Pizza Art

I'm sorry this photo turned out so meh, because the pizza was anything but. Cousin Jan ordered this from the menu at the SRJC Culinary Café - it was spectacular!

The crust was one of the best I've ever tasted, crisp but not dry and very light and tasty. The toppings were goat cheese, thinly sliced ripe figs, ham and potatoes that had been sautéed before being added to the pizza. Jan hesitated before ordering what seemed like a rather strange combination but was hugely rewarded for doing so by one of the best combinations it has been our pleasure to discover.

Salty, savory, tangy, sweet - it was all there and it was all delicious, rivaling the pizza over at Rosso (also in Santa Rosa), and that's really saying something!

I may try making this combination at home. It's like a that Picasso sculpture of the bull's head made from a bicycle seat and handlebars - once you've seen it, you could make it yourself, but you have to acknowledge the genius who thought of it first.

Rosso! Rosso!

On a recent Saturday, My Beloved and I took pal Sari back up to Santa Rosa to sample Rosso again. Major, major home run!

Agreeing to share bites of everything, we started with a flatbread appetizer smeared with garlic roasted with balsamic vinegar, squeezing the dark, now-soft cloves out onto the crisp-tender flatbread and devouring it like starving wolves.

Sari ordered a pizza with egg in the middle, a drippy, unctuous, cheesy wonder of a pizza on that dreamy Rosso crust that we raved about before. My Beloved chose a sandwich of flatbread wrapped around a super-fresh filling of Dungeness Crab Louis. He didn't use the Louis dressing at all, just folded the bread around the generous crab and bit in. I tasted the Louis, however, just out of curiosity, and it was a whole different animal than the mayo-ketchup mixture that usually passes for Louis.

I have saved the best for last - my "forever-cooked" (their words) pork with mashed potatoes. If I had to choose my final meal before the blindfold, the cigarette and the firing squad, this would be it. I love slow-cooked pork in most iterations but this one rises to the level of divinity with its rich, smoky sauce and pink grapefruit sections. Yes, grapefruit! Not white grapefruit that might have fought with the almost-sweet sauce but pink that just gently cut through the richness of the dish and made it sit up and sing.

Happily full and satisfied, we drove a little further up the road to Healdsburg to stroll around the square, window shopping as we relived our wonderful Rosso lunches. Saturdays don't get much better than that.

I'm Moving to Santa Rosa

I'm moving to Santa Rosa. For thirteen years, I have lived happily in the Hidden City, enjoying the small town joys and squabbles, watching the neighborhood kids grow up and go away to college, and relishing the quiet lap of the waves on the beach three tiers below our hillside house.

But, I'm moving now, to be closer to Rosso.

Rosso is a pizza parlor, but calling it a "pizza parlor" brings to mind a wholly different kind of restaurant than Rosso is. We had read about it in Michael Bauer's column and, although we don't always agree with this local food guru, we felt we needed to try any pizza parlor that got 3 stars for both food and service from him. Most places are elated to be given 2.5 for one or the other, and 3+ usually go only to places like the French Laundry.

Saturday afternoon, the rain had not yet begun (again), and we wanted to get out to try something new before the forecast rain set in. We popped Cora into the backseat, drove the hour up to Santa Rosa, settled ourselves into a table and unfolded the clever paper menu. I'm not usually indecisive about food but this menu was a study in forced choice. Almost every offering sounded divine and, looking around at other people chowing down, we saw everyone enjoying their various selections, no one more than any other.

Finally, I settled on a salad with house-smoked chicken, fresh greens, caramelized walnuts, gorgonzola cheese, celery, Nana Mae apple slices and Nana Mae's organic apple cider vinaigrette (Rosso's uses local, organic ingredients). My Beloved ordered the pizza Funghi - a white base of shaved garlic and oregano with oven toasted shitake and crimini mushrooms, taleggio and fontina cheeses, shaved artichokes and fresh thyme.

For drinks, My Beloved enjoyed his blood orange spritzer and I had a "Half and Half," what in other places is called an Arnold Palmer. Both were made with fresh ingredients and both were amazing.

As we waited for our meals to be expertly prepared, we watched as the waiter brought a lump of raw pizza dough out on a floured dish and presented it to a restless little girl of about three years who was lunching with her Daddy at the next table. She was thrilled to play with the dough, squeezing it delightedly and shaping it into a lump of her choosing - and stayed quiet the whole time. Brilliant. The server took it away, then, just as their meal was served and brought it back, baked and served with a dish of the red tomato sauce for dipping, a few minutes later when she again became restless. Once again, the dough worked its magic to quiet and interest the child. This place clearly knows kids and has thought carefully about how to welcome them.

