10/13 Bugs Bunny

With all do respect to Heather and everyone else who enjoys the company of rabbits, these little creatures are a great change of pace from chicken (not much more expensive either) and something I used to enjoy often as a kid. Preparation for this particular dish was relatively easy. Basically, I broke down the rabbit into 6 pcs and covered them with mustard and a touch of oil. I let that sit for a couple hours before roasting bugs bunny with some potatoes, celery & carrots in a 425 degree oven for 35 minutes. That's really about it. If you have cream on hand you can make a creamy mustard sauce from the pan drippings and some of the veggies. Unfortunately I used all mine in the chowder yesterday.

10/12 Chowdah

In anticipation of what turned out to be one of the worst Patriots game in quite some time I'd decided to make some clam chowder tonight. I forget when I had made some last, but I didn't quite remember the Garibaldi's recipe I had learned. I think this ended up being relatively close...

I started off by browning some bacon and using the fat to cook some miripoix (onion, carrot, celery) along with oregano, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper. After all that had softened up nicely for 5-10 minutes, I added a few tablespoons of flour to make a roux of sorts and help thicken the eventual soup. I let the flour cook off for 5 minutes and then added the liquids. 'Twas about 1/2 a cup of white wine, a pint of whipping cream, about 1.5 cups of milk and two 8oz bottles of clam juice. Brought everything to a boil to let the flavors meld and added in 3 medium Yukon potatoes, cut up in medium dice. Cooked those on low heat till just soft, 15-20 minutes, and added about 2 cups of chopped up cooked clams. These were pre-cooked, though not canned, but you could replace with canned or fresh - depending on who you're trying to impress. Don't cook the clams too long though or theyll get tough and chewey. Add the bacon back in and that's about it. Now if only the Pats had held up their end of the bargain this would've felt much more successful. Oh well...

10/09 Pasta with Butternut Squash

On the verge of going out to get fried chicken for dinner, I decided to fight the craving and stay home instead. After sifting through the pantry, I ended up cooking myself another recipe from Bittman's blog. For you loyal readers with an amazing memory, you'll note that this is very similar to something Heather put together almost exactly one year ago! That too was inspired by Mark, though it was a tad bit more complicated.

The recipe is relatively simple. It's just some finely chopped/grated butternut squash, cooked slowly and mixed in with pasta. Pretty straight forward, though I was mostly just intrigued by what it would taste like. Note that the food processor did a great job with the squash - something I was initially a bit concerned about. I also did make my own pasta while the "sauce" cooked, since there wasn't really much else to the recipe and I hadn't made a batch in a couple weeks.

As for the taste? Well I guess pretty much what you'd expect... It actually goes really well together and if you like butternut squash I can't imagine someone not liking this. One suggestion a reader made on Bittman's blog was that the recipe would benefit quite well from a little fresh sausage and sage. I couldn't agree more and may try this in the near future since I now have half a butternut squash left.

10/8 Risotto Cakes

Inspired by a recent post on Mark Bittman's blog, I made a ton of mushroom risotto the other night for dinner. It was a pretty basic risotto with some not so home-made stock and some formerly dried shiitake mushrooms. All things considered, 'twas pretty good the first time around. Rather than nuking it today for the second go 'round, I decided to make some risotto cakes out of what was left. As I'm sure you can see, I did use a mold, but this could easily be done without one. I seared them in some butter (as recommended in Harold McGee's latest article to minimize stickiness) and served the three "cakes" with some lightly dressed greens. All in all, a rather successful meal.

10/05 Stuff in a Jar

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to cook and go to business school at the same time. However, I have not determined whether it is possible to cook, attend school and blog all at once. Here is my first true attempt. I'll keep it short since I have some stupid assignments to attend to after this.

