Category Archives: Baking

Frankenbrownies

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I love Halloween.  We always have a party, and I always go overboard with the variety and quantity of treats I make.  I get nervous about whether we will have enough food, and then I get anxious about whether I’ll be able to pull everything together in time.  It can be a little scary…

I also loved the pumpkin enchiladas I posted about here.  I never would have expected the flavors of rich, fruity pumpkin, mild creamy goat cheese, and the deep roasty chocolate of mole sauce to go together well.  But they did, and it got me thinking of other ways of combining this trio.  Spurred by a statement of dessert desire by a sick friend, the project became brownies.  Pumpkin cream cheese brownies: could such a thing be?

There are a million recipes for brownies, but I went with Dave Lebovitz’s Cheesecake Brownies, which turned out to be a really good idea. Though I was at first thrown off by and nervous about the complete lack of leavening products, I fought back my temptation to add some baking powder and mixed the ingredients exactly as written.  It was the right choice.

Rather than simply swirling the cream cheese dollops with the thick, shiny chocolate batter, I also added about a cup of pumpkin puree mixed with a teaspoon or two of pumpkin pie spice.  I swirled.  I swirled and swirled and swirled, and still no chocolate came to the surface.  I scooped and plopped and swirled some more, and finally a few rich brown slivers came to the surface.  It was kind of a monster.  But keeping in mind that at its Latin roots, a “monster” bears in its etymology the idea of showing us something, I decided that was good enough, and I’d have to wait and see what it had to show me.  I deposited my weighty, ugly baby into the oven for almost an hour.

Fifteen minutes or so into the cooking process, I started to smell that incredible, mouthwatering aroma of chocolate cooking.  Half an hour in, a delicate curl of cheesecake inserted itself into the scented air.  I couldn’t smell the pumpkin much, but suddenly there was chocolate-cheesecake-spiciness, and I wanted to pull the whole thing out and just eat the whole thing with a spoon.

I resisted, and when the collection of smells had solidified into a… well… a thing from which an inserted toothpick came out clean, I set it aside on the counter to cool.  It was truly a frankensteinian creation.  The brownie layer was dark and rich and barely disturbed, while the top was a delicate whipped pale orange that cut like a harvest-flavored mousse.

The taste was so good.  The brownie was dark and rich; it was definitely of the fudgy brownie ilk rather than the cakey, flakey brownie.  The pumpkin and the cream cheese read like a pumpkin cheesecake, with all the creamy smoothness of a cheesecake and all the spongy custard-y quality of pumpkin pie.  They were delicious together, just as the same flavors – with considerably less sweetness – melded in my pumpkin enchiladas.

While the flavor was great, it did read more like a layered dessert than a brownie.  I think this is because I used the full amount of cream cheese mix Dave Lebovitz calls for PLUS a cup of pumpkin puree.  There was just too much goodness to swirl evenly.  My proposed solution to this is to layer half the chocolate, then dollop on the cream cheese and pumpkin, then top it with the other half of the chocolate batter before mixing.  It seems it will be easier to swirl together the much denser, thicker chocolate with the delicate creaminess of the additional flavors if the chocolate is divided up.

This was truly a Frankenstein creation, but it was certainly not a monster, except perhaps in the sense that it demonstrated deliciousness.  It will make its debut at our Halloween party this year, swirled and sliced and dressed to impress, in orange and “black.”  Its trio of components all vying to be the star means I won’t have to make as many kinds of treats, because here’s the trick: this is a three-in-one.

See, trick-or-treat’s not so scary…

Heralding Fall

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A few weeks ago, N. and I took some friends to Agate Alley bistro, and one of them ordered the Pumpkin Enchiladas.  I was intrigued.  I took a mental note: these would soon appear in my humble little kitchen.

Then summer came to a close.  School started.  And that means I went crazy.  This is my first year dissertating, which means I need to stop playing on the internet and start playing with ideas.  And so the pumpkin enchiladas, and my ability to post here, went on hold.

But Tuesday night, magic happened.  In celebration, perhaps, of the second day of the second week of my second-to-last year as a graduate student (fingers majorly crossed, folks!), I decided to take a few hours with my nose out of books.  And they were pretty incredible (the hours off AND the results).  With my own twists and considerations about ingredients, I put together:

Pumpkin, Roasted Garlic, and Goat Cheese Enchiladas in quick mole sauce.

