The Pizza Chronicles: Part III

Fresh Basil Pesto

I was dreading making this when I read the recipe. It specifically said you should make the pesto sauce quasi-medieval style; by mortar and pestle. Pounding nuts and leaves together didn't sound like an ounce of fun, but Tassajara insists, "The texture and aroma of this pesto is quite different if you take the time to pound it by hand in a mortar and pestle. All of the volatile oils and flavor components get released when the cells get pounded rather than neatly cut by the blade of a food processor." Ok, if you say so. So I pounded away, and worked up the second sweat of the afternoon. But you know, once you start doing it, you realize it isn't as hard and primeval as it sounds! Plus, I used live basil (as in, it still came in clumps of dirt) and it smelled glorious. This whole pesto making experience was a pleasant surprise because it was a lot easier than expected. The recipe for the Pizza also called for Rosemary Garlic Oil, but that was pretty anti-climactic, so I won't go into too much detail about it. Basically, just mince some garlic, put it over hot oil and add rosemary. Ta-da! This will brush the crust of your pizza so it won't get dry.

Topping the Pizza!

Speaking of the Pizza. So now, after all the preparation of the dough and the sauce, we were ready to start actually topping the pizza! This is the super easy part. We rolled out the pizza dough into a circle and spread a layer of the tomato sauce on it. In retrospect, we should have put more tomato sauce on it, but oh well. On went everything else except for the tomatoes (because they would have gotten soggy in the oven), and into the oven it went. The recipe doesn't specify how much time you should leave the pizza in the oven, but we put it in for 15 minutes and it came out perfectly. After covering the pizza with tomatoes, we sat down to eat. Maybe it was because it was a big pizza after a hard day's work, or because I used whole wheat flour for the dough, or everything combined, but I am really glad that there were three of us eating it! It was extremely filling. This pizza fed Eduardo and me for three meals, and it was delicious. If you're ever in the mood for a good sweat in the kitchen and have a few hours to spare, make this pizza. It was very worth it!

Not only did the pizza feed us for three meals, we still had enough dough for one more pizza pie! What did we do with it? The last chapter of the Pizza Chronicles, coming soon.

The Pizza Chronicles: Part II

Roasted Tomato Sauce

The oven was preheating to 500 degrees, in order to start on the tomato sauce. The tomatoes were coated in olive oil and put on a cookie sheet, shiny and whole. I love roasted tomatoes. They bring back fond memories of Eduardo's house, where Doña Patricia would fill tomatoes with cheese, mushrooms and olives and roast them over the grill for family gatherings. The skin of the tomatoes becomes blistered and soft, making it easy to remove. I like eating the skin, partially because it has a lot of nutrients, but partially because roasted tomato skin has a very satisfying texture and flavour. It becomes slightly sweet, and feels thin, but chewy. Eduardo and I were eating the skin we peeled off the tomatoes the whole time we were preparing them to be used for the sauce.

A note about the cookie sheet you need to use: it's best to use a cookie sheet with the sides lifted, as opposed to a flat one. If you were baking cookies, a flat cookie sheet would be better because the cookies bake more evenly. However, if you're roasting something juicy like tomatoes, you want a cookie sheet that will grab the juice and excess oil that comes out of the tomatoes.

Next came the onions. I guess this must have been a great recipe for me, because I also love cooking onions! I don't like raw onion, but cooked, onions become an entirely different vegetable. I can't help but recite Neruda's Oda a la Cebolla every time I cook onions;

Cebolla

luminosa redoma,

pétalo a pétalo

se formó tu hermosura...

In the saucepan went an entire onion, chopped, garlic and cumin. It smelled glorious. Once the onions became what neruda would call fina pluma de oro, or a fine feather of gold, we blended them with the tomatoes (the christening of our blender! yay!). Now we have enough tomato sauce to last us a loooong time.

Around this time my friend Alex called and said she wasn't going to a meeting she had after all, so she could come by earlier. She had sent me a message the day before saying she was in town and bored as shit. This was good, because we would need help eating this pizza.

To be continued...

The Pizza Chronicles: Part I

Eduardo and I have finally settled into our first apartment in Dallas! It is absolutely fantastic. One of the best features (as opposed to dorm life) is that it has a kitchen!! A NICE kitchen, with lots of counter space and plugs to use nifty gadgets with! And even more exciting, we now have acquired all the cooking supplies and tools I need for real cooking. Gone are the days of microwave meals and pre-made packaged goods. I'm excited. I'm so excited that I decided to embark on a pizza journey. I've never made pizza before, but I decided to go all out. I made everything, from the dough to the sauce. This is Tassajara's Pizza with Pesto, Ricotta, and Heirloom Tomatoes. I only used half of the dough I made, so I'll be making another pizza pie in the next couple of days, topped with another recipe for veggies from Tassajara :). But anyway. Here's part one.

THE DOUGH.

I never really liked making bread, mostly because I'm not the biggest fan of bread (Except Doña Patricia's Challah. Mmmmm...). But you can't really make a pizza without dough, right? Oh well. Here I go. My first package of yeast was dead. After ten minutes, instead of being bubbly and active, it looked watery and sad. It looked like loose, soggy sand. Good thing yeast comes in packages of 3. Note to self: never, ever cook a recipe that requires yeast if you only have one package. If you only have one and it's dead, you're screwed.