So... stuff in a jar. When you're busy, the best thing to do is to make lots of extra food and have plenty of leftovers later. Stews, soups, chilis and roasts are perfect for this. Another idea is to can things and keep them even longer - ideally a couple weeks or more. Hence stuff in a jar... Here are three examples:

1) Yogurt. I've been making yogurt since early September - so just about a month now - and I'm still using the original bacteria culture I started with. In the process I've rediscovered a simple thing from my youth: Plain yogurt and sugar. Yumm. I think this'll keep at least a week in the fridge, probably longer. Oh and yogurt machines (incubators) cost as little as $15.

2) Apple sauce. I bought a bunch of apples recently that were starting to go soft. Apple sauce is an easy way to extend their shelf life for at least a week - maybe more. This is key when you're poor and can't afford to be wasting apples left and right. Apples, water & sugar is all you need.

3) Pickles. I want to learn how to make pickles. I've tried before and kindda failed (ie taste wasn't quite right). My latest attempt is with some random recipe found online, we'll see how it works out. It's just a quick pickling which will be ready in a few days and wont keep more than a week or two when done. It think it's a step in the right direction though.

8/23 Evanston Farmer's Market

not feeling particularly well today thanks to my new classmates and their tequila drinking habits. in any event i decided to walk it off by going to the farmer's market this morning. when i arrived last week, i was pleasantly surprised to find out that the evanston farmer's market is only a couple blocks away from the house. so, at least through october, i wont have to rely on whole foods for my food. the market is actually quite large - they claim to have about 30 vendors - and seems very popular, always a good thing to see. the farmers seem to come from pretty far away, michigan and indiana for example, though some are more local. unfortunately i couldn't buy much of anything since i'm leaving on a big jet plane tomorrow. i did pick up a few tomatoes and some arugula to enjoy for lunch however. overall, i couldn't be happier to have this essentially next door. good news for me!

8/22 Cajun Shrimp&Bacon Ravioli

my fridge and pantry are still rather empty as i fill out the kitchen. however i did have some bacon and frozen shrimp on hand and so decided to make full use of the herbs and spices in the pantry. i made a quick tomato pasta dough (1 egg, 3/4 flour and a squirt of tomato paste per serving) and rolled it out to make some ravioli. i've determined fresh pasta is actually easier to make for one person than for multiple people since the amount of time it takes to make is directly proportional to the size of the group. in any event, for the filling i cooked up a couple slices of bacon - not too crisp - and whizzed that together with some defrosted shrimp, cooked onions&celery, and what amounted to a cajun spice mix. this already looked and smelled delicious. then i just put the ravioli together using a little egg wash to bind the two sides of the pasta dough together. Nothing tricky here, you just need to avoid overfilling the raviolis.

at this point i realized i had way too much of the filling and decided to mix in some of the egg wash and bread crumbs into it. this allowed me to make a small cajun shrimp and bacon cake of sorts. fried that up to golden crispy goodness and made a little chipotle-lemon mayo to serve along side. the pasta was topped simply with some good olive oil, fleur de sel and parseley.

8/20 southwest-like corn + potato soup

not sure what the inspiration was here, but i had some corn and potatoes and thought to myself - southwest! the end result didn't exactly taste like something you might find in albuquerque, but it was pretty good none the less. started off sweating some onions/celery/jalapenos in olive oil seasoned with coriander seeds/lemon/pepper/salt/ancho chili powder/bay leaf. let that go for a while while i cut up three yukon golds into medium sized cubes and added them to the pot. covered the whole thing with a chicken broth and let the potatoes get all soft. before adding the fresh corn and kidney beans i gave the potatoes a proper mashin' to get everything all gooey-like. then i let everyone get acquainted in the pot while i pondered what was missing. ideally a squirt of lime and cilantro, but a spoon of yogurt and parsley did the dirty work tonight. finished everything off with some fresh ground pepper for a surprisingly heather-like meal. my favorite part was crunching into the occasional corriander seed - i definitely need to play with this flavor some more.

return to (circular) form

It just isn't fun to post without a little friendly back and forth, so many happy returns to Tom. Last weekend I was feeling a bit pizza-obsessed so I made two. The first was inspired by a pizza I had at the ever-delicious Pizzaiolo. This requires slicing fresh summer squash very thinly, a job that would be a lot easier to do with a mandolin but I still haven't gotten around to buying one.

