Cherry Tomato Basil Pesto Pizza

Don't know what to do with cherry tomatoes and basil growing out of control in the garden?

This is an easy recipe, if you have time. The things that are time consuming are roasting the tomatoes and making the pizza dough. There are ways to shorten the time if you know a quicker, easier way to make pizza crust but I don't recommend any store bought ones.

I'm not going to include my own recipe for pizza dough, it's a yeast-raised, half-unbleached, half-whole wheat flour recipe, and it's easy, but you do have to let the yeast rise. If you must know, it's on page 163 of Colorado Cache Cookbook, published by Junior League of Denver, copyright 1978.

Actually the crust is my least favorite part of this pizza and I'm looking at gluten-free recipes that I might be able to use. Future recipe...

You can break this one down into 4 parts:

1. Roasting the tomatoes, 2. making the pizza dough, 3. making the pesto, and 4. assembling the pizza. Then all you have to do is bake it, which doesn't take long. It can be easily adapted by eliminating cheese or flour if you want a vegan or gluten-free version.

Part 1: Roasting the tomatoes

2 pints (about 2 pounds) of cherry tomatoes- can be a mix of red, yellow, orange, purple, etc.

1 large clove of garlic, minced

4 T. extra virgin olive oil, or more

salt and black pepper to taste

Place the olive oil in the bottom of a glass baking pan. Stab each cherry tomato once before throwing it in the pan. Add garlic, salt, and pepper, and toss all ingredients together. Place in oven at 400 degrees and roast for about an hour. When they're done they'll look shriveled and caramelized. Put aside and let cool.

Part 2: The dough

I'm not going into detail here. Here's a picture of the yeast and then the dough after I added all the ingredients. I let it rise until it was at least double it's size. Then I punched it down and rolled it out, and placed it on a lightly greased pizza pan with some cornmeal sprinkled over it (keeps dough from sticking)

Part 3: The pesto

About a cup of fresh basil- or one large packed handful

1 clove of garlic

salt and pepper to taste

extra virgin olive oil- about 1/3 cup

1 cup of grated parmesan cheese (optional)

1 cup of walnuts or almonds or other nuts (optional)

I like my pesto without nuts. Some people think I'm nuts. It's a texture thing, I don't like nuts on my pizza. Just like chocolate, I prefer it nut-free.

Take one large handful of freshly picked basil leaves and rinse them off, shake them dry. Then all you do is grind up the garlic in the food processor, really small, and then throw all the other ingredients in, and pulse them so that you get small sized diced pieces with some texture, scrape the ingredients down off the sides of the food processor bowl if you need to.

Don't blend it until it's green goo. It should be chunky and the basil leaves should still be recognizable as some kind of shredded leaves.

Part 4: Assembling

Once you roll out the dough, place it on the pan as described in part 2.

Then spread the basil pesto evenly over the dough, it should be a uniform, thin layer.

Mix and smash the tomatoes lightly with a fork, tossing the ingredients together in the glass pan, then spread the tomato mixture over the basil pesto.

After that, you can add mozzarella cheese, any toppings- we used pitted kalamata olives here.

Bake the pizza at 450 degrees for about 15-20 minutes, or until the dough is baked through.

It won't last long.

Serve with the quality control officer as your witness.

Crunchy Spicy Sashimi Salad

When I'm craving sushi and I want a salad, this is the perfect combination.

 

 

Ingredients

8 oz of sashimi grade tuna, salmon, or whatever you like

juice of 1 lemon

1 cucumber, peeled and diced small

2 ripe tomatoes, diced

1 avocado, peeled and diced

1 large jalapeno, seeded and chopped

ponzu sauce to taste

soy sauce to taste

hot sauce to taste

thai sweet chili sauce to taste

toasted sesame oil to taste

Prepare all ingredients listed above with the help of your kitchen supervisor. Using a sharp knife, slice the sashimi into small bite-size pieces. Place into glass bowl.

After all the vegetables are prepared, place them in a bowl, then squeeze lemon over the top, removing any lemon seeds. Add the different sauces starting with a tablespoon of each and a few drops of sesame oil, and increase amounts of each according to taste. I like more of the ponzu and hot sauce.

Mix all ingredients up, allowing the flavors to blend. Let it stand in the refrigerator for up to 15 minutes. If it sits much longer than that, the fish begins to "cook" in the citrus juice and will have a creamy look to it. It's not as pretty that way, but it tastes the same.

You can serve it over fresh greens and grated carrots. Or you can eat it by itself. Feeds two hungry people, or one kitchen supervisor if you're not careful.

