Friday Night Challenge: Pizza Rolls for Grown-Ups

I like most things; however, some freezer items in grocery stores taste to me like so much cardboard and bad seasonings.
Take a pizza roll, for instance. I know there are probably legions of fans out there, but really? Dough with no body, seasonings that taste either over-processed or overly-garlicky. Ick.
When given the Friday Night Challenge of:
pizza crust    red peppers     basil    a choice of meat     fresh tomatoes
pizza rolls for grown-ups seemed a good choice.
I consulted the best for the crust: Dorie Greenspan's Baking with Julia book. In it is a great recipe for pizza dough--complete with sponge. I had never taken the time to make pizza dough from a sponge, but I certainly will from now on. The sponge acts as an intensifier. It allows the yeast to mix with just enough flour to really  get going. Later, you add the remainder of the flour. As a result, the dough does taste better. 
The recipe for the sponge and the dough is quite easy and follows:
Take 1 1/2 t. active yeast and add to 1 1/2 c.of tepid water. Stir lightly and let is set for around 5 minutes. Then add 2T. olive oil and stir in 2 1/4 c. flour a bit at a time until all is incorporated. Let rest for around 1 1/2 hours.Stir in 2 more cups of all-purpose flour along with 2 t. salt. Knead for around 6 minutes. Put into an oiled bowl and let rise again for around 1 1/2 hours. 
For the filling, crumble up some ham sausage (seems to cost less and tastes really good). Separately, chop up a green bell pepper (the plan was to buy a red bell pepper, but when I checked they were up to $1.75 a pepper! Green bells are plentiful in the garden, so they won out. I decided to not cook the tomatoes ahead of time, so I used LaRoma (what a great meaty tomato). For the basil, I took a little liberty and used pesto to get a little more intensity of taste.
So, once the dough was ready, I rolled it out, cut it with a pastry round into circles, slathered each piece with pesto, added the pepper and sausage, and then a raw tomato slice. Take two of the rounds and seal them together.  Bake them on a stone in a 450 degree oven for around 15 minutes.
Pizza rolls for grown ups. Enjoy!

      

Soup's On! Zucchini Chicken with Blue Cheese

It is the season of zucchini...tons of it. Lucky us! What more versatile vegetable? Good in cake, good in bread, good in soup. Here's a recipe that we sampled tonight...good and filling. 


Take 1 medium onion and chop into rough dice. Melt 2T butter in a pan and add the onion with 1t. olive oil. Cook until soft. Cut one large zucchini lengthwise, remove seeds, and roughly dice. Add 2t. of dried oregano and the zucchini to the onion and cook. After about 2 minutes, add 6 c. chicken broth. Let simmer until the zucchini is very soft. Add salt and pepper to taste. 


Carefully put the soup, a bit at a time, into a blender to make it smooth. Put the soup back into a pan and add 3 chicken breasts (already cooked) roughly diced, to the soup. Heat the soup to the desired temperature for serving.


After putting into a soup bowl, add a couple of teaspoons of blue cheese crumbles. The cheese will melt into the hot soup and make the flavor even richer.


Enjoy!

Buttered Bluegill in Parchment with Summer Squash

What a fantastic time of year--fresh vegetables arriving in the kitchen daily, fresh fish being caught. The Friday Night Challenge ingredients:

fish--bacon--asparagus--butter--lemon--summer squash

started me thinking about a process I recently saw in a Julia Child cookbook that uses parchment paper and high heat to assure that the fish cooks through without drying--a major downfall of fish, especially more delicate whitefish-types.

What follows is a relatively simple process for the meal:

Cook about 3 ounces of bacon cut into small pieces. Once it is about half finished, add fresh asparagus and a pat of butter. Add some small diced pieces of summer squash and let everything cook slowly. Add just a bit of lemon juice (about 1/4 t.).

Set the oven to 425 degrees. Prepare a piece of parchment paper with butter and lay the fish on  it along with some of the summer squash that is peeled with a vegetable peeler. Give it a pinch of salt and a squirt of lemon juice. Wrap tightly in the parchment and put on a shallow baking pan. Cook for around 15 minutes and check. The squash won't be overly tender; it will have texture.

While everything else is cooking and baking, peel and cut a cucumber into small bite-sized pieces. Give it a bit of salt and about 1/4t. dried dill. Let it set for a bit. Once the asparagus has cooked to doneness, remove it and the squash as well as about 1/2 of the bacon. Put the remainder of the bacon with the cucumber. Take the remaining bacon fat, add a touch of olive oil, a shake of salt, and a squirt of lemon juice and heat through. Pour over the cucumbers and coat.

Enjoy!

Olive-Egg Wraps Mediterranean Style

On one of my sojourns to my beloved gourmet Amish grocery in the area, I happened upon some Mediterranean grilling oil. Its combination of garlic, paprika, rosemary, lemon oil, and capsicun makes it a light oil with full-bodied flavors. So, as I was looking at the ingredients for the Friday Night Challenge

fried eggs---spinach---sun-dried tomatoes---olives---bacon

the salt aspect struck me as something that would work very well with the oil. And it did.