• raw, thinly sliced zucchini
• cherry tomatoes
  
• mozzarella
• lemon zest
• olive oil
• salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and parmesan for topping

In addition to my pizza obsession, I've been loving grain- and bean- based salads. They keep well, make delicious lunches as leftovers, and they're so healthy it makes me feel better for eating pizza non-stop. This pizza was accompanied by a lentil (mixed french green and umbrian brown), basil, onion and tomato salad.


The next day, I tried to pare down the pizza even further to highlight some amazing red and yellow tomatoes I've been getting in my CSA box. This pizza had:

• thinly sliced heirloom tomatoes
• thinly sliced garlic
• mozzarella and gorgonzola
• italian parsley, salt and pepper to top

Serve with a green salad.

8/8 Smoked Brisket

Since I'll finally be getting my own kitchen back in just a couple days (for the first time since the end of April), I figured it's high time we get this blog up and running again. Now I'll certainly have to adjust my cooking to a slightly reduced budget and more importantly an unpredictable schedule. Plus I'll have to find out where all the good food stores are... But that should all make it that much more fun. In any event, for now I'm still in Boston and feeding the entire family, so here we go...

So this one was quite simple, though time intensive. I started off by looking through recipes to gather some ideas on how to smoke this half brisket. Here are a few conclusions I drew:

1) Virtually every recipe uses a spice rub, however not a single spice rub mix is the same.
2) Most recipes suggest refrigerating the brisket overnight with the rub on it. Probably helps, but I've decided it's not critical.
3) Some Texans like to put an open can of beer in the smoker in order to provide humidity. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good beverage to me.
4) Internal temperature needs to come up to about 180 or so for the brisket to be done however cooking times and temps were all over the board and my grill doesn't have an internal thermometer anyway.
5) Some recipes say to flip the brisket while cooking, others say not to. For obvious reasons, I chose the latter option.

With that in mind I made a spice rub which I could not duplicate if you paid me to - essentially taking whatever spices from the spice cabinet that seemed like they could be tasty. Cinnamon, curry, paprika, chile, cumin, coriander, garlic powder, salt, pepper, cayenne, oregeno are the ones that I can remember right now - there were at least a few more.

Now apparently some people have "smoke boxes" for their wood chips. I'm not sure what a smoke box is, but I'll bet it's roughly cube shaped and allows smoke to escape. Since I do have aluminum foil however, I made a little aluminum tray for the hickory wood chips. Now I paid 3.99 for a small bag of Weber chips at Whole Foods. That probably means I got ripped off 4 times over. It also means that wood chips are cheap, so don't be afraid to use them. (A small bag is enough for 2-3 smoking "sessions")

After soaking the chips 30 minutes, I got them smoking on the right side of the gas grill (burner on low) and placed the rubbed brisket on the second shelf of the left side of the grill (burner turned off). Why the second shelf? I don't have an answer. Seemed like a good idea. I also placed a can of water on the second shelf to provide humidity. I'm skeptical that this did anything, but if the Texans do it, it must be good... Finally I placed the thermometer probe into the beef to help me figure out when it was ready and that's pretty much it folks. After that it's just wait and drool for four hours.

As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, the final product was rather delicious. Sure there's room for improvement, but I'd happily eat this on a daily basis! Oh and I know you're all wondering whether that second picture makes a great desktop wallpaper. Well it does.

5/5 Shrimp and Beet Tacos

So admittedly, I haven't posted nearly as much as I'd hoped I would. There always seems to be a good reason, but recently, it was because I was trying to kill off most of my pantry items before moving out of Davis Square. As a result, most of my dishes were pretty boring and not very inspired. I'll be traveling for a couple months now, so obviously it'll be quite hard to cook anything, though if I do - and I will seek out opportunities to cook whenever possible - I will post them up here. For now I made some pretty original tacos for Cinco de Mayo - I think so anyway! The main ingredient was roasted shrimps with cayenne, pineapple, onions, cilantro and oregano. I also made a raw beet and lime slaw, some guacamole and green tomatillo salsa - all to be wrapped in a nice soft shell corn tortilla. I guess the beets were really the only original item in this dish, but I thought it worked really well and the beets add an amazing color to the dish.

