Greek Pizza

I'm a healthy kinda girl in a home full of mostly unhealthy-preferring people.  When I make pizza, I make one covered in a bunch of cheese and sausage and black olives.  And then I make one that I can justify a piece of.  Case in point--the Greek pizza.  As opposed to the Italian/American variety.

True confession here...  Of course I'd rather eat a huge slice (or three) of Pizza Hut cheese pizza.  Or barbeque beef pizza from Pizza Ranch.  Or even veggie pizza from Casey's--our local convenience store-pizza place (with the grease napkined off the top).  But as I said, I'm a healthy kinda girl so I generally refrain.

It took me a long time to find a pizza crust good enough to make more than once.  I've gone through a bunch of recipes, and even went through a period of time when I bought pre-made pizza shells from the grocery store (horror of horror! preservatives!).  Those days are gone.  If you've never checked out the blog Annie's Eats, you must.  She's a genius.  Her recipe for pizza crust is the best I've found, and her desserts...oh my.  But add those to the list of things-I-try-to-refrain-from.  

It's hard to be healthy.

Greek Pizza

Pizza dough recipe directly from Annie's Eats.  No one should adapt it at all.  :- )

I'll let you use her site for that part, and just share some tips from the process. 

Make certain you proof the yeast in warm water.  I use a glass measuring cup for this because it's easier to pour the mixture into my mixer.

I've had the unfortunate problem (too many times) of covering my bowl of rising dough with saran wrap, and then losing a tenth of my dough to what gets stuck to the wrap.  My solution?  Cover my oiled glass bowl with the bowl from my mixer.  Plenty of space, no waste.  In the winter I put the dish near our fireplace to let it rise.  In the summer, I put it into a vehicle parked outside.  I'm clever that way.

No mess, see?

 

After you punch down the down, form the balls and let them rest, they make the most lovely dough blobs. 

 

When this is happening, start with the Greek-pizza-part.  Place the pizza stone in your oven, and turn the oven on to 500 degrees.  Yep, it's going to sit in there and get super hot and you might worry about wasting energy keeping your oven on for so long, empty.  Let go of your environmentalism for a little bit.  Your dough might not cook through if you don't do that, and ruining your dough would be just as wasteful as wasting electricity....

Slice and soak some red onions in water.  It takes some of the bitterness out of them.  Did you know that?  I learned it from Chopped on the Foot Network.  I love the Food Network.  We no longer have the Food Network because we cancelled our dish and switched to NetFlix.  NetFlix carries no Food Network programs.  I am sad.

Anyway.

Soak your onions while your dough blobs rest.

You will also want to slice up about 3 roma tomatoes and grab your jars of kalamata olives and artichoke hearts.  After the dough has relaxed for 10 to 30 minutes, grab a piece of parchment paper and spray it with cooking spray.  Trust me on this part.  Annie doesn't share that tip about parchment paper, but it's a total must.  I have no idea how Annie manages to get her pizza on her pizza stone without that.  But I digress.

Press out your dough into a circle or square shape.  Whatever floats your boat and will eventually fit on your pizza pan or stone.  Brush it with olive oil and sprinkle with Italian seasoning and parmesean.

I know it's ridiculous, but it bothers me now that the shape wasn't a perfect circle.  We'll imagine I was intentionally going for 'rustic.'

Layer the crust with the toppings you'd like.  I use roma tomatoes, red onions, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives and feta cheese.  I'm sure it would all taste better with a heap of mozarella, so if you're into that, definitely add it.  You might also like pizza sauce.  I do not.  Not at all.

Slide the pizza onto the pan or stone that has been heating in your oven.  Bake as Annie instructs for 8 to 12 minutes.  You could remove the parchment from under the pizza after about half of that time if you wished.  I just leave it there because, well, the oven is hot and so is the pizza and I'm ok with browned parchment paper.

Remove the pizza from the oven and let it cool.  Then, of course, dive in! 

Autumn Toffee

Hello.  My name is Rebecca, and I've been addicted to Pinterest for 1 year, 2 months, and 5 days....

Just kidding about the time, but not about the addiction.  It's bad.  The other day I had to rearrange my Feeding the Hoardes board because there were so many awesome recipes pinned there I started to feel like it was disorganized.  And a disorganized board on Pinterest is like a disorganized pantry, or a disorganized closet, or (gasp) a disorganized desk at work.  I just can't live with it.  

In the process of shuffling pins to specific food-related boards, I came across one for Autumn Brittle.  Have you seen it?  It's essentially nuts and dried cranberries in a brittle base.  I hadn't gotten around to making it because only one of our four kids would choose to eat nuts if they were sitting out on the counter.  My husband will eat them, but he's hit or miss on treats--sometimes he eats gross gobs of something, and other times it just languishes in the container.  Seeing the pin again got me thinking about the half-finished bags of a variety of nuts I had sitting in the pantry.  If I made autumn brittle and no one ate it, it would be no worse than letting the nuts waste in the pantry.

