Pizza, Blackberry-Chocolate-Almond Torte & Ginger Ice Cream

Westside Dinner Club Episode 2: Pizza and Torte

For my second hosting of Westside Dinner Club (mid-January), I made two kinds of pizza, salad, chocolate almond blackberry torte, and ginger ice cream.

Used my favorite pizza dough recipe from Vegan With a Vengeance to host a variety of very un-vegan toppings. A condensed version of the recipe is at http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com/2009/04/pizza.html.

One crust was rosemary-whole wheat and the other was spelt-Italian herb.

The whole wheat crust was slathered with pesto that I made over the summer and froze.

From there I topped it with finely chopped garlic, thinly sliced jerusalem artichokes, and slivers of red onion.

Baked at 500 F for 7-10 minutes and finished with crumbled goat's milk feta on top.

The spelt crusted pizza got a fancy sauce-kinda thing I found in an awesome little book called Practical Pizzas. It was a variation of one traditional topping for Pissaladière, a Provencal onion tart. I'd love to try making all-out Pissaladière sometime, but here's what I took from it:

4 T olive oil

1 lb 9 oz red onions, thinly sliced

2-5 garlic cloves, crushed

2 t sugar

2 T red wine vinegar

salt and pepper

1. Heat the olive oil gently in a large pan. Add the onions and garlic and cook over low heat for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

2. Add the sugar and red wine vinegar to the pan and season with plenty of salt and pepper.

3. Remove from heat and spread over crust.

On top of that, that pizza got finely chopped garlic, sliced green apple, crumbled bacon, and once it came out, more goat feta.

Jessica made the salad.

On this particular Sunday, Nick was planning on having his drawing club at our house, so we combined forces for a joint dinner-drawing club! It was pretty much the funnest dinner club ever. Drawing club was at it here before dinner, but after we ate we all played a seriously epic round of pictionary telephone.

The chocolate, almond, blackberry torte with ginger ice cream is the dessert combination of my dreams. It's everything I want in dessert: warm balanced with cool, rich, creamy, spicy ginger accenting fudgey dark chocolate, and tart runny blackberries. I made this exact combo for the first time late last summer in celebration of a few of my favorite Louisvillians uniting at my house in Olympia. Right around that time I picked and froze a gallon of the prolific Himalayan blackberries that take over Olympia in August so I could enjoy them through the winter. Using them to make this sinful treat again totally brought the tastes and memories of summer back to me when I was craving them.

Chocolate Blackberry Almond Torte recipe

Ginger Ice Cream recipe

Both of these recipes are perfect. Because the author of the ice cream recipe knows how to use fresh ginger root (i.e., generously), I didn't feel any need for the suggested crystallized ginger and left it out. But ya know, I don't think it would be bad.

Roasted Winter Vegetables

Westside Dinner Club Episode 1: Roasted Winter Veggies

In fall some of my friends had a great idea: A weekly dinner club! Whitney has described it as the anti-potluck. One person cooks a meal each week for everyone else. They're always really good; I like to call them dinners of standards. At this point we've got about six participating households, and I've hosted three times, but somehow in the craziness of the last two quarters I haven't posted any of the dinners that I've made! These first three back-posts will be a dinner club catch-up.

The first time I hosted (in mid-November) I made squash soup and roasted winter vegetables. The soup was a lot waterier than I wanted it to be, so I'm editing it out of history (except for the part where I just told you about it). The vegetables, on the other hand, were a beautiful showcase of the roots that serve as my seasonal local staples through winter: turnips, potatoes, parsnips, and jerusalem artichokes.

Left to right: Turnip, potato, parsnip, jerusalem artichoke.

Jerusalem artichokes were first introduced to me in a dish similar to this about a year ago by Lee at a Free Herbal Clinic winter workshop. I couldn't believe how yummy they were, packing an earthy artichoke-like flavor and much smoother mouth texture than most starchy roots (since they in fact don't have as much starch as most commercially available roots).

Jerusalem artichokes, also known as sunchokes, are a species of sunflower.

Raw, they are nutty, crunchy, and crisp, and make a great snack with almond butter. Though I imagine that their bulbous grey bodies play a large part in why I've never seen them at a large grocery, I personally am pretty charmed by the knobby little characters.

This recipe was the first I ever used to make jerusalem artichokes and it remains one of my favorites for its humble comfort but distinct flavors.

from http://morselsandmusings.blogspot.com/2008/02/baked-jerusalem-artichokes.html

285 ml double cream or créme fraîche
Juice of 1 lemon
2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 good handful of fresh thyme, leaves picked and chopped
3 handfuls of grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 kg Jerusalem artichokes, peeled and sliced as thick as a pencil
2 good handfuls of fresh breadcrumbs (if you want to go from mmm to OMG, use fresh torn bread pieces, particularly caraway rye)
Olive oil

1. Preheat your oven to 220°C/425°F/Gas7.
2. In a bowl mix your cream, lemon juice, garlic half the thyme and most of the Parmesan, and season well to taste.
3. Throw in the sliced Jerusalem artichokes. Mix well and place everything in an ovenproof baking dish.
4. Mix the breadcrumbs with the rest of the thyme and Parmesan and some salt and pepper.
5. Sprinkle all the flavoured breadcrumbs over the artichokes and drizzle with a little olive oil.
6. Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes until the artichokes are tender and the breadcrumbs golden.