4/6 spring vegetable ragout

A veritable spring bounty that included sugar snap peas, asparagus, leeks, and spinach arrived in my Eatwell box last week. This is sort of a "fancy" dinner that made use of some leftover polenta. In addition to my CSA Box veggies, I also got fava beans, oyster mushrooms and tiny baby carrots from the regular grocery store. Besides prepping all the veg, it was actually quite easy to put together. Ragout is a one-pot dish where the veggies that take the longest to cook are added first. The "sauce" is simply water and the juices of the veggies plus lots of butter and a nice handful of herbs. The flavors were great - everything tasted fresh and green.

3/26 starch and veg improvisation

One of my favorite basic and yummy recipes involves sautéed carrots, celery, and spinach (or another soft dark green leafy, like chard) tossed with hearty noodles (either buckwheat or whole wheat) and french lentils. I had umbrian lentils in my pantry, already cooked whole wheat noodles, and leftover boiled potatoes, which I added to the mix. Blending starches can be fun! I spiked the sauce with a good dollop of creme fraiche (Tom's "secret ingredient") and topped with parmesan cheese. The results were yummy and used up leftover ingredients - a win-win!

3/31 fava bean and dill braise with poached eggs

I admit it, fava bean season gets me all in a tizzy. I know I'm supposed to complain about the picky two-step process to prep them. First you remove the clever little beans from their fuzzy shells and then peal off their charming jackets (which can be quickened by par boiling them, but I prefer the texture when you peal them raw). It's all good to me - it only means I'll be eating favas when the job is done!

Fava beans have a slightly pea-like flavor with a bit more attitude. They're a spring bean and they grow like mad in the Bay Area's Mediterranean climate. They pair nicely with other spring delights, like bunches of green garlic and dill. I sauted these three together for a few minutes before adding a couple of cups of water and letting it simmer (covered) for about 15 minutes. Then, I made a several wells right in the braise and added a couple of drops of rice vinegar and olive oil to each well. In went the eggs, which poached for about 5 minutes.

Serve over rice and eat immediately.

3/22 Another kind of pie....banana cream!

It seams like Tom and I never post desserts. For me, that used to be because I never made desserts. This is not because I don't like them; rather, it had to do with the fact that I was learning so much about cooking main dishes that adding a dessert into the mix seemed overwhelming.

However, based on my newfound confidence with homemade pastry crusts/shells, I've been expanding out of the savory and into the sweet. I decided to bring a banana cream pie to a communal dinner and even upped my own ante by making homemade caramel sauce. This was the most stressful part of the whole process (much more so than making pastry cream - another first. It came out lump free with no problems). I read a couple of food blogs about making home made caramel sauce that made the whole thing seem akin to playing russian roulette ("have a bowl filled with ice water ready to plunge your hand into in case caramel splatters everywhere; wear long sleeves; don't think of "rhinoceros"). However, for a first attempt I think it was okay - nice dark golden brown but not burnt.

So let's review the elements of this banana cream pie (from a Bon Appetit mag recipe which I am embarrassed to say I thoroughly enjoy):

Whole wheat chocolate pie crust
- layer of caramel sauce
- layer of pastry cream
- sliced bananas
- more pastry cream
-more bananas
- whipped cream and more caramel sauce.


Left overs make a great breakfast.

3/24 Shepherd's Pie

So what happens when you cook a 5lb+ leg of lamb for 3 people? Well you have leftovers of course! And what do you do with slow cooked leg of lamb?!? Well, you already read the title above, so yes, you make shepherd's pie.