One bite of our own meals convinced us that we needed to share - both were wonderful. My salad was fresh and balanced with wonderful flavors and textures, and the chicken was pulled apart, moist with a smoky goodness that sneaked in after the taste of the chicken itself was enjoyed, an entirely different animal than the usual dry, overly-smoked, chopped chicken breast one finds almost everywhere else. My Beloved's plate-sized pizza was simply to die for - rich and redolent with tangy cheese and mushrooms, garlic and artichokes, and with a crust that was both crispy and tender, burned black in spots and overall chewy and tasty.

They don't serve desserts, at least not at lunch, but we enjoyed our (very strong) lattes while idly watching the non-stop but thankfully silent soccer games on the big screen TV. I'm not a huge soccer fan but I have to say, "Scooooooooooooore!!" I'm moving to Santa Rosa.

TGIT

Now that I'm back to working for a while, I find myself slipping back into those easy weeknight dinners that we were so familiar with a couple of years ago. Stir frys, quick grills, do the dishes and fade in front of the telly. Even though I'm working reduced hours, I'm also experienced reduced energy.

Here's the fallback position for last night, pizza made from that everlasting, enormous batch of frozen dough that huddles like a troll in my freezer. I took a lump of it out to thaw in the morning before work and rolled it out thinly on a floured board when I got home, topped it with all the leftovers in the fridge and slid it into a very hot oven on a very hot pizza stone for about 10 minutes.

Toppings? Broccoli florets, chopped canned tomatoes, two kinds of salami, sautéed pancetta, mozzarella cheese slices, fresh mushrooms, dabs of fromage blanc on top. Eclectic, colorful, delicious. Didn't even need tomato sauce.

My work week ends on Thursdays these days. TGIT.

Easy As (Pizza) Pie

Back in September, when I had a glut of pizza dough that I was, frankly, too stubborn to throw out, I froze the extra but wondered what in the world I would do with all that dough. In the intervening months, I have been saved more than once by this trove of frozen treasure.

Last night was a good example. I had taken out of the freezer one of the packages of dough and set it in the microwave over the warm oven to thaw when we stepped out to walk Cora around the neighborhood for her late afternoon constitutional. On the way home, we witnessed a terrible scene, two loose pitbulls attacking a cat. We arrived too late on the scene to do anything to save the poor cat but we rushed home, threw Cora to safety in the house and drove back to the scene hoping to at least get a description of the dogs that we could call in to the police, which we did.

My Beloved, being the kind and helpful man that he is, also drove all over the neighborhood trying to spot the pitbulls for the police, warning people that these two dogs were loose, urging them to take their cats indoors and giving rides home to any who were out with their own dogs and far from safety. We heard later that one of the dogs was captured; the other, as far as we know, is still at large. The owner of the cat is inconsolable.

When My Beloved returned home hours later, he was tired to the bone and hungry. We hastily piled goat cheese, sliced, blanched broccoli, leftover bacon and sliced mushrooms onto the rolled-out crust and slid it onto our pizza stone that had been heating in the oven. It made a quick and sustaining meal for two shocked and heartsick animal lovers.

Pie In The Sky

You may remember that about a month ago we had a pizza party at our house. It was fun, despite having to call to the local pizza parlor for emergency dough due to a minor domestic disaster with the homemade kind.

I kept the disaster dough and added cup after cup of flour to it until it finally took on a doughlike form, as opposed to its souplike state. Whereupon I was so tired of thinking about pizza that I froze it all in boules of about one large pizza's worth and forgot all about it.

Yesterday, while rummaging through the freezer in search of dinner makings - voilà! Thawed it on the counter all day, which allowed it to rise a little, too, then rolled it out, flapped it onto a pizza peel spread with corn meal, and topped it with a light brushing of olive oil, thin slices of fresh yellow and Paul Robeson tomatoes, thinly sliced mushrooms, finely shredded mozzarella/cheddar mix from a package I had purchased for the party, tiny sprinklings of crisp bacon (I only had about 1 rasher's worth on hand) and fresh basil chiffonade.

Slid it off the peel onto my pizza stone, which had been heating for the time it took to roll out and top the pizza in a 500 degree oven. Less than 10 minutes later, it was all melty and bubbling and smelling like pizza heaven or, in other words, Pie in the Sky.

