rotisserie chicken, or some chicken breasts that you poached, or pre-cut-into-strips Perdue style)

---Preheat the oven to 475.
---Fry half an onion and several strips of bacon in a pan.
---Throw some cornmeal down on a baking sheet, if you have it, then toss your pizza until it has a pretty thin crust.
---Spread some bbq on, then the bacon and onion, then the shredded chicken, then a bit more bbq sauce. Then the cheeses.
---Bake at 475 for about 15 minutes: until the crust is golden brown and the cheese is bubbly.

nytimes approved

you know the extremely high proportion of pizza recipes on here? you know that i am eating a mushroom parmesan pizza right now? that is because pizza is a really quick and delicious dinner. as with all my obsessions-- well, mostly just making pizza and crackers-- the NYTIMES has fallen in love as well and written a love note to homemade pizza. You can even forget that homemade dough thing.

classy pizza

There is a restaurant in Harvard Square called Veggie Planet that I snubbed for years because it is in a basement and one time I looked down and there was no one there. Then one of my favorite people in the world convinced me to go-- and-- lo and behold, it is one of those super feel-good happy hippie places that makes me put moving to vermont much higher on the list of priorities. They have a couple different kinds of iced tea and the food is not only super delicious but also CHEAP.

This pizza is totally stolen from them, but with love, in that vermonty-sharing is caring kind of way.

LILY'S FAVORITE PIZZA

pizza dough
1 sweet potato
log of goat cheese
1 sweet onion

OK-- Preheat the oven to 450.

Chop the sweet potato into thick rounds and boil until soft-- like 15 minutes?
In the meantime, chop then onion and fry it up until it's carmelized, but not quite blackened. Still has to go in the oven.

Now stretch out your pizza dough, put it on a baking sheet. Put the sweet potato rounds on in some kind of decorative folk-art like pattern and then crumble on the goat cheese and spoon those onion on there, too. How can this not be delicious? Oh, it can't. It is the best pizza in the world. 20 minutes in a 450 degree oven, this baby is unstoppable.

fire hazard pizza

Well, this was a Moosewood pizza, which means that it is ugly as sin and kind of not as tasty as you would want it to be. But it did give me the opportunity to roast some peppers, which was good fun. So here we go:



If you have a gas stove, a grill, a campfire, or a pile of burning trash in your "rapidly gentrifying" neighborhood, gerry-rig some skewers or stick a big fork in a red (yellow, orange) pepper. Plunge it into the flames! My kind of recipe. Char, baby, char. Rotate it so that even the nooks and crannies get blackened and the whole thing gets shriveled and pathetic.

Plop it into a bowl and cover with saran wrap OR put it in a paper bag and roll it shut.

When you're done and all the peppers are just a crusty, steamed, withered shade of their former selves, take all the peppers out and rub the skins off, rinse 'em quickly and chop them into strips, throwing away stems and seeds.

Use them asap as a salad, sandwich, pasta, pizza topping OR put them in a jar covered with olive oil and chopped garlic; they can live in the fridge for a few weeks.


if you want to make pizza:

one big onion or two small onions or a few leeks (we used leeks, but you couldn't really taste them and leeks are such a superstar that they really deserve to be the star)
two shallots
a handful of fresh basil
two roasted red peppers
feta cheese... or mozzarella or both

Obviously pizza recipes are pretty foolproof. The Moosewood version had tomatoes: our pizza was super soggy, so I would leave them out.

Chop and fry the onion and shallots, then carmelize. If they get a little burnt that's just part of the charm.

Now add the basil and let it wilt.

Spread your dough (from the pizza place, grocery store, your freezer because one time you went on a bender and made your own) and put it on the back of a cookie sheet.

Top the pizza with the carmelized onions and basil and pepper strips and feta cheese. Yum.

20 minutes &

bougie kitchen pizza

well team!

time to start a cooking blog after sitting around reading them all day. this blog will teach you to be the laziest "foodie" ever. or possibly the most ambitious lazy cook ever. like that episode of ali g, about the world's shortest giant... nevermind.



today's first entry: bougie kitchen pizza



the original plan was salad, then we realized that it was only 5:30. later, realized that the salad greens were bad, the mushrooms were bad, cheese was bad. corona for dinner? maybe. but not today.

good thing i moved back to the suburbs: this bougie kitchen is seriously well equipped. you can make a damn good bougie kitchen pizza with only ingredients found in your typical bougie kitchen, but you can, you know, use fresh ingredients too.



bougie kitchen pizza

--frozen pizza dough (or, if you live in an urban area (sigh) go to the pizza place on your block and ask for dough)
--half an onion, fried all translucent-like
--handful of olives, chopped
--handful of sundried tomatoes, chopped
--handful of roasted red peppers, chopped
--handful (or two) of the gnarly cheese remains hanging out in the cheese drawer. gnarly old goat cheese is best.

preheat yer oven to 400 degrees.

spread out the dough. you probably only need half the ball. if you cleaned the floor recently toss it in the air and say something in fake italian-- mamma mia! cappuccino!



put in on the back of an upsidedown baking sheet. if you are in a polenta-making phase, put some corn meal on there. yeah.

topping time! again, bougie pizza (tm) consists of only the finest canned antipasto goodies, but the BEST BEST incarnation of this pizza consists of sauteed farmer's market mushrooms, goat cheese, and rosemary.

sprinkle on some cheese, if you've got it.

good work. pop it in the oven, 20 minutes later you will feel way more culinary than you actually are.