Now, I'm pretty sure a lot of you have already heard my rant about shepherd's pie. If not, here it goes: IF A RESTAURANT TRIES TO SELL YOU SHEPHERD'S PIE COOKED WITH BEEF, RUN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE TOWARDS THE NEAREST EXIT. It's really quite simple... Shepherds care for sheep. Sheep in turn provide wool, milk and meat among other things. Cowherds care for cows. Cows and sheep are different. If you want a Cowherd's Pie, by all means order one, I'm sure they're tasty. But if you order a shepherd's pie - at the very least, you should expect to be eating lamb soon thereafter...

So anyway, I cooked the lamb with diced onion, chopped garlic, quartered cremini mushrooms, frozen peas, white wine, tomato sauce, fresh thyme and salt/pepper while I prepared some mashed potatoes (2 russets did the trick). Once both were done, I topped the lamb ragu with mashed potatoes and cheese and baked the whole thing in the oven for 25 minutes at 400 degrees. Now I used Gruyeres instead of some sort of lame British cheese and I used homemade tomato sauce in my "ragu" whereas traditionally you would just use stock... Thus my pie is not quite a real shepherd's pie, but at least I DIDN'T USE BEEF DAMN IT!!

So there you go. This wasn't as good as yesterday's lamb & flageolets dinner, but it wasn't far off and it's a great example of how you can turn leftovers into something quite tasty.

Oh, one last thing. If, for some dumb reason, you drop your chef knife -- don't try to catch it with your leg. The results will tend to fall somewhere between less-than-ideal and horrific. Additionally, this can, and probably will, delay the enjoyment of your dinner.

3/23 Easter Leg of Lamb

Cooked up some lamb this weekend for Easter. Followed two recipes that I’ve used in the past, and they worked just as well as in the past. First the lamb. This one came out of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. It’s the “seven hour leg of lamb.” Just like it sounds, you basically cook the leg of lamb at a low temp (300 degrees) for 7 hours in a sealed cooking vessel of some sort. Before it goes in, you stuff it with slivers of garlic and throw in a few carrots and onions, white wine and herbs for good measure. Cover, bake and voila! Essentially you get confit leg of lamb that falls off the bone.

Traditionally in France, lamb is often served with flageolets beans. These are essentially small premature kidney beans that once cooked are creamy and delicious. For these I followed a Thomas Keller recipe out of his Bouchon cookbook. Essentially, you quick-soak these by bringing them to a boil and letting them sit for an hour, then you cook them for 2-3 hours with aromatics – but no salt (this apparently toughens the beans). Then you finish them in butter, salt/pepper, thyme and comfit garlic… like I said, very creamy and tasty. (btw it's worth clicking on the picture to make it bigger if you don't do this anyway!)

While we're at it...

Chef Heather

Here is an interpretation of my "hobbies" brought to you by Ms. C.E.R.

3/20 Clams and Chinese Sausage

I do like clams and these are no exception. Started this off by sauteeing an onion and some celery with some La Chang chinese sausage in olive oil. After a few minutes I added some clam juice I had left over from I dunno what. After that evaporated and the onions were nice and soft I threw in some garlic sambal (chili sauce) to balance off the sweetness from the sausage and a few large glugs of white wine. Brought everything to a boil and added the Mahogany Clams from Maine. I find these to be a great bargain at $5.99 for a whole bag at Whole Foods. Closed the lid and waited for them to start popping open. At that point, it's just like waiting for popcorn and I started drooling. As they opened i took them off the heat one at a time so they wouldn't get chewy. You've gotta love animals that have built in timers - brilliant!. Once they were all out, added a heaping tablespoon of creme fraiche and served it all up with some tasty bread. mmmm mmmm good!

3/16 Spring veg ragu w/ homemade papardelle

This was sort of a "its spring, glorious spring" kind of dish. Lots of picky and time-consuming prepping (artichokes, fava beans, leeks, and fennel) are braised together in a bit of water. Its sort of interesting to see the bright green of the artichokes and the favas fade to a more respectable muted gray-green in their cooked form.