Pizzacapade

The saga of the pizza dough continues. I made what turned out to be a huge batch of pizza dough over the weekend to accommodate a party of possibly 10 ravenous amusement park revelers after a day at Children's Fairyland in Oakland.

Unfortunately, the recipe (which was from a chef who would have impressed the heck out of you had I been at liberty to share his name and his recipe) was in grams and somehow my online conversion counter screwed up. We ended up with an enormous bowl of thick, bubbly soup and had to resort to calling Extreme Pizza for a bailout of their raw dough. Long story short, everyone enjoyed their pizzas - happy ending.

Back to the soup - I kept adding flour to the mix, cup after cup, and letting it rise again until finally it was gatherable (is that a word?). That took two more days and four more flour additions. It made enough pizza dough to feed the entire army of Liechtenstein. Then rolled it out and topped it with simple ingredients, really more interested in the taste of the dough after all this effort than in the toppings.

It was pizza, no more and no less. It was good, maybe even very good, but stellar? Nope. I was expecting sourdough flavor after so much time rising and bubbling in the San Francisco bay air, but it was just good ol' pizza dough, nothin' fancy. I divided it into reasonable size portions and froze the rest - frankly, I'm a little tired of pizza right now - to top on some distant day.

Anyone need a little pizza dough to round out your week's menus? I have no idea how well it freezes - stay tuned for the final episode of the pizzacapade.

UFO

Over the weekend, we made pizza from scratch. We tried to make a friend's secret dough recipe but the measurements must have been off as we had bubbly, off-white dough soup. Hmmm. Hoping to rescue it for another day I added some flour, put it aside, and resorted to calling Extreme Pizza down in town - they bailed us out by letting us purchase some of their raw dough.

Jim from Boston had quite a flair with pizza dough - the rest of us just rolled it out with a rolling pin and called that good enough.

I had had a blast choosing ingredients from the market the day before so we had all kinds of stuff to choose from - everything from smoked duck breast to pepperoni, plus lots of pre-cooked veggies, different goat, cow and smoked cheeses and a choice of red sauce or creme fraîche. Everyone topped his/her own pizza and shared portions of the masterpieces, so we all got to taste several different kinds.

In addition to pizza, we had a wine I'd like to recommend to you all - 2008 Lee Family Farm Rosé. Beautifully raspberry-pink in color and very soft, it is both a lovely sipping wine and a nice accompaniment to foods. It's from Morgan - we tasted it when we were down in Carmel Valley and loved it; I have ordered a case.

We grilled our pizzas on the barbecue, something I highly recommend. It's super fast (In fact, it's so fast that we have found that pre-cooking all veggies insures a happy outcome) and it adds flavor but, even more important, it adds a little drama and fun to the process while everyone gets a kick out of watching their crust bubble and balloon.

While our granddaughter frolicked on the deck, we enjoyed one of the loveliest evenings of the year while trying to catch pictures of UFOs.

Pizza Trial

We made pizzas from scratch this week, three small rounds, and topped them with everything we could find in the fridge: Italian sausage; Swiss and mozzarella cheeses; sweet peppers; arugula; zucchini slices; roasted tomatoes; onions both green and white; broccoli; duxelles; bacon; tomato sauce with oregano; fresh sliced Paul Robeson tomatoes in different combinations, then each of us tasted all of them.

Raised the pizza dough three times. Grilled above a hot fire on the Weber grill, flipped, topped the seared side, then baked on the grill again, covered this time, to crisp the bottom and melt the cheeses. Another time, I'd pre-cook some of the veggies - it cooks so fast this way that the veggies were essentially raw.

And I'm still looking for the perfect pizza crust. This one, from Sunset magazine, was good - and we loved the blistery, dark places where the dough was stretched thinner - but not as yeasty-tasting and chewy as I like. Still, it was a fun experiment and one we'll enjoy repeating. We froze the other three crusts uncooked, so it will be even easier next time we have a pizza trial.

Fridge Clearing Pizzas

So, we had these very large homemade English muffins lying around, really too big to enjoy with breakfast, so big they really are breakfast. What to do?

As usual, I had a lot of odds and ends in the fridge so it occurred to me in a blinding flash of brilliance that I could make English muffin pizzas and, in an even more brilliant inspiration, that I could let My Beloved construct his own dream pizzas while I assembled mine.

