Kate F____, Girl Reporter

We move to Cambridge tomorrow. Things look like this around here:

But worse now. I apologize for the lack of posts over the last month; hopefully I will return to something approaching normal life soon!

Mom’s pizza. For as long as I can remember, my mom has been making pizza at home, always with no sauce, and with a series of ever-more-sophisticated toppings as the years went on. She uses big perforated pans to bake it, and there was always plenty left over, filling rectangular tupperwares in the fridge with the promise of delicious lunches for a few days afterwards. Long before my parents arrived for graduation we had agreed that we’d make pizza one night, so I could learn mom’s technique.

B had to go to Boston for work on Monday and Tuesday of the visit, so we decided to make pizza Monday night, and then make a nicer dinner when he got home Tuesday. We went to the store and gathered cheese and toppings, drove back to the house, and saw the street that leads to ours full of fire trucks and policemen and power company rigs. Uh-oh. Then I saw the giant moving truck in the exit from the apartment complex near our house. Then I realized that there was about a 99% chance that it was our friends Brian and Liz’s truck. Uh-oh, redux. Turns out the moving truck had hit a low-lying phone line (this was not the first time it had happened but the phone company was refusing to raise the line), and the line was so strong that instead of snapping, it pulled down the entire telephone pole, and with it all the electric wires as well.

Needless to say, we were without power at home. While the repairmen slowly removed the old pole, raised the lines, and put in a new pole, we got to work on the pizza, figuring that if all else failed we could cook it on the grill (one of my favorite summer treats, but much more of a pain than just baking two pizzas in the oven). Since we have a propane stove, the cooktop was useable, though the electronic controls put the oven out of service. Mom started by making the dough (I will put the entire recipe at the end):

Flour, water, salt and yeast (the bulk kind):

Mix together into a loose dough (it’s not pretty at this point) and dump onto a floured work surface:

Knead for about five minutes, adding a little flour to prevent sticking if you need to:

The dough pulls together into a lovely little ball, nice and smooth. If you’re mom, you can knead this and retain the nice smooth ballness of it. If you’re Tom or me, you don’t have the knack yet, and each time you take a turn kneading it will get sort of sticky. Then mom will touch it and it will become perfect again. This part of the process obviously requires practice. We determined that she kneads with her right hand while picking up and flipping with the left, a smooth movement:

When the dough is smooth and elastic, oil a bowl and place the ball in it to rise:

Cover with plastic wrap and let it rise until it almost doubles, 45 minutes-1 hour (blurry pic, sorry):

When the dough has risen but still has a little spring to it, punch it down and roll it out. We had to make little baby ones since we were grilling it and the pizza pan size would have been bigger than the grill:

Here’s where the process differs since we were grilling instead of baking. While the dough was rising we had sautéed wild mushrooms and caramelized onions. We’d also washed and dried some radicchio, to emulate a pizza we ate in Italy a couple years ago.

(A note on the radicchio: In Italy it was left whole on the pizza, but for some reason that didn’t work as well for us. A second batch with the leaves cut up was much easier to eat, though not as pretty.)

For grilled pizza you need all your toppings fully cooked, since they won’t be on the grill for long. We used the mesh pans I’d bought for baking the pizza, which made it easier to get the dough on and off the grill. After heating the grill up, we had the best luck with the heat turned to medium so things didn’t burn too fast. We put the dough on the grill, on the pan, and then closed the grill lid (the pan stuck out a bit):

The dough puffs up rather melodramatically (this one made a perfect rear end, to the juvenile delight of Tom and me):

And then the bubbles collapse, and the dough is ready to be turned:

At this point I pulled the pan off the grill to flip and top the dough. Turn it over, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with cheese (not a lot since it won’t have much melting time before burning) and toppings, and put back on the grill. When the cheese was almost melted, I slid the pizza off the pan onto the actual grill surface to get a little more scorchy flavor. Be careful, it burns fast!

