12 Days of Christmas Food

The ginger spice cookies I made from this month's Bon Appetit.  I cut down on the spices, and they were "spicy" enough.  Significant Other thought they were too sweet.   Here is a photo of last night's pizza and my first ever effort at home made dough.  I followed a recent recipe from the New York Times.  It was pretty simple and I didn't have to handle the dough much. 

Homemade pizza with Pepperoni, Mushrooms, Broccoli, Mozzarella and lots of Fresh Tomatoes

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Somehow, I screwed up the photo of the Apricot Bars.  Once I research, I'll post.  Made a quiche for a party today and the group descended on it like a herd of locusts.  I have noticed that quiche is always popular, and real men do eat it.  I usually take a vegetarian one with cheese and veggies (today's was spinach with a few mushrooms and scallions garnishing it along with two cherry tomatoes.  Red and Green, doncha know?  Of course Quiche Lorraine with bacon rocks, and sausage links also made a fine pizza if you are cooking for a group where everyone eats meat.  

A pizza stone, a peel and a good cutter make pizza cookery so much easier.  Now if I only had a brick oven . . .

Grapeshot

Pretty Good Pizza

The cold, half-eaten pizza is displayed, but not without a certain yumminess.


If you read the blog regularly, you may recall that I am not the greatest fan of pizza, at least the general greasy cheese variety. And no matter what, I don't ever want to eat it more than once every two weeks, so this puts me at odds with our society, but hey, alienation is nothing new.

I do, however, like my own pizza. Wouldn't you know? How is it different?

I buy the crust at the grocery store, either frozen or at the bread counter. A ball of yeast dough. Then, I scour what's in the house. Right now, we have a feast period.

Garlic, olive oil, home grown tomatoes, basil, sage, onion, red and green peppers, arugula.

Zowie! I bought some grated mozzarella. Yikes, the price of cheese has skyrocketed. Also bought some pepperoni. The quantities of pepperoni they force you to buy is absurd. This will yield about 6 pizzas. But it keeps. I also bought a small stalk of broccolli. Are you getting the idea? Veggies to the max.

A layer of garlic oil, a sprinkle of cheese, tomatoes and veggies, pepperoni, more cheese, and topped with parmesan flakes. Oh yum! Into a 500 degree oven until the crust is brown. Leave off the pepperoni and you have a wonderful vegetarian pizza.

Makes us two meals, because the topping is so generous. Love those hot melting tomatoes. Yum, yum, yum.

Grapeshot

Pizza ! Pizza!

Have you noticed the price of groceries goes up every time you step foot into the supermarket? Scary, isn't it? Sometimes I make dinner out of whatever is in the pantry plus a couple of frugal purchases. Today it was pizza. I bought 2 plum tomatoes and a box of sliced mushrooms, (on sale) half of which can be used with another entree.

We had a weird mixture of stuff of hand: a little mozzarella, low-fat ricotta, Parmesan curls and shredded Parmesan, somewhat long-in-the-tooth pepperoni. Frozen dough, although it you make your own if costs pennies, but that is, like, work.

So I arranged everything on top of the dough and stuck the whole business in a very hot oven. Was it good! Better than store-bought. Of course I don't stint on the pepperoni or the mushrooms or even the fresh tomatoes.

You can always make soup out of what is on hand or an omelet, too, assuming you have eggs.

When I was in college for a while a bunch of us would get together to cook a weekend dinner at someone's apartment. We bought a bag of noodles, a couple cans of tuna and some peas. Dinner cost mere cents, which left more money for beer. Students know how to get by.

Sometimes when you have the least money is when you have the most. Think about that.