BBQ Chicken Pizza

If you ask Micah what his favorite meals are he will begin to recite a "Top 5" list. He will say, "My number one favorite meal is either butternut squash risotto or BBQ chicken pizza." And then he will not recite any more of his list, because there is nothing else on the list. Nothing else I make really compares to my butternut squash risotto or my BBQ chicken pizza.

I've already posted the risotto and last night I made the pizza.

Let's cut to the chase: The dough is the most important part of any homemade pizza. I like thin and crispy pizza crust. I also like to make my dough first before starting anything else, so that it has a little time to relax. I also like to bake my pizzas on parchment paper so that no matter what all of you pizza is consumed and not stuck to your baking sheet. My dough recipe is simple and super easy and it's adapted from Smitten Kitchen:

1 1/2 cups of flour

1 teaspoon of yeast

1 teaspoon of salt

3 tablespoons of olive oil

1/2 cups of water- You may need a bit more.

Combine. Stretch, roll, level out your dough to your desired thickness.

Smear some Head Country BBQ sauce on your dough. Sprinkle cooked chicken, thinly sliced purple onions, cooked chicken, and mozzarella cheese on top of the sauce. Bake at the highest heat your oven will go to, until the cheese is browned, bubbly, delicious. Sprinkle fresh cilantro on top of the hot pizza and ENJOY!

Scalloped Potatoes

A good friend once told me that the "f" in flavor stands for fat. Even though a fellow contributor is a dietician, and even though I work at a heart hospital, I have to agree with that statement on some level.

My mind knows that healthy food can be tasty, my mouth knows that butter is heaven and heavy cream is from the Lord.

Everything in moderation, right Steph?

So, with that said, here is a very delicious and flavorful recipe for scalloped taters.

I start by slicing 3-4 large potatoes- I like to use red potatoes with the skins still on and I slice them relatively thin so that there are more layers in the end product.

Also, grate about a cup and a half of cheddar cheese (I used cheddar because I had it handy, but it'd be fun to experiment with different cheeses) and a cup of parmesan cheese. Butter the pan you are intending to use.

The concept of scalloped potatoes is similar to layering a lasagna. Throw some potatoes down, then some cheddar then some parmesan, then season, then more potatoes, more cheese. You get it. Seriously, though, don't forget to season each layer. It makes a difference. And reserve a little parmesan for the top. Here are some layering pictures.

So the last real step is adding a milk component to your masterpiece. Here's the deal: you can use heavy cream, you can use fat free milk, you can use a combination. The first time I made it, I used half heavy cream and half 2% milk. The second time, I used fat free milk because it's what I had handy. Both times, the potatoes were goooood.

In a saucepan, heat 2- 2 1/2 cups of milk (less if you prefer dryer potatoes) on low heat. Add 2 cloves of chopped garlic, several sprigs worth of fresh thyme, 1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

Pour milk mixture over the potatoes, sprinkle remaining parmesan over top layer, cover with foil, bake 375 degrees F for 40 minutes. Remove foil and continue baking for 5 minutes.

Make if for a potluck, like I did. Or eat the entire dish yourself, like I wanted to.

Apple Crostata

Mmmmmmm!

The other night I had a bunch of friends over. I had some apples in the fridge and some flour in the cupboard so I decided to try an impromptu Apple Crostata. I know. I sound pretentious. Like the Barefoot Contessa. I'd been meaning to try it though, and I just thought the setting was right for it.

I was first introduced to apple crostada at Coffee Slingers (who get's their pastries at Praire Thunder Bakery). Apple crostata is best described as a little pocket of apple pie only it's better, because it's sweet and cinnamony and the crust is so tender and buttery. The crostata Praire Thunder makes are "personal sized" which are accessible and nice in their own way. The evening I made mine, I just felt like we all needed to share a huge crostata together.

First make the outside pie dough. Combine in a food processor:

1 cup all purpose flour

2 tbsp sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 stick of cold, cold butter

Process ingredients together until the contents look like clumpy sand. Add 3 tbsp of cold water and combine until dough is formed. Form dough into a disk and wrap in saran wrap. Refrigerator until it is chilled well.

Peel, core and chop 3 large or 6 small apples. I don't care what kind you use. I had granny smith in the fridge and they were excellent.

Next, roll out you pie dough. I just made mine into a huge circle. Here are two terrible pictures of the dough rolling process for you to reference.