Enough people have asked me for my recipe (hah!) that I’m going to post in a more traditional ingredient-and-process list format, to make it easier to follow.  This is approximate, however, so tweak and twiddle as you so desire.  I ended up making 5 enchiladas.

Ingredients:

1 whole head garlic, split horizontally

1 – 2 shallots, sliced thin

corn tortillas

1/2- 1 cup pure pumpkin puree

crumbled goat cheese

crumbled queso fresco cheese

handful of pumpkin seeds

Quick Mole Sauce, or your favorite mole, ready to go at the time of assembly.

(I know, this is not a “homemade” mole sauce, and it doesn’t taste exactly the same.  But it’s a good shortcut, I think, and let’s face it: if you want to make these enchiladas to enjoy on a weeknight, most of you aren’t going to take the time to make a mole from scratch.  I’m not ashamed.  I added extra unsweetened chocolate to this recipe, but otherwise kept it mostly the same).

  • Preheat your oven to 400F.  Place the garlic halves in a small dish, drizzle with oil, salt and pepper, and cover tightly with aluminum foil (or just wrap loosely in foil).  Roast in the oven for about an hour, or until cloves are very soft and very golden.  Burnished but not burnt.  Cool, then squeeze the cloves out of the papers and mash them into a paste.  During this time, you can take advantage of the oven being on to roast your pumpkin seeds.  They will only take 5-10 minutes, though, so don’t lose track of them or they will burn.
  • Caramelize shallot slices in a skillet.  They should be dark, dark, like French Onion Soup onions.  Set aside to cool.
  • Turn oven down to 350F. Spread the bottom of a baking dish (I used glass) with mole sauce.
  • Prepare and assemble enchiladas: working with one tortilla at a time, spread the tortilla with the garlic paste, then top with 2-3 TB each pumpkin puree, goat cheese, and shallots (or to taste). Carefully roll up the tortilla and fit it, loose edge down, into the baking dish, pressing each enchilada tightly against its compatriots.
  • Top enchiladas with a thick, even layer of mole sauce.  Sprinkle with goat cheese and queso fresco crumbles to your liking.  I say the more, the better when it comes to cheese, but that’s just me…
  • Bake for 30 minutes, or until the cheese is soft and the sauce is bubbly.  Queso fresco and goat cheese, depending on which types you use, don’t melt and burble the way other cheeses do, but they will soften and collapse on themselves a bit.
  • To serve, sprinkle with toasted pumpkin seeds and enjoy with spicy refried black beans, Spanish rice, guacamole, or whatever you so desire!

I was a bit concerned, at first, that the mole would overpower any other flavor, but it didn’t.  This dish executed an intriguing and intricate dance between dinner and dessert.  Ingredients that often appear in sweet circumstances remained decidedly savory.  The pumpkin and the goat cheese were so creamy and rich, like a harvest cheesecake enfolded in a tortilla.  I could have used more roasted garlic paste, but there’s always next time.  The chocolate in the mole, too, holds the expectation of sweetness but none of the sugary suggestion of a dessert.  Instead it provided a perfect bite of creamy-spicy-chewy-oozing-warmth, with an almost unexpected nutty crunch from the pumpkin seeds.

Also good were last scrapings and bites of loose cheese crumbles, sticky caramelized mole sauce in the bottom of the baking dish, and a last, perfect, creamy green square of avocado.

Dark beer, perhaps even a chocolate stout, would be a lovely accompaniment.

Dancing in the Kitchen with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef

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Shauna and Danny Ahern are my friends.  I don’t know them, we’ve never met, and though I read Shauna’s blog Gluten-Free Girl with a dedication that trips along the border between religious devotion and obsessive-compulsive disorder, I doubt she has ever glanced at mine.  I have drooled over the food (and made some of it!), I have laughed at her triumphs, I have felt my biological clock chime when she speaks of her daughter.  In late July, I sat on my sofa with tears streaming down my face, choking for breath as I read the beautiful story of her wedding.  As a writer myself, I admire her style, her skill with words, and her ability to talk lovingly, richly, thoughtfully about food, about family, about opportunity and love.  I feel like I know these people.  I wish I really did.

