My secret for making great pizza at home - #FoodPornFriday

I'm staying home for #FoodPornFriday this week.

Today I'm sharing pizzas, pizzas I made at home. I decided to share this as these particular pizzas have turned out better than any other any of us have ever made at home. I thought people would be interested to learn what I used to make such great pies.

The first thing you need is Stonefire Artisan Flatbread. Costco started carrying this and it comes in a five pack which is perfect for us as there are five of us in the family.

Up next is the pizza sauce. Over the years we have tried a lot of different pizza sauces. One of our favourites was one that came in a baggie in the Kraft Pizza Kit. I've now found something we all like even better. This is Mutti Pizza Sauce with Spices.

I think anyone who regularly follows this blog knows the next important ingredient. It's one of the main things that makes Windsor Style Pizza so damn good. That's Part Skim Mozzarella from Galati Cheese. If you don't live in Windsor, I'm sorry. I can't help you out here.

The last secret, one I figured out when making Pizza Bombs is to toss the meat into your skillet for a bit before putting them on your pizza. For the pepperoni specifically, I wait until they curl and the edges are a bit crispy.

As for the rest of the ingredients that's all up to you. That's what makes this such a perfect meal for our family as everyone can have exactly what they want. My wife has recently become of fan of adding yellow zucchini to her pizza. Personally, I stuck to meats with lots of cheese.

As far as cooking goes, I used the instructions on the back of the Stonefire bread. 425F for about 10 minutes. 

I found it takes an extra 5-10 minutes or so depending on how many toppings you put on. In general, I just put the pizza in the oven and watch for the cheese to get just a tiny bit browned.

Went looking for cheesy and ended up with a ricotta, spinach and mint terrine

I mentioned in my last cooking post that I'm no cook. The kitchen is probably the room I spend the least time in. This is something I'm trying to change. My wife insisted suggested that I start taking care of dinner one night a week to give her more time to work on her Mommy Blog. Now she did note that she didn't care if all I did was pick up fast food or ordered pizza, she just wanted one night out of the Kitchen. I've decided to take the opportunity to step up and actually learn to cook more than Kraft and scrambled eggs. This week I ended up cooking a terrine. Before starting this quest I had no idea what a terrine was.

I'm a big cheese fan. A huge cheese fan. I eat a lot of cheese. So step one for deciding what to make this week was to google recipes with lots of cheese. This led me to the 100% Canadian Milk website: All You Need is Cheese. After browsing the very appealing graphical spread of recipes I found a recipe for Ricotta, Spinach and Mint Terrine. The picture for this recipe just looked awesome. It listed 2.5 cups of cheese in the ingredients and mentioned under 2 hours prep and cooking time. Googling "terrine" I learned that it's basically a loaf that's similar to a pate. This one was egg and cheese based and my wife and I love quiche and frittata so I thought it would be a good fit for our family. Now I will admit mint seemed a bit odd, but what the heck, lets try it.

Awesome Canada Beef tablet holder.

So we grabbed ingredients from our favourite local interdependently owned grocery store: Remark Farms. Reviewing the recipe I noticed something I missed. A 1 hour cool down in the fridge. Wow, I guess I really should read these things closer before rushing off to buy ingredients. Due to this I started getting ready as soon as I got home from work.

One of the first steps was to set up the awesome Canada Beef tablet holder we received at the first ever Food Bloggers of Canada Conference. This thing is great for cooking with. Besides holding up your tablet at a good angle (portrait or landscape) it also includes a washable stylus so that you don't get your tablet all messy with food bits.

One of my helpers.

I gathered, cut and prepped all the ingredients and had them ready to go before I started cooking. I had a couple little helpers for this one that really speed up the process. Especially pulling stems off of fresh mint and spinach and cracking eggs.

Not being very experienced with cooking I try to follow recipes exactly and don't like to mess with them at all. In this case I stuck with that. We did have one small change and that was due to not having unsalted butter in the house. I just ended up using regular and putting less salt in later. For everything else I followed the recipe.

All the ingredients gathered.