Place the chopped apple pieces in the middle of the dough, leaving about an inch and a half border. Make your crostata filling by combining:

1/4 cup of flour

1/4 cup of sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp allspice

Sprinkle this mixture on top of the apples. Or you could always toss the apples into the dry ingredients. Fold the edges of the dough over the apples and filling to make a "pocket". I pinched off the areas where the dough overlapped. Thinnly slice a tbsp of butter and place slices in over the crostata.

Bake on 450 degree Farenheit for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. You can let it cool, but it's better if you enjoy it hot off the pan like we did.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Happy Valentine's Day. Yep. I'm going there.

I made my very excellent, very sweet, very charming boyfriend these cookies because they are his very favorite. And because it's Valentine's day week. And because cooking is my love language and I express my affections for people best through it.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter

1 cup of peanut butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 Eggs

2 cups of flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup of chocolate chips (or the whole entire bag, you're grown and can make your own decisions).

Preheat oven on 325 degrees F. Cream butter in a stand mixer. Incorporate peanut butter. Add sugars and eggs. Add dry ingredients and mix well until everything is incorporated. Add chocolate chips. Spoon onto cookie sheets and bake for 12-15 minutes or until browned.

Breakfast for Dinner: English Muffins

I'm just going to come out and say it. Baking bread is my forte. You know the quote, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Well, for me it's bread. Beer too, but bread especially. I love the taste, the texture, the baking process. There are few things that bring me more joy than a nice, smooth dough. That said, many of my posts will be about bread.

I could go on, and on, so let's just get into content.

This recipe produces 10 or so buttery, soft-on-the-inside, crunchy-on-the-outside, sweet, salty, all-around mouth-watering english muffins or, as I like to refer to them, pockets of heaven. Prepare yourself, you will probably cry at the first bite, then look up to the heavens and thank God for introducing them into your diet.

If you want these for breakfast, prep them the day or night before and leave it in the refrigerator over night. Or you can do what I did, prep first thing in the morning and have breakfast for dinner.

Start by mixing your dough starter: 1 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoon of unbleached, all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup of water, 1 tbsp honey, 1 tsp active dry yeast.

The starter is a wet, battery mixture that will ultimately ferment and produce the deep, savory flavor profile of the muffins. Whisk all of the ingredients together in a large stand mixer bowl and set to the side.

In a seperate bowl, make a flour mixture by combining 1 cup plus 1 1/2 tbsp of unbleached, all-purpose flour, 2 tbsp dry milk, 1 tsp of active dry yeast. Sprinkle the flour mixture over the dough starter. Cover with plastic wrap, let stand at room temperature for an hour and then refrigerate for up to 24 hours.

Two hours before you're ready to serve, take your dough out of the refrigerator. Mix the dry ingredients into the starter using a kitchen aid on a low speed. Add 1 1/4 tsp salt and 3 tablespoons of butter to the mixture and continue mixing until everything is incorporated.

The next step is prepping out a workspace by flouring an area large enough for your dough. I'm not one of these people that loves to flour out an entire counter top and get dough and crap everywhere. Maybe it's because the mess would be ridiculous. However, if that's your spirit, go for it. There's no judgement here. I use my commerical sized baking sheet.

Roll your dough out, then cover it and let it rise for about an 30 minutes to an hour. Then cut out muffins using a biscuit cutter or an inverted, floured glass (like me!). Toss each muffin in a bit of cornmeal and when you are ready fry them in butter on a griddle, the same way your would a pancake. You'll know they are ready when both sides look delicious and not doughy.

Now gather your friends or family around the stove. Open a jar of jam and a container of butter and let your loved ones enjoy the fruits of your labor, fresh off the griddle. This, is living.

Dough Starter:

1 cup plus 1 1/2 tbsp all purpose, unbleached flour (156 g)

3/4 cup of room temp water (177 g)

1 tbsp honey (20 g)

1 tsp active dry yeast (2 g)

Flour Mixture:

1 cup plus 1 1/2 tbsp all purpose, unbleached flour (156 g)

2 tbsp dry milk (20 g)

1 tsp active dry yeast (2 g)

Then later:

1 1/4 tsp salt

3 tbsp butter

Cornmeal for dusting

Butter for frying

Quiche two ways and my friend bio

It has been a tradition for quite some time now to have Sunday dinners with some, many or all of our friends. The menu is always different, the food is always exceptional. It was at a Sunday dinner that the idea of a food blog was first born.

