Pizza Party: Pizza Dough, White Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Vinegar, & Pizza with Tomato Sauce and Mozzarella

So, my mom's been wanting to make pizza for a long time now. The project seemed the perfect excuse, not that you need one: all things considered, it's a simple process and it yields great results even if you don't have a pizza stone, which *gasp* we do not. And it's really fun. And you can't argue with this:

So you take flour, cornmeal (optional, but makes the crust crispier), yeast, and salt, and put them in the food processor.

Turn it on, and add some water and olive oil through the feed tube. It will form a ball within about thirty seconds; if it doesn't add some more water. What you end up with looks like this:

Put it on the floured counter. Knead it a little bit.

Put it in a bowl, cover it, and let it rise for 1-2 hours. Sounds like a lot of downtime, but this is when we threw together our toppings. Each batch of dough makes two pizzas (or one huge one, I guess). On one we did just some caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar. The other, tomato sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms and turkey sausage (from DiPaola Farms at the Greenmarket--the best turkey sausage I've ever tasted). So, we caramelized some onions, over fairly low heat, for a pretty long time til they were nice and brown and sweet and delicious. Did pretty much the same thing with the mushrooms, which cooked faster. Browned the sausage (crumbled out of its casing), and threw together a batch of Fast Tomato Sauce.

And by then, the pizza dough was ready.

We stretched and rolled it out so it was as thin as we could get it, then laid it out on the baking sheets and got to topping. For the white pie we mixed a bit of the balsamic vinegar with the onions and just spread them out on top. For the other pie, I spread out a pretty thin layer of sauce, then the cheese slices, then scattered about the sausage and mushrooms. Sprinkled some grated parmesan on top of that, because why not, and our pies were good to go.

Bittman says that they need to bake for 6-12 minutes on 500 degrees. Ours took more like 20 minutes, but maybe that's because we like a nice crispy crust. Here's the finished white pie:

This one is definitely going into heavy rotation; let me know if you ever want to have a pizza party and I'm so there.

Minimalist Wednesday: Fast Tomato Sauce and Grown Up Mashed Potatoes

Today Bittman took his spiel to the Today show to do a recipe very near and dear to my own heart: Fast Tomato Sauce, that endlessly variable recipe that was a key reason I started the Ben Cooks Everything project in the first place. He didn't call it Fast Tomato Sauce, but that's exactly what it was, complete with the toss-in-anything-you-like attitude. Matt and Meredith keep the obnoxious to a minimum, which is nice. And! Bittman says you can throw in the rind of parmesan cheese when making sauce and get a lot of flavor from that otherwise garbage-bound ingredient. Awesome.

Meanwhile, the Minimalist column in today's paper, which went online last week, is all about making mashed potatoes a little healthier and a little more interesting. Boil potatoes, add dandelion greens, olive oil (interesting substitution for the butter that I've got to try).

Both these recipes use a similar concept of using a lot of veggies (tomato sauce, dandelion greens), and a lot less starch than you usually would (pasta, potatoes). Mark Bittman: waning you off carbs. That being said, both of these (especially the mash) look tasty as hell. Are dandelion greens in season yet? I guess so.

As always, the NYTimes video is better, more informative, easier on the eyes, and with 100% less cheery morning talk show hosts. It is not, however, embeddable, so please enjoy below the Today show clip and click here or below to see the Times video.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Green Potatoes from Liguria [nytimes video]
The Minimalist: The Greening of Mashed Potatoes [nytimes]

Staple: Fast Tomato Sauce

This was the first template recipe of Bittman's that I mastered. I call it a template because, like the Five Minute Drizzle Sauce, once you master the technique, you can mix it up in an infinite number of ways. It's a special recipe to me, because even though it's one of the most ordinary meals known to man, if you can master making your own tomato sauce, your kitchen self confidence will see a tenfold boost. At least. Even more than when you make your own stock.


Originally, I made this out of the HTCE spinoff book, How to Cook Everything: Quick Cooking, which is a fantastic sort of training wheels version of the book. Anyway, basically you sautee some onions and garlic in olive oil, throw in some canned tomatoes, let it cook for a while, throw in a bit more olive oil toward the end to thicken it up, and you have a nice simple tomato sauce. It's not gonna change the world, but it takes no longer than reheating a store bought jar and it tastes a lot better.