The second package of yeast looked quite robust, so I figured it was ok to go ahead and add the rest of the ingredients. Remember how I said I never really liked making bread? Now I remember the real reason why. "Mix together by hand until a shaggy mass forms." Ewwwwwwwww!! I just shoved my hands into slimy, icky glop! If I ever put my hands in a baby's mouth while it was eating, I think this is what it would feel like. But I shouldn't scare anyone. This feeling only lasts a few seconds. After that, the dough becomes malleable and not gross feeling. Next comes the kneading. 12 minutes of kneading feels like a looong time! It's no joke that chefs need good upper body strength. I was literally sweating when I was done. I do have to say, you feel powerful when you're kneading, in much the same way some might feel powerful when lifting weights. That was it for now. Coated with olive oil, the pizza dough now sat on top of the oven, warming up and growing over the heat of a preheating 500 degree oven.

To be continued...

Cookies for Grandpa

My Grandfather is an amazing man. In his life, amongst other things, he has been an eighth grade teacher Honduras, an FBI agent in Venezuela and the Philippines, and a trade unionist in all of Central America- all of this after having been born into a conservative family from Iowa that had never left the United States! I can't count the number of women -of all ages and walks of life- who have told me that they want to take him home. “Get in line!”, I tell them. After all (at eighty-one!) he just married for a second time, after a life-long happy marriage with my Grandmother. You have to be a real bitter soul not to like Grandpa- he is always breath of fresh air.

He also was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

This has really been a blow to my family. Grandpa has never been seriously ill, and apart from an overdose of tapioca medicine as a child, he's never had to endure any strenuous medical procedure. Now all of a sudden, he has to learn how to live with cancer.

I came to El Paso for the summer, after finishing my freshman year at SMU. Since then I've been sharing in hospital visit time with my mother, my step-dad John, and Clemencia, my Grandfather's lucky wife. I never realized how exhausting hospital time can be for the family members. It is boring and painful. During my visits, one thing that has stood out to me is my Grandfather's dissatisfaction with hospital food. Grandpa never- never- complains about anything, especially not in this fashion. After two days of watching him “tackle his food” with grimaces and comments like “That has got to be one of the most unfortunate culinary experiences I have ever had!,” I decided to ask him if there was any food from the outside world that I could bring him. He said he wanted cookies. This was a perfect moment to resume my cooking crusade. After being released from the hospital this morning, Grandpa and I went to the grocery store and got the necessary ingredients to cook Tassajara's Chocolate Chunk Cookies.

Challenge number one: Clemencia, in the traditional Latin American way, only had brown sugar in Panela form: a solid block that's too hard to cut through. I asked Grandpa for help, and he decided that he should grab a grater and grate the block of sugar into a powder that I could work with. After a few strokes at it, he stopped and said “Whew! This is going to be an... interesting project.”

“Isn't there any easier way to go about that?”, I asked.

“Not with a Panela there's not.”

So we kept at it, me chopping pecans while Grandpa grated sugar. It was both a noisy and quiet experience. I took it upon myself to follow Tassajara's advice of not speaking while cooking. After a few more goes at it, Grandpa was able to give me the ¾ of a cup of brown sugar that I needed, even with a little to spare. Next came creaming the sugar with a stick of butter. Salted? Unsalted? The recipe didn't specify. I just went with regular salted butter. The egg I used caught my attention- a bleached white shell. That is not what eggs really look like! I was a little troubled, as I was expecting the naturally spotty, skin coloured shells that I grew up with. But in it went. With regard to the cooking time, it is possible that El Paso's extremely dry heat impacted it slightly. I added an extra couple of minutes to the cooking time stated in the recipe. As for the chocolate, the recipe specifically calls for 70% bittersweet chocolate, but the Albertson's I went to had either 100% cocoa, 62% or less. 62% is what I ended up using. It's probably a little sweeter than the authors intended, but it still worked fine.

All the while, I worked in silence. Grandpa left to the pharmacy, and I had the house to myself. It gave me space to appreciate the light coming in from the garden and falling on the water in the sink; the beauty of the ingredients and the flour dusted kitchen counter; my gratitude to be cooking again in a real kitchen after a year of dorm life. I thought about how much I wanted these to be good so I could give my Grandfather a break from awful food. I am a person who is usually loud and talkative, who listens to a lot of music and bursts into song with the slightest provocation. But in this silence I felt serene. This whole silent meditation thing works after all!

Yes- the author's comment that real chocolate bars or slabs cut by hand are better than chocolate chips is absolutely correct! The hand-cut, irregularly shaped chocolate gave the cookies much more character and flavour. The dough was creamy, and was complimented very well by the gooey chocolate and crunchy pecans. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough dough, but as is usual every time I cook from a U.S. cookbook, I ended up with many more cookies than I expected. The recipe said it made about 2 dozen cookies. I had 3 dozen.

Grandpa got home from picking up an antibiotic prescription just as I was putting the last of the cookies on a platter. He was tired from a long week of hospital treatments and doctor's appointments. He was ready to take a nap. He isn't a very effusive person, so when he tried a cookie, he wasn't very enthusiastic. “It's good,” he said, “They have a very nice consistency.” But there was chocolate left on his lips instead of dry, bland hospital food. That made me smile. When a loved one has cancer, it's hard to really know what to do. But you don't have to be a miracle worker to do good. A day of your time and a plate of cookies is enough to make things a little better.