A few weeks ago, Shauna announced that along with the forthcoming publication of the cookbook/love story she and Danny “the Chef” wrote together (Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes, listed on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Free-Girl-Shauna-James-Ahern/dp/0470419717), they were willing to share three preview recipes with interested parties.  I was, of course, one of these, and in a flurried email exchange, I suddenly had three brilliant recipes, replete with stories, to dance to in my little kitchen.

I ended up only making two of the three, mostly because N. doesn’t like shrimp, so a plate of seared prawns in almond garlic sauce did not sound appealing to him.  But if everything in the cookbook is as stellar in flavor and straightforward in instructions as the two recipes I did conquer over as many days, everyone should own a copy of this book, whether you eat gluten-free or not.

Friday night N. and I went to a last-hurrah-of-summer-bbq at the home of J., my birthday twin, and his partner HP.  Troubled by the notion of bringing the chocolate cake again (I’ve made it several times this summer already), I cast about mentally for another idea, and there was the pdf recipe for GFG’s chocolate peanut butter brownies.  My mouth started to moisten.  Chocolate, butter, sugar, peanut butter, and my first experimentation with xantham gum?  Yes, thank you, I think I will!

As brownies go, it was a fairly standard procedure of careful melting, mixing, swirling, baking, but oh the delight of tasting!  In the short section about the recipe preceding the ingredient list, the words “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” appear.  They aren’t kidding.  With the peanut butter swirled gently into the deep chocolate batter (and there is no other word for the color than that: chocolate) and my fingers cautiously tasting stray blobs of batter, I wanted to stop and eat the batter.  Half of it would bake up just as nicely as the whole pan, right?

I resisted, and slipped the dish into the oven, relinquishing it from sight for half an hour.  Still tasting the batter, I could detect a slight grainy texture that I attributed to the alternative flours used (my previous experimentations with gluten-free flours have not always been great, but they have always been grainy), so I was a little worried about that.  But after the pan cooked, cooled, and came to the party with me, my concern lifted.  I wouldn’t have had to tell anyone these brownies were gluten-free.  I wanted to, because I must admit I wanted to brag a bit about participating in this project (and get the word out there!), but there was no explaining to do.

Oh Shauna.  Oh Danny.  The taste!  The crumb was rich and moist, the pockets of peanut butter were sticky bombs of candy-like delight.  I couldn’t even get a photo in before the hordes descended on the pan.  Seven people decimated ¾ of the pan in ten minutes.  Almost everyone went back for seconds.  Ever thoughtful of my not-so-narrow waistline (and hips, and thighs, and butt), I generally try to leave leftovers at other people’s houses when I choose dessert as my contribution to a meal.  Not this time.  The remaining brownies came with me, clasped tightly on my lap as we drove home in the rain.

Saturday, I ventured out into the weather again to pick up a few last ingredients for my second dance with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef; it’s hard to make a pasta dish containing lemons, olives, anchovies and pine nuts when you don’t have lemons or pine nuts in your kitchen.  I grumped to myself as I walked to the store and back.  Why did I need this stuff?  I knew I shouldn’t, but it would just be easier to substitute ingredients.  The brownies had been good (liar, understatement of the century!), but this was just pasta.  I could post about the brownies and leave it at that…

I was so wrong.  With water for brown rice pasta considering coming to a boil, I prepped ingredients and tried to imagine what this was going to taste like.  N. had already been frightened by the idea of anchovies, and I knew he was envisioning a cheap pizza draped with little fishy bodies.  I told him that Shauna and Danny said not to be afraid.  He said “hmph,” which meant he was unconvinced.  He doesn’t know Shauna and Danny like I do.

With the toasty, nutty perfume of not-quite-burned pine nuts still lingering in the kitchen, I sautéed a collection of vegetables in my biggest skillet, hurriedly chopping and slicing in between stirring sessions.  I’m always too anxious to cook to bother readying all my mise en place before scraping a boardful of ingredients into the pan.  At the point that the roughly chopped mix of olives I’d kept stowed in the back of my fridge and the finely chopped little fillets of anchovy hit the pan, I felt my knees buckle.  The smell was incredible.  When I added capers and lemon juice, I had a Proustian epiphany of Corsica, of Greece, of Spain.  Except I’ve never been to Spain.  Or Corsica.  Or anywhere in Greece.  It was just a strong enough, rich enough, delicious enough smell that it lifted me from the stained hardwood floor of my kitchen and transported me onto some magical different plane of Mediterranean glory.