I made quiche for last Sunday's dinner and have made it again since then. For good reason.

I spent Sunday morning researching methods and different recipes and eventually settled on the version out of America's Test Kitchen. Honestly, I was a little bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, the taste was what I imagine heaven to be like and the texture was tender and flakey. But my dough receded in the baking process and the shell had a few cracks in it and I'm a perfectionists and I can't really tolerate a few cracks in my tart shells, even if they will be equally delicious and eventually covered with filling.

However, I highly recommend this shell recipe with the sole exception that it will recede and there is nothing you can do about it (at least that I know of). Apparently, many tart shells will recede as is the nature of the dough.

Here's the recipe. In a food processor, add 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Mix the dry ingredients by hitting the "GO!" button on the processor. Cut up a chilled stick of butter into tablespoons and drop into flour mixture. Blend until you have a consistency of clumpy sand. You know what I mean. Add a little under 3 tablespoons of ice cold water and blend into the mixture. Your dough has been made.

Now divide the dough into walnut sized pieces and place in your tart pan or pie pan. This will help the dough to spread evenly throughout the pan. Working from the middle of the pan outward, press dough to cover and the surface of the whole pan. Continue pressing dough up the sides so that it spills slightly over the side of the pan, then using your thumb, scrape off the overhanging dough. Use the scraps to fill in holes or thin areas in the shell. Put a sheet of plastic wrap over the shell and use your hand to really smooth it out. Pop your shell into the freezer and don't take it out until it's frozen solid.

Here's some pictures to clarify the shell-making process:

Now that your shell is frozen, preheat your oven to 375F. Place the pan on a baking sheet and bake the shell, covering with tin foil and weighing it down with a pie weight for 30 minutes.

Now for the filling. I'm going to keep this as short as possible. Put whatever you want in your quiche. Just make sure that your ingredients are pretty dry going in, otherwise you'll get a runny, mushy, kind of gross quiche.

For example, I generally use fresh spinach in my quiche. I'll throw some butter into a skillet, saute some garlic and then put in a heaping amount of fresh spinach and wilt it down. Then after I'm done, I disperse it onto a plate so that the juices dry up quite a bit before I throw it into my quiche.

That said here are some ideas for quiche fillings:

• Bacon, spinach, swiss cheese quiche- Cook and chop approximately 12 oz of bacon, pat dry and set aside. In a pan saute together spinach and garlic until spinach is throughly wilted. Use as much spinach as you would like. Grate up about a cup of swiss cheese.
• Black forest ham, spinach, provolone cheese quiche- Throw as much black forest ham into a skillet as you would like; once brown cut into pieces and set aside to dry. Follow spinach directions from above. Grate about a cup of provolone cheese.

I feel like you get the idea. Once you have all of your filling ingredients together and your shell is done, you simply place the filling into the shell. I like saving the cheese for the top layer. Do whatever your heart desires.

In a medium bowl, mix together 3 whole eggs, 2 additional egg yolks (makes quiche creamy), 1 cup of heavy cream, and 1 cup of milk. Season with salt and pepper. Pour egg mixture over the filling in the shell. Slide the whole tart pan (still on a baking sheet) into the oven on 375F for 40 minutes or until the top of the quiche has become golden-browny. Enjoy immediately, piping hot, straight out of the oven.

Now, for your enjoyment, my friend bio:

What I’ll bring to this blog: Easy recipes to food that is seemingly difficult to make and bad photography. No really, other contributors will take all of the photography on my posts. And they will never even get any of the credit.

Up my sleeve: Ciabatta bread, bagels, homemade ricotta, onion jam, and English muffins, and a slew of other carb-loaded, fat-enriched, simply delicious recipes.

If I had my own restaurant, it would be: A bagelry in Midtown OKC. If you’d like to invest in a bagelry, let me know.

Favorite food memory: Counting up the sticks of butter my girlfriends and I used to prepare a massive Thanksgiving feast for our friends in 2009. We stopped counting at 12 ½.

Favorite culinary-related memory: Shootin’ the shit with Mario Batali on bus at the airport in Bologna, Italy.

Cookbook I use most often: The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Kitchen equipment I use most often: Kitchen Aid stand mixer, dutch oven, kitchen scale.

Kitchen equipment I use least often: Microwave and my ultra-expensive knife set.