It’s best to have everything ready to go, and to eat them as they come off the grill. Unlike the baked version, these don’t hold very well for some reason. Some of my favorite toppings include mushrooms, pesto, fresh tomato, etc. Go light with the cheese and toppings and play around. This is really fun for a party, with everyone sitting around topping the pizzas and eating them right away!

Naturally, right as we were about to cook the last little pizza, the power came back on. Oh well, this was much more fun!

The recipe:

PIZZA: From Kate’s Mom

Dough: 2.5 cups unbleached flour
1 T active dry yeast
1 cups warm water
.5 teaspoon salt
olive oil

Put dry ingredients in large bowl, add 1 cup of warm water, and mix. Water can’t be too hot or it will kill the yeast. The mixture will be very ragged. Sprinkle some flour on your counter and turn out the mixture. Knead for about 5 minutes, adding as little flour to counter or dough as needed to prevent sticking — 1/4cup total. The dough should be smooth and elastic when ready. Oil bowl with olive oil and turn dough into it. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise 1 hour or until almost double; dough should still have some spring to it. While dough is rising, cut up tomatoes, grate cheese, and prepare any other topping you choose. Preheat oven to 450.

ASSEMBLE THE PIZZA
• Roll out dough 1/2 at a time into the right shape for the pan you are using.
• Brush dough with a little olive oil.
• Cover with diced tomato that has had seeds and pulp removed*.
• Cover tomatoes with coarsely grated cheese. (I use mixture of whole milk mozzarella and Italian fontina – not Danish).
• Add your favorite toppings, but not too many or the pizza gets heavy and complicated.
• Scatter a little oregano, a few red pepper flakes and some drops of olive oil. Salt lightly.
• Bake at 450 for 20-25 minutes. Alternate pans halfway through.
• When they are done, flip each pizza out of its pan, onto to bottom oven rack and let the bottom of the dough dry out for a minute or two; it will be crispier.

PIZZA TIPS
• Use granular yeast if you can, sold in bulk in natural food stores, rather than the brand name yeast in little envelopes.
• Use unbleached white flour or even better, organic unbleached white flour.
• Use fresh tomatoes, not canned. Plum or Italian tomatoes are best.
• Use fresh mushrooms, not canned. Put them on raw & they cook perfectly during baking.
• If using sausage or pepperoni, put them on raw & they cook during baking.
• For this amount of dough, you’ll need about .75 lb. cheese and 4 or 5 plum tomatoes.

What better way to welcome my parents to our house than with the famous Sunday Suppers at Lucques triple pork burgers I’ve already blogged about at least once, maybe twice? After meeting my mom and dad for dinner in the town where my mom grew up, staying over, and walking around the town the next morning, we headed back to NH and my parents spent some time visiting one of my aunts. They meandered up to Hanover for dinner, and we were joined by my brother for a final pork burger run, this time accompanied by grilled asparagus and another stab at the oven fries I made last month. They worked better this time, though not as crusty–we put them skin-side down on the sheet and they didn’t stick as badly.

It was just weird and nice to have my parents in our little house, where I’ve hosted so many dinner parties over the course of our first year of marriage. Sadly it was really cold, so we couldn’t eat on the porch, but it was cozy inside:

Friday and Saturday nights we went out to dinner with loads of family members: Tom and Ben were both graduating (undergrad and grad school), so there were hoards of people around. We greatly enjoyed both dinners, first at our old standby The Perfect Pear, and at The Inn at Weathersfield, which was gorgeous. They set us up with a huge almost-square table (there were 13 of us) in a room between the pub and dining room, full of warm wood and with plenty of space but no other tables.

Sunday, after commencement we had invited people to come over for a casual barbecue. Of course it was damp and grey out, so we ended up with 30 or so people inside instead of out on the lawn, but thanks to a fantastic potato salad from my aunt Chris, tons of sausage and hot dogs, big bowls of beans and snap peas, etc., we kept everyone fed and happy. Once the last guests had taken off, it was just Ben, his mom and brother, me and my parents (Tom had another party to attend), and since it was Ben’s mom’s birthday we put together a little dinner for the 6 of us. My mom went at got chicken, salad greens, and tomatoes, and dinner was a B_______-family classic: Mom marinated the chicken breasts in some lemon juice and olive oil, dad grilled them to perfection, and we laid the slices over a simple salad. To top it off, we sliced up a loaf of ciabatta, oiled and grilled the slices, and rubbed them with garlic (that smelled amazing).