My first roadblock was when I had everything in the mixing bowl. This thing was thick! So thick that it actually bent the whisk I was using to stir. At that point my wife came to the rescue with an antique hand blender she inherited from her grandmother. That made things much easier. Now it wouldn't be me in the kitchen if something didn't go wrong and well it was that blender that caused the problem. I'm sure you can guess what happened. It took over half an hour to clean up.

It wouldn't be me in the kitchen if
there wasn't at least a small disaster.

Moving on from there things seemed to be going really well. I learned that fold the spinach doesn't mean fold in half and place into the goopy mess by hand thanks to my wife. I also learned that a dry toothpick doesn't mean not moist but rather no stuff stuck on it. The big eye opener for me though was that recipes don't include downtime, and this recipe had a lot of downtime. By downtime I'm talking about things like "wait for X to cool" After wilting the spinach and mint I had to wait for it to cool. After pulling the baked terrine out of the oven I had to wait for it to cool. I then had to put it in the fridge for an hour to let it cool. None of this cooling and waiting is listed in the hour and fifteen minute time this recipe said it was going to take. This made for a very late dinner for the kids.

Once everything was said and done I ended up with a really appealing looking terrine. I was amazed by how much it actually looked like the pictures on the 100% Canadian Milk website. It took about two hours more than I expected but the house smelled great and the food looked great. At one point my wife came in and decided to bake up some fresh local asparagus as she thought my meal needed a side.

Out of the oven

My final step for this meal was to choose a beer pairing. My wife and I recently returned from an anniversary trip to Toronto and while there we picked up a fridge full of new beers to try. At first I debated grabbing something thick and rich and chocolaty. A strong porter perhaps. Something to off set the mint. Instead I decided to go for something lighter with more hops than malt and grabbed an Amber Ale: Grand River Plowman's Ale.

So how was it? It was good. Not great but good. For something with 2.5 cups of cheese in it I expected a much stronger cheese taste. Especially when half a cup of that is something as strong as Parmesan. Then there was the mint. The mint was just odd, especially for a main dish. I even double checked to make sure this wasn't meant to be an appetizer or hors d'oeuvres. Nope it say "Main" It wasn't bad, it was just odd and the more you ate of it the more the mint taste seemed to grow. The beer choice was also good but not great. The Plowman's was very hoppy for an Amber Ale. It had a lot of Pale Ale qualities that were a bit overpowering.

My youngest daughter loved it devouring three slices. My oldest didn't seem to like it much though she said she did, she only had one slice but ate a ton of the fresh asparagus. My wife had pretty much the same opinion I did.

If I ever tried to make this again I would play with it a bit. I would probably double the amount of spinach and add some more stronger cheese. Maybe some swiss or sharp cheddar. I think I would also go with my original beer idea of a porter. Overall we had a decent meal, I learned a lot more about cooking and my wife got time to get caught up on some work. A good night in my books.


FYI: In case you missed the link above, the recipe I used can be found here: http://www.dairygoodness.ca/cheese/all-you-need-is-cheese/recipes/ricotta-spinach-and-mint-terrine

Nordic Ware Dutch Oven Duel for #FBC2013

So tonight I cooked dinner. This is a rare thing. My cooking skills are pretty much limited to breakfast, where I have my own special recipe for scrambled eggs everyone seems to love. I literally caught a kitchen on fire boiling water to make Kraft dinner at our first apartment. I usually stay out of the kitchen.

Well I'm going to the Food Bloggers of Canada Conference starting tomorrow afternoon. As a guest one of the promo items I received was a Nordic Ware dutch oven. There's a contest deal where you show off what you did with it. Much to my wife's surprise I thought it would be cool to enter. I get to try out the new 'toy', she gets a night off cooking, it's win win.

My wife is also going to the conference and she runs a mommy blog called Maple Leaf Mommy. She came up with the idea to make this a bit of a contest. So last night she cooked this really amazing Lemon Chicken with Curds thing. You can read all about her entry here: http://www.mapleleafmommy.com/2013/04/dutch-oven-lemon-and-milk-chicken.html

The Nordic Ware Dutch Oven
Who knew this was a cooking tool?

First off I had no idea a Dutch Oven was a cooking tool. Come on, I know I'm not the only one. So first I had to ask my wife what exactly it was we received here and do a bit of research online. After figuring out it's kind of like a Crock-Pot that you can put on the stove and move right into the oven and back (or do some really cool stuff using coals outdoors) I started to look for recipes online.

