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.
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.
wow! that looks delicious!!
ReplyDelete