Green Chile, Interrupted

This recipe is my northern Colorado version of New Mexico Green Chile Stew, one of my two favorite foods in the universe. The other is sushi, BTW.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

3 lb. pork shoulder roast

3 lb. Hatch green chiles, roasted

6 large poblano peppers

2 large red bell peppers

6 large russet potatoes

1 large sweet onion

6 cloves of garlic

2 liters of low sodium chicken broth

ground cumin to taste

salt to taste

ground black pepper to taste

vinyl gloves for peeling and de-seeding the chiles

It helps to start the day before or early the same day by roasting the pork. I do it on top of the stove with some onions and garlic thrown in, browning the meat first in it's own fat or a small amount of oil. I cover it and it only takes a couple of hours for the pork to cook on top of the stove. Once the pork is cooked, allow it to sit and steam in the juices to soak up the flavor.

Then chop the meat and remove as much fat as possible. As you can see here, this pork was shredded, not chopped into cubes. That's because I started cooking and got interrupted, actually I spaced out that I was supposed to be at work- oops! and had to leave it for my husband, who shredded it for me, even though I asked him to chop it. That's okay though, it tastes the same. You can place it in a bowl overnight in the fridge or until you're ready to use it.



Roast the poblano and red bell peppers over a gas grill until the skin is blackened. Peel and seed all the chiles, wearing gloves!!!

I use a food processor to chop the onions, garlic, and chiles because it's quicker, easier, and less likely to leave my hands burning from handling the chiles. Yes you can chop them with gloves on, but I cheat with the food processor.

Saute the onions and garlic with a small amount of fat from the pork. Yes, this is bad, bad, bad! But it's sooooooo good!

Peel the potatoes and chop into fairly large cubes. Then add the meat, chopped chiles, the chicken broth, then the potatoes, add salt, cumin, and black pepper to taste. I go real easy on the cumin otherwise it overpowers everything. I like it so it's barely detectable.

Bring to a gentle boil, then cover and simmer for at least two hours, add water as needed. I use a huge old pot and usually add another 2 liters of water in addition to the broth.













 Make sure the kitchen supervisor watches the stove.

Serve with tortillas, beans, whatever you like. The northern Colorado part of the recipe comes from beer. Not in the chile, but with it. My favorite beer comes from local breweries like New Belgium, Odells, Fort Collins Brewery, and others.

I could eat this every day, on everything, except sushi, if I could only train the girls to make it for me!

Baba Ganoush

Baba ganoush (pronounced baba gan-oosh') is very simple, it's basically a middle eastern eggplant dip.

Ingredients
2 large ripe eggplants
1 large clove of garlic
sea salt
3 T. tahini
2 lemons, squeeed for juice, seeds removed






You'll need a gas grill and a food processor if you want the same results I got. I highly recommend doing it this way. After making it this way, I'll never go back.

I made baba ganoush several times in the past with poor results, and today I figured out why. I never grilled the eggplant before, always broiled it in the oven. It doesn't taste the same from the oven. The oven doesn't give that smoky flavor that makes it so good. Today I put two large eggplants on the gas grill outside after poking a million little holes in them with a fork, and grilled the living #$%&*! out of them. I would say they were on there for a good 30 minutes. I turned them every 10 minutes or so to grill them evenly.

Then I let them cool on the counter for a while. They smelled so good I wanted to eat them before I did anything else.









I squeezed two small lemons and removed the seeds from the juice. I dumped the juice into the food processor, followed that with a big clove of garlic, a generous sprinkling of salt, and about 3 tablespoons of tahini. I'm not a big tahini fan. I just don't like the taste of untoasted sesame seeds. I blended that all up in the food processor until it was a thin liquid.

Once the eggplants were cool enough, I cut them down the middle, and scraped out all the insides, being careful to scrape all the way down to the inner side of the skin, because the browned parts of the outer eggplant that cooked the most have the most flavor. I threw the dry charred outer skin away.

I put the eggplant guts into the food processor with the tahini-lemon-garlic-salt mixture and ran it for a long time, until it was almost shiny on the surface of the mixture.






                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Then I dug it out of the food processor into a bowl using a spoonula, and stuck it in the fridge, since I couldn't eat it right away (I had to run first). It smelled irresistible. And after a good run, with some pita and kalamata olives and olive oil drizzled on top, who needs 72 virgins? Baba ganoush is heaven. And I'll never buy store-bought again.

S-Cap Smoothie

This is the easiest recovery drink, and nutritious too. It will put back fluid, electrolytes, calories, a little protein, some calcium, and a few carbohydrates. I start drinking these when the weather gets warm, around Easter.

Ingredients

1 cup of nonfat plain yogurt
1 cup orange juice
a couple drops of vanilla extract (to taste)
a frozen banana, broken into 4-5 pieces
1-2 cups of frozen fruit: strawberries, peaches, mangoes, etc.
2 S-caps, contents dumped in and capsule shell discarded






First make sure you have adult supervision nearby.

Scoop yogurt into the blender, then add orange juice, vanilla, frozen fruit, and dump the contents of 2 S-Caps on top of everything.


Turn blender on low, until ingredients are mixed, then increase speed until fully blended. Adjust ingredients to taste and thickness preference.

Pour into your favorite glass and add a colorful straw. I promise the straw makes it taste better!