Eventually I found this Goulash Recipe on the Food Network website.  It sounded quick and easy, plus it will let me face that fear of making Macaroni (I wasn't joking about the fire).

Reading through the recipe I already decided to make some changes. The first and main one was to get rid of the House Seasoning. Pepper doesn't sit so well with me and I really dig a mix of oregano and Parmesan with a touch of thyme and garlic salt as a spice mix (there's a bit more to it then that but I'm not giving away my scrambled egg secret), so I planned on using that. The other main complaint I had just reading this was the total lack of cheese. That's not something I can live with so I knew I would be adding cheese at some point. Well more cheese than the Parmesan I was already planning to add. Have I mentioned I like cheese?

Here's what I finally went with:

2 packs of lean ground beef
2 large onions
3 big cloves of garlic
3 cups of water
2 cans of tomato sauce
2 cans of diced tomatoes
1 Tablespoon of Garlic Salt
A few dashes of Oregano
Enough dashes of Parmesan cheese to cover everything before stirring.
2 tablespoons Italian seasoning
3 Bay Leaves
3 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
1 Tablespoon Seasoned Salt
2 cups of Macaroni
About half a big bag of Kraft Tex-Mex cheese

With it I served some pre-made Dempster's garlic bread (with cheese to be added on top).

How I cooked it:

Beef browned and veggies cut.

Browned the beef, breaking it up as I went and draining fat along the way. Remember to next time buy leaner beef. Added the veggies (onion and garlic) and cooked them until they were soft. I dunno maybe 8 minutes or so for that. Added the water, tomatoes, and all the seasonings (everything but the Mac). Figured out I didn't have a big enough dutch oven. Panicked  Skipped one of the cans of tomato sauce. Put a lid on it and and really hoped it would simmer down a little, while updating the blog about my panic. Fully realizing that by having the lid on that probably wouldn't happen.

The solution to the emergency.

Okay, new plan: let it cook for about 20 minutes. Then take half of it out and put it in a bowl, all nice and cooked (still minus the macaroni). Split the second can of tomato sauce between the bowl and the oven. Add only half the macaroni or so to the dutch oven and continue to follow the recipe from there. Then a couple days later we can toss all of the stuff in the second bowl, already prepped, back into the oven and toss in a cup of Mac and we should be good. At least I hope so. I haven't lit anything on fire so far so I think things are actually going pretty well.

Almost finished just needs cheese.

So I proceeded according to plan B. I took out a little under half of the goulash mix and added just over a cup of Macaroni. Realized that I'm not sure exactly what we will do with the other half since we are heading up to the Conference tomorrow. Right now it looks and smells like it would be a great stew, so probably going to go that way later. For now it went into the freezer. As of then I had half an hour, some of which I'm used to update this here. Oh and I remembered to get some more pictures. Actually I've been good about that, I was worried I would forget about the picture thing.

Well the next step was easy enough. I turned off the heat and let it sit. I've got to say at this point the house sure smelled awesome. About half an hour later I cut up the Demptster's bread and tossed some of the cheese on it. At the same time I tossed a ton of cheese on top of the Goulash. I put both in the oven at 400 degrees for 8 minutes.

So how did it turn out?

The finished meal before serving.

Rather good I do have to say. The Macaroni was a little softer than I would have liked, but that could have easily been caused by not splitting the liquid well during that emergency in the middle. The meat tasted fantastic. It had absorbed all the other flavours. I was slightly tempted to just drain it all and use that ground beef as a base for a Spaghetti Sauce (something I may actually try sometime in the future). I think baking the cheese on top at the end really finished it off. My wife liked it enough that she went back for seconds. Not something she does often. The kids seemed to dig it, though they both said they preferred Kraft Dinner.

My plate, well my first plate.

Overall I'm really happy with how things turned out. The Nordic Ware Dutch Oven worked great, even if I did underestimate how much I could fit in there. I loved being able to take the finished goulash, toss some cheese on it and transfer it right to the oven for a quick broil. If I ever made this recipe again I would cut all of the ingredients in half. As it stands I think we have enough left for at least four more delicious meals.