Pizza Part II: Bruschetta Revenge

Though I would consider my first pizza attempt a failure, I used the leftover ingredients to make myself a delicious lunch the next day.  Rather than dealing with the dough and stone again, I used a baguette.  First I sliced the French bread, then I topped it with sliced tomatoes and goat cheese.  Next I drizzled olive oil and dried oregano on top, and I baked these in the oven for perhaps ten minutes.  This bruschetta was one of my best lunches.  Luckily my grocery store has a fantastic cheese section, so all I really needed was a few simple ingredients to pull the dish together.

Soggy Pizza Party

For Christmas, I got Nick—well, us—a baking stone and peel.  Though he's made pizza from scratch before, I started us off this time with a ball of dough from the grocery store.  So, I put the stone in the oven and heated it to about 400 degrees.  On the counter, I rolled out the dough on the peel, and topped it with sliced tomatoes (no sauce), sliced mozzarella cheese, goat cheese, fresh basil, dried oregano, and drizzled olive oil.  It looked really pretty and delicious.  So, I shimmied the thing onto the stone, and cooked it for...well, I'm not sure.  I obsessively opened and closed the oven every five minutes or so, thinking I was going to burn it.  Ultimately, I don't think I set the oven temperature high enough (and, of course, I let heat out every time I checked it).  The pizza was strangely moist on top, the dough soggy.  I probably could have left it in longer, but that didn't seem to be the main problem.  Did it make a difference that I sliced the mozzarella cheese instead of shredding it? I'm still not sure what happened, and I'm apprehensive about trying the whole thing again.  I have to say it wasn't the worst thing in the world, though, because the goat cheese I got (imported!) was so, so good.

Sugar Cookie Extravaganza: Nerd Treats, and Lopsided Holiday Tree

I've never really been into sugar cookies.  They're too plain, too unwaveringly sweet.  But, I've always failed to see the point of a chocolate-less cookie anyway.  Peanut butter cookies make me thirsty, snickerdoodles are boring,  molasses cookies really gross me out, and shortbread only tastes good when topped with Nutella.   Anyway, this holiday season, I finally warmed up to the sugar cookie.  They're so simple to make, even I aced them, and they're easily moldable and made into decorative creations worthy of your Sandra-Lee-style tablescapes.   This year, I did two very different sugar cookie projects that were both quite delicious.

I found my recipe in The Joy of Cooking.  My mom hates that book, citing that it "has recipes for rabbit and stuff you'd never make,"  but it does have a whole section on roll cookies, with several recipes and tips (like using powdered sugar instead of flour to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin).  No matter what book you use, though, making sugar cookies is easy.  It's mostly butter, with a few other ingredients like flour and sugar.  Give it a spin in the Kitchen Aid, and then chill discs of dough in the fridge until they're firm enough to roll out and create shapes.

This actually all began when my boyfriend Nick wanted to bring Christmas cookies to his office at Bethesda Softworks.  He had an idea to make them look like the Vault Boy, a character from the studio's signature game, Fallout.  To create the shape, we basically modified a ginger bread boy cookie cutter.  (The hardest part was to find one with long enough arms) and then further molded the resulting doughy cut out.  We worked on these all night.  It took a while to nail down the process, but once we got on a roll, we cranked out quite a few.  Nick chronicled the whole thing on Bethesda's blog, and we also got featured on Gizmodo.

Because I wasn't sure how far my dough was going to take us, I made several double batches.  We were driving back home to Michigan the next day, so I packed my lunchbox full of dough-discs and hoped they'd stay cool in the trunk  for nine hours.  When I got home, my mom pulled out some snowflake cookie cutters she'd bought years ago.  She saw someone on TV stack the different sized snowflakes to make a Christmas tree.  So, we had another project.  Ultimately, the frosting stuck  the cookies together so severely, that it was impossible to pull off an entire cookie.  You had to sort of crack off a corner.  Not practical, or particularly aesthetically pleasing, but it tasted all right.  Though I probably wouldn't do that particular project again—or the Vault Boy one since I don't really like video games, hah—I could see the possibilities for next time, and I would absolutely do sugar cookies again.