After being inspired by Tom's "isn't this easy, even you can do it" homemade pasta postings, I decided to pull down the pasta machine and make homemade wide egg noodles to go with the ragu. It really was easy (although I got tired wrists kneading the dry pasta dough for ten minutes per my recipe's instructions). The noodles had great flavor and texture. I didn't run them through the thinnest setting of my machine which left them pretty hefty - I might do that next time. Which should be soon!

3/15 Saturday night is pizza night

Just when you thought that Tom and I couldn't possible make any more pizzas, think again! A pizza is always good. It works with whatever is in season and is a good bet when you're cooking for people you haven't met before (and thus cannot gauge potential food preferences and dispreferences).

I was inspired both by Tom's pizza night and my own success with getting yeasted tart crusts to rise, so I decided to make my own pizza dough. I really hate it when it turns out that homemade is like 10 times better than the convenience of store bought. My own dough was much lighter and more willing to be stretched out (without rebounding back into a ball - what is this a product of? Glutens? Only science can say). It was a joy to work with.

Here are the two pizzas. The first (above) had sauted mixed greens (kale, mustard, chard, and spinach) plus goat cheese, mozzarella and olives. The second had roasted portobello mushrooms,
sauted spring onions and garlic, fotina, and arugula. I prefer the mush pizza, but they were both pretty tastey.

3/14 More on tart crusts

I spent the weekend in the kitchen, despite the beautiful California spring weather and the weeds taking over my backyard patio.

I started Saturday off with a smoked salmon tart. You may remember this tart (or quiche) - I've posted about it previously. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to document more fully the making of a non-yeasted tart dough, especially since my proficiency level has increased exponentially from the early days (read: September).

A good crust starts with cold butter, cold water, flour, and salt. That is it. The key is not to add too much water. I make mine in a tiny food processor and stop adding water as soon as damp, loose crumbs form.

The second step is to roll out the crust to the desired thickness (large enough to fold over the edges and create a lip when the crust is placed in the tart pan). I finally have enough rolling pin skills to do this well. Here is the crust pre-oven:

Next, the crust is frozen briefly before baking for 25 minutes. Here is a shot of my home-made pie weight (kidney beans in foil) and sauted green garlic and spinach, waiting to fill the tart:Last but not least, the pre-baked tart shell is filled with the sauted greens, smoked salmon and a custard mix of eggs, milk, and creme fraiche (I beat 2 eggs and 1/2 cup creme fraiche in a 2 cup pirex, then pour in enough milk to bring to a total of 1 3/4 cups) and baked for about 40 minutes.

Finally, serve with a salad dressed lightly with honey and spring onion vinaigrette:
Take a brief tour through my past tart / quiche exploits. While they were all pretty yummy, I think I'm finally getting to the point where I'm making something quite lovely that gets the details right.

3/14 A spring quiche/tart/thing

This was made more recently (on March 3). I have been making a lot of different tarts and quiches lately, with either yeasted or non-yeasted crusts. I had been avoiding the yeasted crusts since I was having a hard time getting the dough to rise properly. This time around, I put the dough in my oven on "warm" and let it rise in there, which helped considerably. I think the oven was probably still too warm even though I had some good rising action happening, so next time I do this I will leave the door propped open a little.

A yeasted dough can be simply spread in the tart pan and the ingredients poured right in to bake. A non-yeasted dough needs to be prebaked. I was having a lot of problems with bubbles forming in the bottom of my non-yeasted doughs, even when I was pricking holes in the crust to let the steam escape. One of my friends reminded me of the old "foil and beans" trick to weight down pre-baked pie crusts, which I have employed once now to great success.

Another trick when baking a filled quiche (either yeasted or non) is to really wait until you see a nice brown crust to pull it out of the oven (as opposed to relying on the old, "45 minutes and it's done" rule).

The real moral here is that this particular quiche, which had asparagus and red onions, was the product of many a trial and error. I'm a "learn by repeating" kind of girl - even though I consider myself relatively adept in the kitchen, even I have cooking disasters.

