Last night I was given permission to try making the skillet pizza from the Cooking for Two 2010 book. You might be wondering under what bizarre marital dynamic it is normal to seek permission from one's spouse to cook something. The thing is, M is a die-hard Yankee pizza snob. I will never make pizza up to his standards at home. And I'm okay with that, since I don't love making pizza or eating it all that often. But every now and then I'll ask to try, because I'm in the mood or I have all the ingredients on hand. Both were the case yesterday. I used CI's pizza dough recipe and their method but Marcella Hazan's instructions for making a margherita topping. If your tomatoes aren't essentially perfect, she has you cook them down a bit, and to spruce up "commercial supermarket mozzarella" (as she calls it in distinction from her precious mozzarella di bufala) you shred it and toss it with a little EVOO, letting it sit ideally for an hour. Mine only got about 15 minutes of that treatment, but then I think supermarket (at least Sorrento block) mozzarella is already good enough.
The pizza is started over high heat on the stovetop in a 12" skillet just until it begins to set and finished for 7-10 minutes in a 500 degree oven. I brushed the garlic oil I keep in the fridge for focaccia on the dough first, then topped it with tomatoes and mozzarella. After it came out of the oven I put whole fresh basil leaves on top. The verdict from M's side of the table was, "Not bad at all." I too judged it my best attempt yet at homemade pizza. It was plenty crispy, and the dough flavor was okay, though we've come to prefer the sourdough flavor of the crust at Varasano's. Of course you couldn't go wrong with the toppings; the deciding factor is always the crust: whether it got soggy at all, or whether it's nearly charred on the bottom (M's preference---this one wasn't, but it was well-browned). So I'd make this recipe any time for non-pizza snobs. It was quick and easy and perfectly passable pizza for most of us.
Tonight I decided to pretend like it's not the end of April and 85 degrees outside, and made a decidedly cool-weather meal: braised beef and polenta. On the other side of dinner I don't regret it at all. Several months ago someone on the CI forums was raving about this recipe from Michele Scicolone for an Italian slow-cooker roast, the "secret" ingredient being anchovies. She reassured us that they really do dissolve into the sauce and you don't have bits of fish showing up in the finished product. Another surprise to me was the use of a cup of white wine to deglaze the pan in which you brown the beef. I would have expected red wine, but as with the anchovies and everything else about this recipe, it worked. It cooks for 6 hours on low in the slow cooker, resulting in meltingly tender beef that is perfectly seasoned. The polenta (from CFT 2011) was very tasty and the perfect thing to sop up the juices from the meat. I only took one pathetic picture while cleaning up of the meat and juices leftover, which is not worth posting.
Sadly, it will probably be several months before I make either polenta or braised beef again, as roast doesn't exactly call to me in the sweltering, humid summer months. *sigh* In an effort to overcome my aversion to being in the kitchen when said weather hits, I've made a list of no- or low-cook recipes, mostly ones I've made before and loved, but a few that are high priority to-try. So I'm a little more prepared for summer this year.
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