With that, I launched into boiling the sugar and honey and water.  If I've learned any kitchen lesson more than once, it's that attempting to bring a sugar syrup up to a hard crack stage too fast will result in a big stinky burnt mess.  That hard lesson was driven home again today, when setting the concoction at a 4.5 on my burner quickly resulted in scorched sugar.  Dump it out.  Rethink it.  And then epiphany struck.

I don't even like brittle.

But I do like toffee.  

And toffee and nuts could be a good combination.  And toffee and brittle are really only different by a lot of butter.  And butter and sugar are a marriage made in heaven.  Friends, I give you Autumn Toffee.  

It's just plain amazing.


Autumn Toffee
(Toffee base adapted from Paula Deen's English Toffee)

14 T butter
1 c. sugar
2 T. water
1 T. vanilla
3/4 c. rough chopped pistachios
3/4 c. cashews
3/4 c. sliced almonds
1 c. Craisins or other dried cranberries

Begin this with a little bit of prep work.  Combine your fruit and nut mixture in a bowl and set it aside.

Line a 9 x 13 cake pan or another similar-sized pan with foil and butter the foil.  Grab your candy thermometer.

In a large pot, combine the butter, sugar and water.  Stirring constantly, bring the mixture to a boil.  Stir and boil the mixture for about ten minutes, then stop stirring and let the sugar reach 300 to 310 degrees.  That is the 'hard crack' stage.  Do this SLOWLY or the mixture will burn.  I set my burner to 2.5 out of 10 and left it there.

Once the mixture has reached 300 to 310, remove it from the burner.  Mix in the vanilla and the fruit and nut mixture.  Quickly scrape the mixture into the foil lined pan.  Press the mixture flat and allow it to cool.  If you're in a hurry, put it in the freezer for a bit.

WARNING:  Do not put any part of this in your mouth if you are being careful of your diet.  If you taste it, you are going to want more.  I can't be responsible for how much more you eat.  It's that good. 

  A brittle couldn't hold a candle to this.

Enjoy!




            

First Snow, A Day Off, and Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies

It snowed today, and it isn't even November yet.  If that is a sign of what is to come this winter in Iowa, my 20 mile commute won't be much fun.  But if it had to snow, today was the day for it.  Someone in human resources sent me a dire warning the other day that if I didn't use my unused vacation time from last year, I was going to lose it and never get it back again.  Since Tehya didn't have school today, and none of the kids have school tomorrow, I went a little crazy and took both days off of work.

And then from home I checked my email at least a dozen times to make sure everything was going ok without me.  I'm ridiculous like that.

Anyway, I didn't have to go out in the cold and wet.  Instead, I got the joy of watching it through the windows with a 5 year old who thinks snow is magic.  

And I cleaned out closets.  And I washed sheets.  And I found the two pairs of snow boots I couldn't find for last winter so had to buy two new pair.  But best, I baked cookies that were still warm when the boys got off the bus.  My kind of day off!

It's been forever since I made oatmeal cookies.  They aren't the kind my family usually requests.  But today seemed to call for something old-fashioned and comforting.  This recipe doesn't take 48 hours in the fridge with finely shaved dark chocolate and two types of flour.  It doesn't involve shaping or rolling or using any kind of fancy press.  They might not even knock you naked.  But they will disappear quickly, and they will hit the spot on a cold day when you feel like doing a little nurturing.

Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies

1 c. butter, room temperature
1 1/4 c. brown sugar
2 eggs (or 4 bantam-sized eggs, if you're like us)
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 c. all-purpose flour
3 c. old-fashioned oats
11 oz bag of butterscotch chips (minus about a quarter of an ounce due to taste testing)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Beat the butter and brown sugar until fluffy.  Add eggs and vanilla and beat until well combined.  Add the dry ingredients, mixing until they are incorporated.  Stir in butterscotch chips.  At this point, I would recommend you put the dough in the refrigerator for a while to firm it up so your cookies don't spread as much.  If you can't wait, then of course you should scoop them up and put them on cookie sheets.  I used a large cookie scoop because who doesn't like large cookies?  The larger size also means each cookie is thicker and spreads less.  

Bake for 10-11 minutes, or until the cookies are browned.  Allow the cookies to cool for a few minutes on the pan, then do what my husband's Grandma Josie recommended and place them on a newspaper to cool completely.  Maybe Grandma Josie, who raised a dozen children through the Great Depression, didn't have a cookie rack and that's why she recommended newspaper.  I like to use them because it absorbs some of the excess oil and therefore these particular cookies approach health food status.  

Grandma Josie also handed down this gem about not greasing cookie sheets before using them...."A cookie that can't grease its own butt isn't worth making."  And I'll leave you with that little bit of unconventional wisdom.  Enjoy!

Bantam Eggs and Bananas

Last winter my loving husband and our dear son determined that the best type of chicken to show for 4-H was white leghorn bantams.  Before I could get the words 'but wait!' from my mouth, we had three chicks living in a horse trough in our garage.  I should be used to these things now.  

True story.  Once upon a time we had a cute little chicken coop but no chickens.  Then about two years ago, quite unexpectedly, that same loving husband and son brought home a dozen Rhode Island red chicks. 


