Stewed Zucchini Pizza

Not purchasing groceries for a week always makes the week get increasingly challenging with each passing day. It also means that as the days pass each dinner becomes less and less remarkable. Of course that's not going to stop me from taking pictures and writing a blog entry! Not on your life, Jack! If anything it's going to make me more motivated to continue on with this fruitless endeavor.

It's what I do.



In keeping with my theme of mixing in whole leaf herbs in with salads I used the rest of the buttercrunch lettuce with cilantro leaves, feta, avocado, lime, and olive oil.



Tonight's pizza was made quite simply. I took last night's dinner leftovers, put them on top some pizza dough, and baked it in the oven. The only thing I added was some dollops of ricotta, fresh oregano leaves, and the last remaining shreds of a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano. This is just about the simplest form of dinner that is possible.

It may be fortunate that there was no quinoa left. Not sure what that would have added to this pizza.



To accompany the pizza I selected one of the last beers in the fridge, this Anchor Summer Beer from Anchor Brewing. This beer was a little more bitter than I'd expected it to be but pretty good to go along with a shabby, leftover pizza dinner at 10:45 PM.

Tomorrow's dinner is going to be a bit of a stretch. I have no idea yet what it's going to be but it might just involve a plate of romaine lettuce. Maybe I'll put some barbecue sauce on it. That will really give it some pizzazz!

Mom's Stewed Zucchini

Every summer my mother would make a delicious stew with some zucchini from the garden. Generally this would usually be at the end of the summer and from one zucchini the size of two footballs. The zucchini we got this week were enormous considering how early it is in the season but still large enough to make a great deal of this delicious dish.

I seem to remember this being the first vegetable dish that I actually liked. Up until then I largely despised any and all vegetables. I distrusted them as if they'd swindled me out of money as a baby. I'm not exactly sure where this hatred came from. I just remember the look on my parents' face the first time I voluntarily ate a tomato.



First I had to use the remaining buttercrunch lettuce along with some lemon, oregano, and feta for a first course. It would have been easy to keep this meal vegan but that would have done anything to clean out the fridge now would it?



I used much of the same ingredients to make this quinoa with lemon, oregano, salt, and pepper. Jen had put in a special request days ago for a base to this stew and she seemed to be pretty hot on quinoa.



I cooked down some Vidalia onion and crushed garlic cloves along with all the summer squash we got this week. There was a small amount of shabby white wine in the fridge that I also threw into the pan along with a little salt, pepper, and tomato before and added who oregano leaves just before serving.



Since we didn't have any lemon and oregano flavored beer in the fridge I opened this Rosato form Bastianich which I'm pretty sure we've had before. Jen picked it up at Tarry Market last week to beef up our suffering wine collection.

My lemon and oregano tarts didn't quite turn out for dessert so instead we look to the rest of the week to see how we can finish up the remaining over abundance of lettuce

Lettuce pudding, Anyone?

Oregano and Avocado Recipes

It's the longest day of the year. This means it's the most likely day of the year that Jen and I will be able to eat dinner while there is still daylight. This ended up being 8:30 PM but there was a decent amount of sun and bird chirping to make dinner a novel experience.



Sometimes when I am caught between the crunch of cleaning out the fridge and receiving a random assortment of vegetables from the farm share I like to do things I'd normally avoid. Firstly this gives me an opportunity to clean the fridge, pantry, and freezer. Secondly it gives me an opportunity to see if certain flavor combinations are avoided because no one has ever thought of them or because they've been tried and are terrible. It's usually the latter.

This salad is a key example of this philosophy.

I used some remaining Red Sail lettuce, sliced avocado, crushed macadamia nuts, and oregano leaves as the base of this salad. I could have just left the oregano out but I wanted to see how oregano goes with tropical fruit.

As of today a Google search for "oregano and avocado recipes" only yields one result. There will be at least two after today.

To tie the oregano in (slightly) I used some lemon juice over the salad along with salt and pepper. I intended on using olive oil too but I forgot and it turned out pretty good even without the oil.



Jen bought some linguiça the other day so I browned up the links along with some onion and crushed garlic then tossed in the escarole from the farm share with some cannellini beans and finished it with some grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.



Another day, another hefeweizen. I chose the Paulaner Hefe-Weissbier Naturtrüb from Paulaner as tonight's beer. With a weird tropical-Italian salad and an Italian-Portuguese main course I thought the right thing to do was to go with a German beer. When I'm feeling confused about themes in a meal I always go with Germany. It brings me comfort.

And what better type of beer to have on the first official day of summer than a hefeweizen? Now it's time to officially enter my least favorite season of the year!

If it wasn't for the Tour de France and grilling I think I might just go into hibernation.

Ol' Dirty Lettuce

The Monday rush was on as I raced down 95 to get home and pick up the farm share. I've missed the mad rush home to pick up the farm share. I just pray that I don't eventually end up missing a pick up like that one sad, sad day in 2009.



If I do miss it (and I hope I don't) this was not going to be the week. I made it with time to spare. This week's haul consisted of: Butter Head Lettuce, Green Towers Romaine Lettuce, Red Sail Lettuce, escarole, garlic scapes, radishes, summer squash, summer spinach, and a bunch of oregano

There have been heavy rains which have kicked up a huge amount of mud onto the lettuce resulting in the dirtiest lettuce I've ever encountered. Last week was the same which turned the small crack in my salad spinner into a gaping canyon of leaky water. Thus was the end of its life and I had to pick up a new one today.



Old and busted.



New hotness.

Still I had to wash my lettuce more than ten times. On the tenth or eleventh wash (I lost count) there was still dirt in the water. Eventually I figured I just gave up when my fingers had wrinkled as if I'd spent all afternoon in a pool. Eventually one has to accept some level of grits and just get on with dinner.



The Red Sail looked beautiful so I made a salad with that, the radishes, some lime, cilantro, olive oil, salt, pepper, the remaining Zima tomatoes, and feta cheese.



The farm recommended a recipe for garlic scape pesto which sounded pretty good. I pretty much followed the recipe by cutting up the scapes, adding some toasted walnuts, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt, pepper, and olive oil. The only thing I really did differently was adding a lot of extra olive oil and omitting the yogurt.



I served the pesto with some of my homemade gnocchi along with some ricotta. Sadly my gnocchi just don't freeze all that well. Last time I made them I put them into the water still frozen and by the time they were cooked they had bloated to be the size of golf balls. This time I thawed them out and they were soft and messy before they hit the water.

At any rate, the gnocchi was pretty good despite its messy appearance and texture.



For beer I opened this In-Heat Wheat from Flying Dog Brewery. This is a beer both Jen and I could easily enjoy. It has something for everyone. For me it was a nice light summery beer to pair with this late (extremely late) spring dish. For Jen it was a hefeweizen which is the main thing she looks at in a beer: is it or is it not a hefeweizen? It passed this test with flying colors.



For dessert I served up some slices of my rebranded blueberry custard pie (previously known as Blueberry "Napolean") from the other night.

I thought tonight we may carry our Abrahams and Zucker streak into this week with some of the Naked Gun movies. Instead I chose not to recommend this. Jen has been more than accommodating with this week's movies so I didn't want to spoil a good thing.

Besides, it's been nearly ten days since we've watch an episode of Top Gear. Who can live like that?

Mexitalian Fusion Cooking (Well, Not Exactly)

Tonight we had an uncharacteristically early dinner in that we were done eating by 7:30 PM, about two full hours before our normal schedule. You'd think that with all this extra time I may have cooked something extra nice! Not the case. Instead I simply used tonight as an opportunity to clean out the fridge, one of my favorite pass times. Besides, we'll need the space tomorrow when we inevitably get a bunch more lettuce from the farm share.



For a warm up I took the remaining salsa from last night's opah and served it with tortilla chips. Having a day to marinate the salsa was potentially even better today.



I got some amazing lobster tails and immediately had a plan to make some sort of rice dish with them. When I got home I discovered that I only had about six grains of rice left in the bag after last night's macadamia nut rice. After scouring the pantry I discovered that I also had a good amount of polenta as well.

What I did was brown some crushed garlic in butter and olive oil, toss in red onion, red and yellow peppers, a little jalapeno, and the remainder of a piece of chorizo. When this had cooked down nicely I tossed in some polenta, vegetable stock, milk, water, salt, and pepper then cooked it down for about ten minutes before throwing in some chopped cilantro.

I thought that I should call this dish corn grits since I was using cilantro but instead I referred to it as polenta. Polenta with cilantro? Mama mia!

I'm a risk taker.



For a drink I poured this summer ale from Otter Creek Otter Creek. I didn't think I'd had this beer before until I tasted it and realized that it was actually just the same beer I'd had last year with a new label. This beer gets pretty lousy ratings on BeerAdvocate but I found it to be a nice match for this meal. Then again, I'm easily impressed.

We rounded out the weekend with a showing of Airplane II: The Sequel to round out our Abrahams and Zucker weekend. I'm not sure how Jen enjoyed this weekend's movie lineup but I had a good time. To pay her back I'm going to have to watch a bunch of Bones with her.

Actually, that's a lie. I can't friggin' stand Bones.