sparkling cyanide

Cooking With Christie: Pizza!

Finder of Lost ThingsLeave a comment

Inspiration: Recently, my favorite pizza place closed unexpectedly, leaving a wedge-shaped hole in my heart. Since it was one of the few pizzerias I could actually eat at (as it used non-enriched flour), I’ve been missing my bi-weekly pizza runs!

Deep Calming Breath

I’ve tried making pizza dough in the past, and it was…okay. Not bad, just not great either. So I decided to up my pizza game and bought the following book.

King Arthur’s Baking School has all kinds of basic recipes for simple and complicated bakes, accompanied by helpful hints, tricks, and advice.

So, I tried the book’s pizza dough recipe….with a few tweaks. To add some extra flavor, I mixed in dried basil, majorum, and parsley. I also swapped half the all-purpose flour with bread flour to give the dough a bit more chew.

And it turned out beautifully!

Then I discovered the pizza sauce I thought was in the cupboard magically disappeared. (I swear it sprouted legs and wandered off.) Undaunted, I winged it. Using regular spaghetti sauce fortified with tomato paste (to thicken it and make it taste more tomatoey), I added extra herbs, a dash of sugar, and a healthy amount of gochugaru pepper flakes.

Helpful Hint: Make a sauce like this the day before. It will taste oodles better the next day as all the flavors have time to marry together.

Spreading my improvised sauce, I loaded the pizza with veggies and vegan chorizo and baked it….It turned out great! With more practice, it might even become excellent!

Doesn’t it look pretty!

Christie: Honestly? I’m not sure I can see any of Christie’s detectives making this…Save Superintendant Battle who I think would like feeding his family something that requires time to make and a bit of improvisation.

Cooking With Christie: Sourdough Cheese Crackers

Finder of Lost ThingsLeave a comment

Inspiration: On a week where the temperatures ventured down into the low 70s for a whole week, I decided to bake….Because, well, frankly, I missed mixing things up! (I also find all the measuring and assembling of ingredients calming.) So whilst baking bread, buns, cookies, and frying tortillas, I had the show Good Eats (the newer episodes) playing in the background. During a lull, my ears perked up when Alton Brown started talking about his take on sourdough cheese crackers.

Now, for whatever reason, I’ve always found sourdough intimidating. You’ve got to start the starter, feed it, and then, after an appropriate amount of time you use it (well, at least the leftover bit). Then there’s the generally slow rise time associated with these breads….And well, the whole sourdough business kinda seemed like a faff.

But I really, really missed baking.

(Summer is not my favorite time of year.)

(Alton Brown’s cookbook which contains the cracker recipe.)

So I decided to give it a go. Whereupon I discovered, much like hummus, constructing a sourdough starter is easier than it looks. You just need a bit of patience because it just takes time.

(How the starter started vs. how the starter looks now.)

So after a week and a day, I was ready to make the sourdough cheddar crackers….Mine aren’t as brightly colored as the one in Alton Brown’s cookbook or show — due mainly to the mild cheddar cheese powder I used rather than the sharp cheesy powder called for in the recipe. (Hey, it’s what I could find at my local grocery store).

Additionally, I didn’t read the recipe as closely as I should have (that’s on me for not wearing my glasses), so I added all the butter listed in the ingredients list rather than only a portion. (As a part is used in the dough while the rest is brushed onto the cracker later.) So, they didn’t rise as well overnight and had an almost greasy feel.

They tasted great. They just looked a bit….special.

In any case, I cannot wait for the mercury to dip back into the low 70s (or, even better, the low 60s) so I can have a do-over on these crackers!

Christie: I can see most of Christie’s main characters eating these at one point or another in their lives and liking them — except perhaps for Hercule Poirot and Mr. Sattersthwaite, who possess far more particular culinary objectives.

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2023