From there, it's your call. I like mine with some carrot cooked along with the onions and garlic. This makes it a bit sweeter, and if you grate the carrot in the shreds just sort of melt away into the sauce. I also usually add tomato paste after I add the can tomatoes; it makes it a bit thicker and saucier. You like olives? Throw some in. Anything goes, really. In addition to all the improvisation you can come up with, there's a list following the recipe with something like 20 quick spins on the template. They pretty much all look good.


This week I thought I'd play with it beyond my usual two "variations" of grated carrot and tomato paste. I started with adding lemon zest in the sautee phase (though maybe I shoulda done this when I added the tomatoes. Anyway, I added the zest and skipped the tomato paste. Not on purpose. I just forgot. I also put it through the food processor so it was a little smoother and less chunky.

Then towards the end I added some pitted olives and half a jar of capers. The additions made the sauce a lot tangier than usual. It was pretty good; next time I won't omit the tomato paste (I like it thick!) and my olives, which were the mild green kind, were not optimal. Next time, Kalamata or something nice and salty like that.


Maybe the best part is the quantity; there's always some left over and it keeps pretty well in the freezer. So the next time I want tomato sauce, I'll just defrost, add some tomato paste (it's never too late!) and be good to go.

It Begins: Classic Lasagna, Italian-American Style + Breaded Fried Zucchini

Let's start at the start. Not at the start of my interest in the work of Mark Bittman, but at the start of the project. "Do you think we could do one while I'm in town?" Emily asked me. I had recently decided, for various reasons, to cook every recipe in the newly revised edition of How to Cook Everything, and having just received the brand new, 80% redder version of the book from Amazon, it was time to get started. Emily was staying with me for the weekend, visiting from Boston. "Pick a recipe or three while I'm at work, make a shopping list, and I'll meet you at the store after work." I know Emily doesn't play around (we'd cooked together before), and I was not disappointed with her choice of Lasagna and Fried Zucchini.

I'd never made a lasagna before. Emily decided on the Classic American Lassagne (check title) variation, which is light on vegetables and heavy on cheese. We left out the meat because a vegetarian friend was coming (would've upped the vegetables, but it was kind of last minute; no one complained in the end).


I got things started by whipping up a batch of tomato sauce, the way I learned from my Bittman training wheels book, HTCE: Quick Cooking. I sauteed onions, carrots, some crushed garlic cloves (I take 'em out at the end) and red pepper flakes in some olive oil til they were nice and soft, then threw in some canned crushed tomatoes and tomato paste, let it simmer away, and was pretty much done. Emily cooked the lasagna noodles til they were al dente, maybe even a half step firmer than al dente. Then it was time to layer. I must say, lasagna is much easier than it looks. Oil the pan, then a noodle layer, then sauce, then cheese (mozzarella/ricotta/parmesan), pepper, more noodle, more sauce, more cheese, etc. til you're out of materials. Then enough parmesan (we used pecorino romano) on top to make it nice and crispy. If you're doing it right, this is the point where you'll start to feel like you're going to have a seriously delicious lasagna. Is there a name for this point in the cooking process? It's not the ultimate "wow" moment that occurs when you take the lasagna out of the oven, it's the moment where you know that "wow" moment is coming, and it is going to feel great. I'll try to think of something catchy for that.


Throw it in the oven til the sauce is bubbling and you're good to go. I think it was about 40 minutes. While it's not the quickest recipe, and the layering makes it seem like it takes more effort than it really does, it is super easy and seems like it'd be pretty hard to mess up.


Meanwhile, we used the recipe for Breaded Fried Any Vegetable. Emily sliced up the zucchini into kind of flat looking shapes, dredged them through flour, egg, then breadcrumbs, then right into the oil. This was easy enough, though I hate frying stuff, and the excess breadcrumbs in the pan cooked to a blackened mess and I wasn't so into it. But DAMN if they weren't totally delicious anyway (fried is fried, after all, right?) and Bittman's suggestion of squeezing some lemon juice down on top of them was perfect.


I whipped up a quick improvised balsamic vinaigrette for the bag salad I bought (sue me, I buy salad in a bag; I don't own a salad spinner). This all fed 7 people quite well, with a little bit of leftover lasagna for lunch the next day. I may only be two recipes in, but so far this culinary expedition is going quite well.