I fried a strip of bacon and chopped it; sizzled some minced herbed salami; and sauteed a single breakfast link worth of sausage for the meaty choices. Prepped some sliced green onions, tomato, broccoli, mushrooms, minced garlic for the veggie part. Made some tomato goop as a base for all that pizza goodness (mix tomato sauce and tomato paste in roughly equal proportions and add oregano to taste), and we were ready to roll.

On the right is my traditional combination of muffin brushed with olive oil, tomato goop topped with mozzarella and raclette cheeses, sliced mushrooms, crumbled sauteed sausage, sliced green onion and sliced fresh tomato. Very nice, but the real winner is the one on the left. It was also made with tomato goop (To me, it's just not pizza without tomato goop) on a muffin that was lightly brushed with olive oil before topping, then layered with broccoli florets, Humboldt Fog goat cheese, crumbled bacon and some thin slices of fresh tomato.

We slid them onto the preheated pizza stone at 500 degrees for just a few minutes until all the cheese melted and lightly browned.

This is a stellar way to use up the odds and ends from the fridge - My Beloved enjoyed playing with his ingredients as much as I did, and we both ended up with a satisfying supper.

True Love

Well, why the heck not?

Heart-shaped pizza for your Valentine from Malnati's in Chicago. They ship anywhere, maybe even to the White House, these days.

My Beloved and I learned about Malnati's deep dish pizzas on a TV program about olives, so we ordered one of the heart-shaped ones to celebrate my birthday this year. Then we got carried away and ordered another for our SIL, Rachel, who went to school in Chi and returns there frequently to visit friends.

Rachel loves pizza, so now it will love her back. Perfect! She lives in Hawaii - I hope the cheesecake holds up in the heat.

Pizza and the Joy of Dining with Grown Children

My Beloved has two delightful daughters, one who lives in Boston with her handsome husband and our granddaughter, the so-adorable Mia, and one who had the superior sense to stay locally in the Bay are where we can sometimes hook up for a meal and a visit, as we did last weekend.

Katie and her squeeze, Adam, who used to manage a pizza parlor, made cornmeal crust pizzas for us that were out of this world. We had three to choose from so I had a slice of each - luckily, these were 8" pizzas so my gluttony was somewhat contained.

The first had a combination of homemade tomato sauce, goat cheese, basil and asparagus - an inspired choice. Next, I sampled the fresh mushroom pizza, also with a layer of the tomato sauce. The third was a traditional melding of mozzarella and tomato.

By the end of the evening, I was soliciting the recipe for the cornmeal crust from Adam and he kindly emailed it to me the next day. I'm including it here along with his warning that he does it by memory so the measurements may be a little approximate. It's worth the risk - go for it!

Corn Meal Pizza Dough, compliments of Adam

1) Start with 2 packs of fast acting Fleishman's yeast and 1 cup of warm water. Put a tablespoon of sugar in the water and add the yeast and stir. Let this sit until a foam develops on the top.

2) In another bowl add roughly 2 cups flour and 1/4 cup coarse ground corn meal.

3) When the foam develops on the yeast water pour it into the flour and cornmeal mix along with 1 tablespoon olive oil

4) Mix this up and it should be a wet mix

5) Throw some flour out onto the counter to prevent the dough from sticking and dump your bowl out on to the flour

6) Knead the dough, mixing thoroughly and adding water and flour as needed
If the dough starts to break jaggedly, you have too much cornmeal in it and need to add some more flour; if the dough sticks to your hands you need to add some more flour; if the dough is tough add more water.

7) Separate the dough into 1 or 2 balls depending on what size pizza you want to make. Generally speaking a dough ball unrisen 2" in diameter will make a pizza crust about 6".

8) Let the dough sit somewhere warm for about 20 minutes with a damp towel over it.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

9) Once the dough has risen begin your crust; the cornmeal makes it a little harder to work than a normal flour dough so spread it out by your fingertips rather than tossing it. .First form the crust edge and then slowly work towards the middle working the dough to an even shape and thickness.

10) Spread a little olive oil on some foil and sprinkle with cornmeal.

11) Put the pizza dough on top of the oiled foil and then add sauce and toppings. Olive oil on the crust will help it retain more moisture and crisp the edges.

12) Put the foil right onto the oven rack. Depending on the toppings it will take anywhere from 15-20 minutes for a 6" diameter pizza, 20-25 for a 12". Check the center of the pizza first to see if the crust has crisped yet; that's what will take the longest.