Garden Pasta

After an afternoon of swimming, we came home after our regular dinner time (hungry and mama getting edgy!) only to find in our crockpot dinner the beans were not quite done.  Hmmm. Out to eat? Popcorn?  Thankfully, Jason is truly gifted in the kitchen, a trait he earned with lots of sweat and little sleep while owning his own restaurant.  In the face of dinner desperation, I can be less than helpful.  Case in point: I went to take a shower.  Not one second more than 20 minutes later, this lovely pasta was on our table, complete with the first of garden zucchini and squash.

Thankful.

Homemade pizza

I think there are more serious pizza dough recipes out there, but I like this one for its simplicity and for its ease of use.   Last Saturday I made this for dinner that night and we had a last minute change of plans.  I stuck the dough in the fridge.  On Sunday, I set it out about 1 hour before  making pizzas, and it was just a-okay.  I appreciate that in a dough.  I'm experimenting a bit with adding some seasoning to the dough, to make it a little more tasty, but really, I'm just fine with its simplicity.

My basic pizza dough (Martha Stewart)

2 packets Active Dry Yeast

2 T sugar

1/4 cup olive oil

2 t course salt

4 cups all purpose flour (unbleached)

Pour 1/2 cup warm water in large bowl.  Sprinkle with yeast and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.

Whisk sugar, oil, and salt into yeast mix.  Add flour and stir until sticky dough forms.  Shape into a ball and lightly coat with oil (kind of coating the bowl as you go).  Cover bowl with plastic wrap and set aside in a  warm, draft free place, until dough has doubled, about 1 hour.

Turn out on lightly floured surface and gently knead 1 or 2 times.

Did you spy the spinach on my piece of the pizza?  Yep, delicious.  We used some sausage, peppers, onion, and - the key - mozzerella from the cheese section of the store (not the grated cheese section of the store.)  I have future plans to try to make my own mozzerella, but that is a future project and one I can't pull out of my hat without some planning.

And someone, who happens to be a teensy picky, has asked for "that pizza you made that one time not too long ago that was white on top and that you made all yourself and not from a restaurant" no less than three times.  Enough said.

 

Italian Stuffed Peppers

Such a simple, delicious dinner.  I take credit for none of it; we have the chef in the house to thank for its ingenuity.

We love stuffed peppers and make them frequently with combinations of rice (maybe beans), with chicken, beef, or sausage.  Every time we make them we have the same comment - stuffed peppers are so filling without being overwhelming.  The pepper itself provides the bulk of the meal - such a nice, fresh crunch and counterpart to the heavier rice, meat and cheese.

We had some ground beef cooked up and my husband simply added some pasta sauce to it.  He spooned it into the peppers, topped with a little mozzerella, and baked.  And in a clever twist that indicates what was in our fridge - he served it with a sweet potato. {If your only experience with sweet potatoes is the Thanksgiving version with marshmallows, please, oh please, bake one and eat it with a little butter, pepper, and a touch of garlic salt.  Delicious.}  The Italian version of stuffed peppers - seriously great.