Salami Alfredo Pizza (Pizza Night!)

Gooey cheese and spicy salami on top of creamy Alfredo sauce for a hot mess of a pizza.
A subtitle could be: where to find the tools you need for successful pizza at home.

Almost as many times as I've shared a Friday Night Pizza Night recipe here I've also said to preheat a pizza stone if you've got one [one glaring exception would be deep dish pizzas which I cook in cast iron skillets]. Now I'm going to say that if you like to make pizza at home and don't already have a stone, GO GET ONE. I took my stone out to make room for the turkey last month and didn't even notice it was gone when I made a deep dish Thanksgiving leftover pizza [with green bean casserole--who knew?]. Last weekend I preheated my oven while I was dithering over what kind of pizza to make for my birthday**. I assembled my pies, opened the oven door to slide the first one off the peel onto the . . . . oops.

Well that was unexpected. I ended up using a cookie sheet and my crust was no where near where it usually is crispness-wise.  The stone really makes a difference. I even wrote an ode to mine.  Here's a link to King Arthur Flour where I bought my stone, and an Amazon affiliate link for good measure. The shape shouldn't matter, but I like how my rectangle fits in my oven and how I can easily fit multiple dishes on it when I'm baking. 

My stone is broken, but unlike a casserole dish I can just push the edges to close approximation and rock on. Compared to the cost of buying a couple of pizzas every weekend, it paid for itself 15 years ago. Ditto on the pizza peel [Amazon affiliate link to my sanity-saving pizza peel] which makes getting the pizza in and out of the oven terribly easy. Triple ditto the parchment paper, though I keep on buying that stuff so it's not like it pays for itself [silicone mats do not work in this instance]. My kids just don't hear such a wide array of colorful language when I use parchment paper.

There is a pizza recipe here, I promise. This was a hot mess of a pizza, but boy did it taste good. The pictures are lousy, but I decided to share it anyway because of the flavor. We had salami left from an antipasti dinner, prepared alfredo sauce because I cannot resist a magical markdown sticker, and mozzarella because people don't make a lot of caprese salads in the winter so there's marked down mozzarella at the fancy cheese counter. You'd think that I'd know better about using thawed mozzarella slices, but you'd be wrong. This pizza made a gooey, drippy mess all over the back of the oven when I lifted it up to broil the top (photo at the end).  It was worth it.

For general hints, tips, and photo collages please check out my Pizza Primer post, a brain dump of all things related to making pizza in my home kitchen.  For a photo album of pizza dough troubleshooting tips, please see my FB page.

Ham Ball and Black Eyed Pea Chirashi Rice

Continuing to upcycle a holiday ham, this time into New Year's good luck, while getting folks to eat a wide variety of vegetables as well.

I am not a nutritionist nor much of an advice giver--but in my 8 years of experience with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and 16 years of experience with, shall we say reluctant vegetable eaters [because if the child won't eat any type of vegetable, well, that's not a picky eater--you have to pick something in order to be picky, you know?] . . . .

This has been such a run on sentence I've lost the point. Let me sum up.

If you have a wide variety of vegetables in your house, you are more likely to include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals. If you include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals, the folks eating your meals will ingest a wide variety of vegetables. Because we joined a CSA, my kids eat a wide variety of vegetables.

It's a bold statement--but if I'd served this recipe to my kids before we joined a CSA, or in the early couple of years, they probably would have picked out the ham balls and the rice and left the rest. Sure, while they've spent the last 8 years eating from the farm share they've also been growing up--that happens--but the unrelenting exposure to a wide variety of vegetables is the foundation of the change. Extrapolating from the end of season survey, we got more than 40 different vegetables over the course of the 20 weeks.  That's a wide variety, and more than I would have bought had it been up to me (ahem, mustard greens, turnips, and beets I'm talking to you!).

This recipe is a great example of how having extra vegetables on hand means I'll add more veggies to our meals. It's also another way to get your New Year's good luck on without extra effort the day after the hoopla. For another New Year's Black Eyed Pea recipe, please see my Black Eyed Pea and Kale Salad in Salumi Cups.

Teriyaki Roasted Mushrooms

Teriyaki sauce tossed with roasted mushrooms for an easy to fix savory appetizer.

It's been over a week since our Fall Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share ended. One moment I'm blogging my Thanksgiving After Action Report, the next moment I'm cleaning up from Robert Barker's latest escapade [he chewed a hole in my nukable neck wrap and I vacuumed rice & flax seed from the living room rug. Now there are piles of rice & flax seed all around the yard]. You can read about Robert's story--and get a dog food recipe--here. The end of the Fall CSA means two things:  time for mushrooms and time to squeeze in all my end-of-year posts before I take a holiday break.

No, it doesn't mean I'll stop blogging about what we're eating from the farm share. Although we only get fresh foods from the farm for about 6 months of the year, to paraphrase the words of my birthday t-shirt, "We eat local because I CAN" (seriously cute shirts, no affiliation to disclose). The point is that I've been freezing and canning and filling up the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve like a boss an ant all Fall, and after I take a couple of weeks off to host my family-of-origin (flung from the far corners of the globe to Southwestern Ohio for the holidays) I'll be back on it with seasonal CSA-inspired recipes, ways to use local foods, and the occasional indulgence thrice weekly in 2015.

Mushrooms and end of year posts . . . there's a connection. We don't get mushrooms in the farm share, though if I'm lucky I can score an occasional King Oyster mushroom at the farmer's market--so I like to make mushroom treats for my spouse and I while I'm not staring at overwhelming piles of mustard greens. I'm also participating in Holiday Baking Week next week, sharing five sweet holiday recipes [though predominantly getting my ethnic on] with giveaways for you folks.

That means I need to get my savory and New Year's recipes up now, like this little effort-big taste vegetable appetizer, one of my Awesome Veggie Apps and Snacks (link to my Pinterest board). My spouse and I consider a skillet of mushrooms a mini-date--we're easy to please--and I've shared several recipes. You can find more mushroom recipes in my Mushroom Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index.