Cut the bacon slices into quarters so it can be crumbled it into big crumbles. Once it is fried crisp, put it in a strainer to dry it out. Pour off most of the bacon fat, give it a good blend of the Mediterranean grilling oil, and then add 6 lightly beaten eggs. Before the eggs set, add thinly sliced stuffed olives and let the egg set up to a texture that it can be used it as a wrap. Once finished, cut it in half and remove each half to a separate plate, having flipped it olive-side down. Add a bit of the bacon fat/grill oil back to the pan and saute 1/2 bag of baby spinach, allowing it to wilt to a rich green color.

While all this is going on, "sun dry" paper-thin slices of fresh tomatoes under a high-heat broiler with a touch of the grilling oil and a very generous amount of pepper. 

Once everything is finished, put a layer of bacon crumbled, a layer of spinach, and a layer of sun-dried tomatoes in each wrap and then turn it seam side under. Add the remaining sun-dried tomatoes to the top with the remaining bacon crumbles.

This will work for any meal, be it brunch, lunch, or supper. It has a great combination of flavors.

Enjoy!

Oriental Grilled Chicken Pasta with Fresh Vegetables

Two elements played strong roles in this Friday Night's Challenge: hot weather and fresh vegetables. Both tended to serve the Challenge well. 


The hot weather sent me out the kitchen and onto the deck to the grill. This meant some pre-seasoning of the good things for tonight's menu. I decided to go oriental since a sesame taste was beckoning me.


I mixed up a marinade of canola oil, chili sesame oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, and a generous portion of ginger sesame spice.


Using some heavy-duty foil, I made a pocket and coated it with canola oil. Then I added in a layer of the first ingredient, chicken, that was coarsely chopped. I poured a bit of the marinade over this. For the next layer, I broke into 3 inch pieces whole wheat pasta, and poured a bit more of the marinade. I then added coarsely chopped zucchini, red bell pepper, tomatoes, and off the cob corn. 


Everything was put together on the grill. I wasn't too sure about grilling pasta, but with the natural juices from the veggies and the moisture of the chicken, it did just fine. It also nicely soaked up the mild sesame flavor.


Easy to do; easy to fix. Gotta love this time of year with all the freshness of our food...be sure to enjoy!

Friday Night Challenge: Tuscan Style Tuna on a Hot, Hot Day

When the heat index is in the 100s, all thoughts of heavy-laden foods go out the window. So with the ingredients offered in the Friday Night Challenge:

tuna, asparagus, sauerkraut, cheese, and tomatoes

I decided to steer clear of the Reuben-style solution in favor of a lighter, Tuscan-style meal that allows all the freshest flavors of the season do their thing.

The meal is very easy to make and, happily, very inexpensive. And--it's pretty!

I drained two cans of tuna until all traces of water were completely gone. Set aside. Roughly dice two Roma tomatoes and set them aside. I used frozen asparagus from this spring's garden that I brought to a boil for around 5 minutes and then rinsed in cold water in a colander until cool. Open a can of sauerkraut, drain, and then, in a colander, run cold water over and continuously wring out until much of the "bite" is gone. Mix together olive oil, a generous amount of dried basil (or if you have fresh chopped-great!), and some garlic powder. Pour this first over the kraut and let it sit for awhile while you're working with the other ingredients. 

Assemble the salad with the base of the kraut, then layer on the tuna and tomatoes. Next comes the asparagus. Finish with some freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Pour a bit more of the olive oil/basil/garlic mix over the combination. That's it!

Hot and humid days shouldn't keep us from enjoying great food; neither should a questionable economy.

Enjoy!

Tuscan tuna and a limmoncello martini--refreshing!

Spam Time! for the Friday Night Challenge

It seems the lines are clearly drawn when it comes to Spam--people either really like it or detest it. There's just not much area in between. I happened to be married to a nice guy that really likes Spam. Plain Spam, Spicy Spam, you name it--it's all good. So when it was time for a Friday Night Challenge, he asked if he could play along and name Spam for one of the ingredients. Well, of course! And so he did. The other four ingredients were:

Velveeta cheese, pineapple, water chestnuts, and avocado

It was way too hot to heat much up in the kitchen and what's nicer to have than a grill in the summer? So, with little hesitation, I coarsely chopped the avocado, the water chestnuts, and the Spam into bite-sized pieces. I kept the pineapple in slices--pineapple and a grill just really get along well, so why mess with what works? Once the avocado was tender and the rest of everything else warmed through and a bit caramelized, it was time to remove it from the grill and add some thin slices of pepper jack Velveeta and let it do some serious melting. 

My Spam man agreed it was pretty darned good!