Carefully twirling the pasta through sauce, I had to be careful not to drool on it.  These flavors: is this umami?  It was almost more than I could manage to mix in pine nuts, lemon zest, a clumsy chiffonade of basil – I just wanted to eat it straight out of the skillet.

We sat down to eat.  I tried to do one of those perfect forkfuls where you get a tiny sample of everything.  I tried to think objectively about what I was about to experience, about what vocabulary I would use to describe it, about how I could speak like a food critic about it.  I don’t know how.  Here are my words, all I can manage: earthy.  Warm.  Salty-bright-tangy-acidic-perfect.  Briny.  Tart.  Meltingly rich.  Flavor bomb.  Somewhat reminiscent of chicken piccata, but deeper, richer, earthier, nuttier.

And N.?  He scraped his plate.  I asked him what he thought so I could make a report.  “It was excellent.”  As I’ve written before, N. is generally restrained in his verbal praise of food.  And this was “excellent.”

I’ve never bought anchovies before.  I might never allow them out of my pantry again.  This recipe, whether we use gluten-free pasta or not, will fast become one of my staples.  For me, it’s too distinctive to have all the time.  It’s too special.  But for those nights when I need something powerful to wake my taste buds, when I need something that makes my mouth feel alive, this is it.  This was like eating a tango.

Go to a bookstore.  Order Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes.  Rejoice in the story and in the recipes and in the wonderful opportunity to eat really, really good food.  Dance in your kitchen.  And then tell me about it.  And tell Shauna.  I know she’d want to know.

Cheese and macaroni

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I pride myself a bit on escaping from some of the pressures and temptations of processed food. I like to cook, I like homemade food, and I like when my shelves are full of whole ingredients and natural products and grains and all that snobby stuff. If I can (relatively) easily make it from scratch, I try not to buy it premade.

But there are always exceptions, and sometimes they are the very worst kind. You see, most of my life I have hated all but one variety of macaroni and cheese. My mom’s elbow noodles in cheesy bechamel with bread crumbs on top? Can’t stand it. The crunchy baked roasting hot steaming vessel-o-mac from Cornucopia, one of our go-tos? Merely tolerable. But that kind that comes in a blue box? That kind with the chewy, rubbery noodles and toxic neon orange powdery “cheese”? Oh god, I love it. I wait till it’s 10 for $10 at the grocery store and stock up. Sometimes I peek into the back of my cupboard just to check that I have a box or two stockpiled there. I’m not ashamed.

And yet… and yet I always feel like I’m missing something. There must be an element of worth to homemade mac and cheese. People love it! Our friend X is practically a connoisseur. I finally decided I, not the mac, must be the problem. I love pasta with cheese on it, I love fettuccine alfredo, so where, I asked myself, did the problem arise?

In the sauce.

The closest I’ve come to enjoying a bowl of homemade, baked macaroni was a version in which the sauce was made of (as near as I could tell) two things: butter and cheese. It’s the white sauce I apparently take issue with. Thick and creamy but bland, with all the graininess of melted cheese but only 50% of the flavor. Ever notice how a chocolate milkshake has only the palest color and flavor of chocolate compared to a big scoop of rich, fudgy ice cream? Cheese sauce seems to do the same thing to cheese.

So the natural solution seemed to me to tinker around in my kitchen, producing numerous casseroles of ever increasing cheesiness, until I found a ratio I (gasp!) actually enjoyed. Perversely, however, given my strange penchant of creating and serving new food to friends and family without testing it first, I decided to make macaroni and cheese for my in-laws during our visit to their home.

I don’t know what made me think of it. I don’t know what made me decide it was a good idea. But suddenly, there I was in the tiny grocery store in their little town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, buying cheese and elbow noodles and Panko breadcrumbs. Baby, I was makin’ mac’n’cheese.

I must admit to borrowing a bit from Pioneer Woman’s recipe, but I made a few alterations of my own. Here’s the rundown of ingredients, some approximated:

1 pound elbow noodles (1 16oz. box)

¼ cup butter (½ a stick)

¼ cup flour

2 tsp spicy brown mustard

2 cups milk, room temperature

1 egg, beaten, room temperature

garlic salt

black pepper

3-4 cups cheese? I used an 8oz. block of sharp cheddar, 2 generous handfuls of parmesan, and some already grated leftover medium cheddar stowed in the fridge.

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Topping:

2 TB butter

½ cup Panko breadcrumbs

2 TB parmesan

2-3 TB sharp cheddar

  • Cook the noodles in boiling water until almost done. They should still be a little underdone on the inside, because they are going to continue to cook when we bake them. Drain well and set them aside until we call for them.
  • Melt the butter in a large pot or pan over medium to medium-high heat. As it melts, add the flour and stir in, making a smooth golden paste. This is a roux.
  • After letting the roux cook for a minute or two, watching it carefully and stirring frequently so it doesn’t burn, add the mustard. As Pioneer Woman said, this adds a really nice but not recognizable tang to the finished dish.
  • Begin adding the milk gradually. I probably added in three or four additions. Stir or whisk well after each addition of milk, until the mixture is smooth and does not have big lumps of flour. When all the milk is added, let it cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes until it starts to emit heavy reluctant bubbles and becomes quite thick and rich. Turn the heat down to low. This is a bechamel, or basic white sauce.
  • Slowly, stirring constantly, add about ¼ cup of the bechamel to the beaten egg. This is tempering, which starts the egg cooking slowly so it mixes in smoothly in liquid form. If you just tipped the egg into the sauce hot on the stovetop, it would scramble and leave little eggy bits in your smooth wonderful mixture. After tempering, add the egg and sauce mixture, now warmed and safe, back into the bechamel. Season to taste. I used garlic salt and seasoned pepper, because that’s what I found in my mother in-law’s spice cupboard.
  • Add the cheese in handfuls, stirring until each addition is melted before adding the next. This way your sauce doesn’t get overwhelmed with clumps of cheese, and if you decide it is cheesy enough without the whole amount, you can stop where you like. I wanted it to start to get stringy and clingy, as the cheese overwhelms the milk completely.
  • Add the parsley and the cooked, drained noodles. Stir to combine.
  • Pour the sticky cheesy mixture into a buttered 2 quart casserole dish and load it up with the topping (procedure follows), then bake in a preheated 350F oven for about 30 minutes, or until the edges are bubbling up from the bottom and the topping has become relentlessly golden and crisp. Eat.

To make the topping,

  • Pinch about two TB of butter into pieces in a bowl.
  • Add the bread crumbs, parmesan, and cheddar and mix together as you would a streusel for a crisp. You want small chunky pieces, and you want the cheeses and crumbs to be evenly distributed. This makes a lot for a casserole dish of macaroni, but N. really loves a crunchy topping so I always add a little more than, perhaps, the average person would. Adjust to your tastes.

When the topping was taking on a burnished shade and the combination of butter from the sides of the dish and cheese from the sauce was boiling and bursting up around the sides, I liberated our dinner from the oven and we dug into it anxiously, dropping large spoonfuls onto our plates. The noodles had soaked up a lot of the bechamel during their stint in the oven, leaving the decadent suggestion of creaminess but the overwhelming assault of cheesy flavor holding them together. The topping was the perfect combination of sizzling salty crunchy sharpness and, served beside steamed broccoli and whole wheat focaccia, I must admit, I liked it. I went back for seconds. I had it for lunch the next day. Forget macaroni and cheese. Give me, for the rest of time, cheese with macaroni.

Three-Bite Tableau

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I like small sized food. I like its charming appearance, its potential for fanciness, and, not least, its ability to fool otherwise intelligent people ((i.e. yours truly) into thinking they can eat extra, because it’s so petite it must be calorically harmless as well.

To qualify, I think this sort of food must be consumable in three bites or less. Ideally this should be possible without a fork, but of course (especially with desserts) there are exceptions to this ideal. At any rate, three-bite foods should be attractive to the eye, enticing to the nose, and should carry far more flavor than seems possible for their small size.

Here are two I’ve constructed recently: one that turned out to be a snack superstar, and one that carries as yet underrealized potential for true greatness

Artichoke Spinach dip cups

Two of our colleagues and dear friends got married in Long Island recently. As N. and I were both teaching a summer class (and subsisting on graduate student salaries), we were unable to jet-set across the country to attend. But to our delight, G. (the bride) informed us that her father would make a toast to friends and family not physically present. We gathered with some friends, some wine, and some snacks, and at 4:10 pm PST we raised our glasses to G. and T. I brought these little dip cups, bubbling and creamy in brown crisp phyllo shells. This is an adaptation of a recipe for hot artichoke dip that I usually make in a pie plate, but the elegance we were attempting to emulate and the stark truth of half a box of phyllo sheets in my refrigerator made me change my plan. Note that these ingredient amounts are almost all approximations.

In a medium bowl, I mixed:

4-6 oz. cream cheese

½ cup mayonnaise

5 oz. spinach, steamed or boiled, drained, and roughly chopped

1 14 oz. can artichoke hearts in water, drained and roughly chopped

2 TB parmesan cheese, divided

black pepper to taste

After a serious taste test and careful alterations, I set the dip aside and considered my phyllo. I had about 10 sheets, which I swept with butter and layered in the usual way, before cutting into twelve even stacks (3×4). I pressed each stack carefully into a mini muffin tin, letting the edges point out every which way in hopes of creating crisp, crunchy tips, and then loaded the buttery vessels with spoonfuls of dip. I probably used about 2 TB per cup, topped each with a generous extra grating of parmesan cheese, then stowed them in a 400F oven for 20 minutes. Depending on your oven, they are ready when the edges of the phyllo cups are dark golden and fragile, the parmesan cheese atop the dip is beginning to color, and the dip itself is slightly bubbling. Or just when the phyllo is brown, if you are impatient.

We were impatient. How could we not be, when the smell of cooking cheese was filling the kitchen, and the promise of that perfect balance of crispy and creamy whispered how wonderfully it would compliment our champagne?

Crab cakes

Now visiting family in California for a few weeks before the term begins again, my mom and I have been bonding the way I like best: in the kitchen. Three days ago, we decided to make crab cakes and salmon cakes to go with a half dozen luscious ears of sweet corn.

I like crab cakes, but like pesto, I am still searching for the right ratios in my collection of ingredients. This version, while tasty, is no exception, particularly because while we did look up a recipe, we ended up barely consulting it and, ultimately, not following it at all.

Working delicately in a medium bowl, so as not to break up the crab too much, we mixed:

3 6 oz. cans of crab meat (1 lump, 2 regular if you’re skimpy like us, all lump if you’re really looking to impress)

1-2 TB each, or to taste, finely chopped green onions, dill, and flat-leaf parsley

2 TB lemon juice

2 tsp lemon zest

scant 1 cup or less fresh bread crumbs

1 egg, lightly beaten

salt and black pepper, to taste

I recommend adding the egg last, so you can taste and test flavor balances and add extra herbs or lemon before dousing the mixture in raw egg. I also recommend adding the bread crumbs a little at a time, because depending on how you like your crab cakes, a full cup might be too much. Crab has such a sweet delicate flavor that too much bread or too many herbs will hide it completely.

Again, with extreme care, we patted the mixture into five palm-sized cakes, trying to help it hold together without overworking it. We plopped our fragile quintet onto a plate and refrigerated them for about 45 minutes to let the flavors meld and the cakes mesh together more firmly.

While they were chilling, I mixed up a little dipping sauce in the food processor, dropping in:

½ cup mayonnaise

2-3 generous TB strong horseradish

5-6 basil leaves

3 TB flat-leaf parsely

3 garlic cloves

generous squeeze of lemon juice, to taste

When the cakes had thoroughly chilled and our stomachs were rumbling with anticipation, we heated just enough vegetable oil to cover the bottom of a large skillet and carefully patted the cakes with dry bread crumbs, sliding each into the heated oil as soon as it had received its crisp coat. We fried them for 4-5 minutes a side, or until the bread crumb coating had become crunchy and golden. They threatened to collapse into pieces, and two cracked severely down the middle, but with careful coaxing and dextrous spatula work, we managed to keep them together fairly well.

They tasted good. They were light and herbaceous and not eggy at all, but they didn’t scream “crab.” Oh they suggested seafood, but I think we overdid the quantity of bread crumbs, and playing it cheap by adding leg and claw meat might have been a miscalculation. Topped with the horseradish mayonnaise, however, they were delightful. It was creamy and smooth, but the spice hit the back of your tongue just as you swallowed, and lingered for a moment or three.

Three moments of spice, three piles of herbs, three cans of crab. What does it really matter, then, that it took me five bites to finish my cake? At its core, this was a three-bite item. Matching delicate flavor with delicate table manners was my downfall. I should have, as my tongue urged, anxiously cut bigger pieces, urgently indulged, finished the whole little patty in only three tasty bites. Everyone else did.

Gourmet

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On a warm, July day, when a person (and her husband) is unjustly required to spend the shining hours of the afternoon working, teaching, holding office hours, what better treat could there be than to come home and indulge in a little gourmet dinner?

As I’ve divulged previously, I like cannibalizing from restaurant menus.  Usually it’s not the dish I order, but another that was second or third on the list… or just barely missed the final, nervous, rushed decision as the server hovers above me… and I jot down the description on a slip of paper somewhere and try not to lose it in the subsequent weeks.

This time it was that Americanized, fancified Italian food-of-the-common-man: pizza.

Several weeks ago N. and I celebrated Friday by meeting some friends to drinks and dinner.  We’d already eaten, so we swore to each other we would only drink one pint (for him), and one glass of wine (for me).  Then we went to Agate Alley with our friends and ordered a huge, gluttonously greasy, spicy, salty, decadent basket of onion rings.  I ate so many…

While we patted our fingertips on napkins to try and assuage our greasy shame, our friend S. ordered a personal size pizza topped with prosciutto, gorgonzola cheese, brandied figs, and a bright salad of fresh raw arugula, piled high right in the middle.  I had never thought of putting figs on a pizza before, but it seemed so inspired.  Though S. ate hers without the porky delights of prosciutto (one of those vegetarian types, you know), the idea of wafer-thin slices of cured pork-belly lingered in my mind when I recalled the recipe.

So I, so often operating as Dr. Frankenstein in the kitchen, decided a recreation was required.  This pizza would be a hybrid – a loving, daring combination of Agate Alley’s delectable pie and the prosciutto and caramelized onion darling Ree of The Pioneer Woman has developed.  With a hunk of gorgonzola languishing in my cheese drawer, it was just the right thing to do.

Ingredients (mostly approximated):

1 lump pizza dough (I shamelessly bought mine, pre-made, from Trader Joe’s fridge section)

1 medium to large sweet onion

2 TB brown sugar

4-6 oz. prosciutto

5-8 dried figs, sliced

1-2 oz. gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

1 cup (at least!) shredded mozzarella cheese

Big handful of arugula or basil

While my pizza stone heated in the oven, I caramelized my onions per the Pioneer Woman’s directions.  Then, while I prepped all my other ingredients (grating cheese, slicing figs, playing with the dough), I forgot about the onions for a little bit too long and the brown sugar started to burn.  But I decided to just call that “extra-caramelized” and be happy with it.

With the dough stretched, plunked onto the hot, cornmeal sprinkled stone and already starting to shrink back in on itself (it never wants to stay in a 12-inch circle; why not?), I quickly piled on the toppings: a drizzle of olive oil, evenly spread mounds of mozzarella, trailing slices of salty hammy goodness, cheese crumbles, figs, and dark, dark mahogany clumps of onion.

Into the oven at 450F it went, and about 12 minutes later, gasping, I edged it out and clunked it down on my stovetop.  Lacking arugula, I sprinkled baby leaves of basil atop the whole thing.

It looked glorious.  The crust was crunchy on the bottom, the cheese was golden and bubbling, the prosciutto had crinkled and crisped, and the figs were these dark, seeded pockets of mystery.

We ate.  We ate more.  The combination of salty and sweet has been hyped for years now, but that’s because it works.  The sweet onions and tangy, sugary figs balanced the rich creamy funk of the gorgonzola and the perfect saltiness of the prosciutto.  I would have preferred arugula to basil, because the licorice overtones of basil weren’t the perfect match, but the fresh greenness was definitely welcome.

I would never have thought of figs on pizza, but I would urge you to try them in this combination (or just figs and prosciutto, I won’t tell).  Sliced thin, they warmed in the oven and just started to create their own glassy brulée atop their honeyed interiors.  With chewy dough, creamy bubbling cheese, crisp-chewy ham, soft sweet onions, the crunch of the little seeds inside each slice of fig, popping between the teeth and tickling the taste buds, was the perfect final flavor of each bite.

This would be perfect enjoyed with a crisp, semi-dry white wine, though the beer we drank with it was just fine.  It is supposed to be simple fare, after all.