A recent example came when I tried to make muffins with buttermilk in the batter. I blended my dry ingredients together and then went to mix in the buttermilk. Thinking it would be faster to use my electric mixer, I blended for a few seconds and then noticed the buttermilk separating into solids and water. It was disgusting. I had to throw the whole thing away and didn't have any muffins. I still don't know precisely what went wrong, but I know next time I will not not not use an electric mixer.

3/14 A veg pizza

Okay, I made this on February 3. That was a long time ago. Over a month. I know.

In any case, it seems only timely that I post a veg west coast pizza in response to Tom's pizza extravaganza. I like to make pizza, but I tend not to make my own crust - I buy TJ's premade dough, which is lazy but not half-bad. This means pizza does not have to be started in enough to time actually let the dough rise. I normally don't start cooking on a weeknight until 7:30-8, which means that getting bread rising action is not really going to happen.

This is a classic Greens pizza, with roasted tomatoes and garlic and thinly sliced, roasted potatoes. Add to this manchego (spanish sheep's cheese with a profoundly pleasing salty bite), gaeta olives, and basil. I was really happy with the crust-to-topping ratio with this pizza, and I actually ate leftovers on the plane to D.C. for the Smart Growth conference. It was way better than my usual cross-country meal of three bags of Jet Blue's signature Tierra Blue Potato Chips.

(it's worth looking at up close to see the perfect level of meltyness and crust browning)

3/8 Pizza Night

So Haskell had the grand idea to make pizza last night. Pepperoni just wasn't going to cut it, so we made a quick trip to Fromagio Kitchen in Cambridge, where we found a few top-notch toppings. We bought some fancy pants fontina cheese, some brown clamshell (honshimeji) mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and basil. We then took our toppings one step further - as I tend to do with these things - and picked up some duck prosciutto and some lardo. Now lets talk about how good those two things are. Duck prosciutto... Had it a couple weeks ago at Central Kitchen and loved it. 'Twas just as amazing this time. Each slice is about equal proportion cured fat and meat. This particular version had a good amount of black pepper on it too. And lardo??? I've actually never had the stuff before... well not when it's just "lardo." Basically its just pork back fat, cured like prosciutto and sliced thinly. So essentially, it's like eating the fat from prosciutto. I can't tell you how good this is.

So onto the cooking. Haskell made the dough while I started preparing some stuff to snack on. Some olives, ciabatta, olive oil, mimolette cheese and the aforementioned lardo. We also cracked open a 1985 Vosnes Romanee, a red burgundy that had aged wonderfully. So clearly, we were off to a good start...

Ok, onto the pizzas. The first one was pretty basic but very well executed by Haskell. We started off pretty simply with mozzarella, previously home-made tomato sauce, basil and fontina. We noticed the dough was lacking salt, but otherwise a flawless pie. Oh, and at this point Dave came over to help with the eating – lest you think that two people could eat all this food alone.

Onto the second pizza. Things got a bit more creative here. Toppings included duck prosciutto, ricotta, fontina, slivers of green olives, and lightly dressed arugula on top of everything after the pizza came out of the oven. The duck was crisped up like bacon, the ricotta was nice and sweet and the arugula had its characteristic pepperiness. Very tasty.

Pizza three... clamshell mushrooms, tomato sauce, fontina and basil. The mushrooms were lightly sautéed before being added to the pizza and had a nice bite to them. We're starting to be quite full now, not helped by the fact that Dave is now watching Roadhouse on the TV - not a movie that one should watch while eating.

Final pizza... ricotta, olives, lardo and tomato sauce. we we're stuffed by now and probably didn’t really appreciate this one. The lardo mostly melted into the pizza which was definitely not a bad thing. By the end of the night, we had eaten all but two of the slices, which if you do some math is a lot of pizza. Anyway, the best pizza of the night? In my opinion, the duck prosciutto was the winner - but I'm not sure what the others thought. In any event, besides the whole over-eating thing, I would say it was a pretty successful evening.