Favorite ingredient to work with: All purpose, unbleached flour.

How I learned to cook: At 14, my Vietnamese mother told me I’d never find a husband if I didn’t learn to cook. A few days later, she told me that when she was my age, she was preparing full meals for her family of nine people. I buckled under the pressure of her subtle hints and here I am, ten years later.

First post: Tomato topped ciabatta, butternut squash and baby portobello mushroom risotto

What better way to start a brand new blog than to jump right in with content.

I'm Toni. Thanks for stopping by. My friends and I decided to start a food blog. We all cook. We all have different styles, backgrounds and passions. Each of us has decided on a day of the week to blog on what we've got up our sleeves, things we're working on and perfecting, staples in our repertoire (Um, I just spelled repertoire right the first time I tried!), etc.

So here we go!

Anna and I cooked together the other day. I like cooking with Anna because she frequently talks to her food. She'll say, "Ohmygosh! Risotto! I love you!" or "Thank you, tomato salad! You're so delicious!" It's really lovely.

Let's start with the tomato salad, because it is my favorite thing. Ever.

Don't waste your time on the big, hard and pale red tomatoes at your supermarket. Go with the ones on the vine. The real-red, real-ripe ones. Cut them into chunks. Pour in some balsamic vinaigrette and olive oil. Not a lot, but enough. Season it with salt and pepper. Yes, you should use fancy sea salt and fresh-ground pepper. It's better. Serve it over ciabatta or a baguette or whatever other kind of crusty bread you have. Eat it while you make the risotto. Or have manners and wait for everyone else.

Moving on to the risotto.

Split, de-seed, and peel your squash. Cut half of it into bite-sized or smaller chunks, throw it on a roasting pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper. Let the squash roast on 400F for about 15 minutes, tossing them at some point.

While those are roasting, clean up some baby portobello mushrooms. Adult portobello mushrooms are waaay to meaty for this recipe. Baby portobello mushrooms sort of cut through the salt and creaminess of this dish and they are my favorite part to eat.

So, after the squash have been roasting for 15 minutes throw the mushrooms in the oven, and continue roasting another 10 minutes or until both vegetables are cooked through.

Alright! Now the risotto part of the risotto recipe.

This takes a minute and you should have all of your ingredients ready because risotto demands your full attention.

Here's my number one rule on risotto: Don't stop stirring. As you continually stir, you break down all of the gooey, creamy starch stuff in the arborio rice. Yes, your arm may get tired, but trust me, it is welllll worth the effort. Plus, when you are cooking with Anna, she helps stir when you haven't mentally prepared yourself to stand over a stove for so long.

Here's my second rule to risotto: Don't add all your stock at one time. In fact, you add it by the ladle to keep the pot and rice wet, and as it continually dries, you continually add stock.

I mean, you don't want to drown your rice in a stock bath but if you are wondering if there is enough stock, there probably isn't.

So, throw in butter and half an onion or a couple of smaller shallots into a dutch oven on medium-low heat. Cook the onions until they are nice and translucent. Don't let your butter caramelize. Next, add 1 1/2 cups of arborio rice and coat with the butter in the pan. Once coated, begin adding a couple of ladles of chicken stock. Bring it so a nice simmer, stirring the whole time. Add a little salt (no really, just a little; This recipe has enough salt and doesn't need much help) and more fresh ground pepper.

The rest.. is so simple. Continue stirring and adding stock until the risotto is ever-so-slightly al dente. Don't let it get gummy. Taste often so you'll anticipate where you are at in the cooking process. It will take between 20-30 minutes.

While you are stirring, ask Anna to shred up some parmesan cheese for you. Maybe half a cup. We got a little crazy with ours and added probably a cup and things got heavy fast. I mean, it was delicious. But heavy.

So, now you have roasted squash and mushrooms, a pot of creamy risotto, and some shredded parmesan cheese. Throw it all in together. Then listen for Anna, because she'll start talking to it soon.

Tomato Salad-

• 3-4 vine-ripe tomatoes cut into chunks or a crate of grape tomatoes cut in halves.
• Balsamic vinaigrette
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Butternut squash and baby portobello mushroom risotto

• Half of a butternut squash, cut into chunks
• Crate of baby portobello mushrooms, clean and halved
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Butter
• Half of a small onion or 2 shallots
• 1 1/2 cups of arborio rice
• 6 cups of chicken stock
• 1/2 cup of shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano