melting your mouth

These come from my Aunt Kathryn, who is always sending me great, not-too-complicated recipes to try.  She always especially has delicious finger food.  Our extended family gatherings are often at her house, and she served these cheese biscuits at our Christmas gift exchange a few years ago.  I try to keep the ingredients for these on hand, as they come together pretty quickly.  They also freeze well, so I usually freeze half the batch for a night when I need a before-dinner snack.

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I’m sorry I couldn’t get a better picture of this — our camera is still screwed up so that everything is coming out dark, so I’m having to use flash on all my pictures, which makes them not look as good. But, I hate to just stop blogging because I’m less than thrilled with the pictures I’m getting, so, you’re just going to have to take what you can get for a little while! Our camera is still within warranty, so we’re going to have to send it off to Nikon to be repaired, which means it may be a while before we get it back. So please be patient with us!

So anyway, I promise that pimento cheese is much tastier than it might look in the above photo. If you’re not a Southerner, you may not have heard of this spread, which is extremely easy to make, and is a pretty yummy snack. Since we’ve been exercising more, we’ve found the need to keep more quick and easy snacks or meals on hand, so I made a batch last week. We like to use it to fill celery sticks (so you can tell yourself you’re balancing out the healthiness of mixing cheese with mayo), or spread it on sandwiches. If you’re going to put it on a sandwich, I think it’s much, much better if you toast the sandwich (in a toaster oven, already filled with the spread, so the cheese gets gooey and melty), but there are those in my family that disagree and think it’s better without toasting. Either way, you should give it a try, as it takes all of 10 minutes to whip up a batch.

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I think this is the longest gap in posting I’ve had, at least in a good while, and I’m sorry. What can I say — we’ve been traveling a lot (the summer of 5 weddings is now done. phew!), I’ve been pretty busy at work, we’re trying to train for a triathlon in September, I’ve been sick for the past several days, and our camera has pooped out on us so we haven’t really been able to take pictures of what little we have been cooking! Basically, life gets in the way.

Anyway, I did still have a couple of things saved up from before the camera started screwing up, so hopefully I can now get back on the ball and these will tide me over until we can get the camera fixed!

So no more of this whining about being busy — let’s talk about pizza! Grilled pizza is something we tried for the first time on the weekend of a thousand posts I keep talking about. I have to admit, my parents’ pizza oven back in Raleigh has pretty well spoiled me for pizza. It took a few years, but they really have it down pat now and make some pretty excellent pizza. I’ve occasionally made pizza on our pizza stone (thanks, Saket!) in the oven, but it’s never quite as good as I want it to be. However, grilling pizza is really the way to go to me. This makes a nice crispy crust, seemed to be pretty forgiving if you’re not able to get the crust as thin as you’d like (that’s me!), and cooks everything pretty fast which is nice for making a lot of different types of pizza to please everyone. I’m not trying to say it’s as good as wood-fired, but it might start to be on the same spectrum, and if you’re 3,000 miles away from the pizza oven you’re used to, it makes a pretty darn good substitute.

For the dough, I of course used a recipe from my mom, which she in turn got from the folks over at Mugnaini, where they bought their pizza oven. She has done a lot of experimenting with pizza dough recipes over the year, and this one is her favorite. The topping combinations listed at the bottom are also some of the favorites my parents have refined. What do you like on your pizza? I’d always love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

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So I got the idea of stuffing acorn squash with pears a month or two ago from a post at briciole, someone commented suggesting gorgonzola, and I went from there. This is good as a not-too-sweet dessert, which was how I made it, but it could probably be a side dish or even a main dish with a few sides. This was a very good combination and one I will definitely make again.

Ingredients:
1 Acorn squash
about 1/3 c crumbled Gorgonzola
about 1/2 c Pecans, roughly chopped
1 Pear, chopped into 1/2″ cubes
a couple T Brown sugar

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 F. Cut acorn squash in half and scrape out seeds. Put a little bit of water in a jelly roll pan, and place halves of squash upside down in the pan. Bake for about 45 minutes, until squash is just tender. Meanwhile, mix gorgonzola, pecans, pears, and brown sugar. I’m not really sure if the amounts I listed above are right, so eyeball it. When the squash is done, turn it rightside up and mound the filling in each half. You may have to slice off the top of the squash so that it will sit flat. You want the filling really mounded up as much as possible, as it will cook down a little bit. Empty the water out of the pan, and bake the filled squash for another 7 minutes or so, until the topping is a little bit brown.

I think this is finally the end of my Christmas Eve dinner posts, at least until next year!

As you can see, my parents have a wood-fired pizza oven, which makes for a nice party centerpiece as well as some absolutely delicious pizzas, and also other dishes including breads, meat, and roasted vegetables.

These are not so much recipes as lists of some combinations of toppings we enjoy for pizzas. As I said, we served them as appetizers, but they can definitely make a good main dish instead. Most of these are based on ideas from Mugnaini, the company where my parents bought their oven and where they recently went to cooking school. The last one is based on something we had at Myth, a restaurant in San Francisco.

Sometime I promise to share my parents’ delicious new recipe for pizza dough as well (assuming they’ll share it with me first!).

What are some of your favorite pizza toppings? I’d love to hear more suggestions in the comments section!

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