So simple there aren’t any recipes to share, but the perfect light dinner after snacking all afternoon.

That morning I had baked a gluten-free cake and made frosting for a birthday cake. I toasted coconut in a frying pan (I think a baking sheet would have been easier!) and stuck it to the frosting in an attempt at festivity, which sort of worked, though I think a two-layer cake would have been much prettier:

We sat on the porch for hours, drinking wine and laughing at the hysterical impressions B’s brother performs. It was the perfect wind-down to a very busy weekend.

I can’t wait to post all about the week my parents spent with us over Graduation Weekend, etc. As you can imagine, there was lots of great food to be eaten while mom was in the house. Unfortunately (forthe blog, anyway), for the last five days I was in Boston, where we have closed on our apartment, and I just haven’t been able to write everything up yet.

But Sunday night, the third we spent at the new place, I made us dinner for the first time: A simple We-Haven’t-Moved-In-Yet dinner; Rising Moon ravioli (made in my home town!) with butter and cheese, bread with oil and more cheese to dip, and red wine. Here is the sophisticated dining set-up for the time being:

I accidentally bought vegan ravioli but they weren’t bad. A weird trace of curry in an otherwise italian-flavored pasta, but ok!

Up next: Packing! Wheeee. (Sigh.)

Artichokes. I love them, always have. My mom buys these grilled baby artichokes in olive oil from an import store that I could eat straight from the jar for weeks before getting sick of them. I love them streamed, grilled, fried, just the hearts on a sandwiches… But I’d never made myself an artichoke, somehow, and last night I finally did. Ben got home around 9 from his two days in Boston, and I grilled garlic-cheddar sausages, baked potatoes and steamed artichokes so they’d be ready around when he got back.

To steam artichokes: Cut off the top of each artichoke, maybe about the top inch. I used a serrated knife. Use scissors to trim the tips of the other leaves if you want to avoid painful stabby injuries from the spines (artichokes are nettles!), and cut off the stem and a bit of the base so it sits flat.

Put water and a couple cloves of garlic (peeled and cut in half) in the bottom of a pan, under a steamer; bring to a boil and put in the artichokes. Steam for 30-40 minutes, until you can easily pull off a leaf (use tongs, there’s lots of steam in there!). I forgot to keep an eye on the water level and ended up boiling the pan dry, so I’ll be more careful next time. I melted some butter to dip the leaves in and cut the heart up into once the leaves were gone–I think Ben was freaked by the choke, which is all fuzzy and spiny and a little hard to scrape out, but it was so fun to eat an artichoke again!

When I put the potato and artichoke on the plate with the sausage, I realized I’d accidentally made a winking smiley face (excuse the blurry picture):

How funny is that?

Oh dear. We’re in the midst of “Disorientation” and preparations for graduation this weekend, and we’ve been out of townyet again–this time to Nantucket for a beyond fun trip with 130 Tuckies/partners. I haven’t been around enough to cook, but here’s a fun little recipe from Greta, who made these ridiculously delicious sausage balls at the Lake last weekend. I singlehandedly ate about 20.

Sausage Balls, from Greta.

Combine 3 cups of Bisquick, 2 cups shredded cheese, and 1 pound of breakfast sausage. Mix this rather sticky trio until it’s well combined, using your hands–this will take a bit of time. Form into smallish balls and bake at 375 until done.

Greta may pretend to eat it raw but I don’t advise it!

Here are two lonely cooked ones the next day; I forgot to take a photo while they were hot because I was busy shoveling them down.

That’s not very specific but it’s awfully tasty.

Mom and Dad arrive on Thursday–there should be some cooking over the weekend!