I shut myself in my closet and wept copiously.  And I never cry.  Chickens freak me out.  On top of that, they are one more thing that tie us down and mean we can never go anywhere for longer than 12 hours at a stretch.  

But I digress.  Aside from the one chick that turned out to be a rooster, surprisingly I've come to appreciate the chickens more than I resent them.  Those hens produce a lot of eggs.  And so do the ten buff orpingtons that came to live in our chicken coop the following year.... 

When you live in the country outside a little town so small the grocery store closes at 6, you come to appreciate convenience like a fridge full of eggs.

Anyway.  Our son showed Big Mike, Juliette and Minnie over the summer, and they all got blue ribbons.  I did understand that they needed to stay in the horse trough in the garage until he showed them, because they would have been dirty and hen-pecked, as they say, if they would have lived with the rest of the flock.  But it's October, and the fair was back in July, and I still have three chickens in a horse trough in my garage.  On nice days, my son puts them outside in a dog run (with no dogs, of course).  No one (but me) can bear to put them in the coop, where nature's 'pecking' order would likely result in us being down three little chickens.

I love the farm life.

So let me wrap around to the moral of this long story.  Turns out, bantam hens lay really little eggs.  I once made an angel food cake with two dozen of them.  They tend to pile up in our fridge in favor of the more normal sized eggs the other hens lay.  I needed to get rid of some eggs and some they're-so-ripe-I-must-use-them-today-or-throw-them-out bananas, so I whipped up these healthy muffins for the kids' breakfast.  

Banana Oat Muffins
Roughly adapted from The Complete Book of Baking, 1993

1/2 c sugar
1/2 c butter, room temperature
2 bantam eggs (or just one regular-sized one)
1/4 c milk
2 ripe bananas
1 t vanilla
1 c whole wheat flour 
1/2 c old-fashioned oats
1 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
chopped nuts
cinnamon and sugar
6 jumbo cupcake liners

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream sugar and butter until fluffy.  Add eggs, milk, bananas and vanilla and beat until well blended.  Add flour, oats, baking soda and salt and mix until just combined.  Spray cupcake liners with cooking spray, and fill each liner about 2/3 full with batter.  Sprinkle tops with nuts and cinnamon sugar mixture.  Place in oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until done.  Cool on a baking rack, then feed to bleary-eyed children before they leave for school.  Or just eat them yourself, if you want!

Wall Good and Evil

We built our home about 5 years ago.  It's taken that long for me to work up the courage to put things on the wall.  It's not that I don't appreciate things on walls, but there comes this point where it starts to look cluttered.  Clutter is the devil.  The devil.  So it takes me a long time to get up the nerve to put something on the wall because I'm afraid I'll hit that tipping point between 'looks good' and 'woah, too much crap.'  The good news is, vinyl lettering can be peeled off without too much effort.  So if I decide this one letter tips the balance between good and evil, I'm not committed to it for life.  Whew.






 

Pumpkin Puree

When I plant pumpkin seeds in the spring, the space I make available for them always looks so mammoth.  Year after year I second guess where I put the mounds, even though every year I eventually wonder whether I should extend the garden out another 5 feet to make more room for them.  When those first pumpkin flowers bloom, when the green bulbs form, and when one of the kids is the first to spot an orange pumpkin on the vine....it's the little things, right?  It never fails to make me happy. 

So pumpkin puree.  It's definitely less work to buy a can of it at the grocery store.  But I've never been motivated by what's less work.  If you've got muscle and time, making pumpkin puree is a snap.  And I like knowing exactly what goes into the food we eat.  For this, it's sugar pumpkin seeds, sunshine, water, and good ol' Iowa soil. 

Start by cutting your pumpkins in half.  I generally ask my love to take care of that part.  I'm all good with delegating manual labor like that.  And here's another way to delegate manual labor:  bribery.

(No child labor laws were broken in the making of this pumpkin puree.)  He needed to earn money for a school trip.  It was a win-win, friends.  Whoever takes care of it at your house, scoop out the seeds.

Poke a fork into each pumpkin a few times to vent steam, and place each half cut side down on a baking pan.  I like to cover my pans with aluminum foil.  I'd do that if I were you.  Unless you love to scrub pans.  I don't so much.

Bake the pumpkins at about 350 for about 30 minutes, or until the pulp of the pumpkins is soft.

Allow the pumpkins to cool a bit while you get another pan ready to put into the oven.  Then scoop the flesh out from each pumpkin into a bowl.  

When you have a bowl full of pumpkin, grab a potato masher or whatever kitchen implement you like best, and mash up the puree.  It's going to end up looking like this:

Pretty, right?  Oh, so pretty.  I scoop up about two cups of puree into each quart-sized Zip-Loc freezer bag.  Being a little OCD, I usually weigh my bags to make sure they're all about the same.  I also label the bags so I don't end up with pureed squash pie, or a side of pureed pumpkin with supper.  Toss them into the freezer (or lay them neatly, if you're like me), and they're ready to thaw when you need them.  Fun, right?  And well worth the time and effort it took to make them.