Caramelized Onion and Mushroom Pizza with Trader Joe’s Herb Pizza Crust
You have to try this – herbed pizza dough topped with caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms. Wow was it good, and so simple to put together too. I cooked the sliced yellow onions over medium heat in a cast iron skillet until they were soft, sweet and deeply browned. Meanwhile I sauteed the sliced mushrooms (I used shittake and crimini mushrooms) in olive oil until they were soft and browned as well. The dough I used was Trader Joe’s refrigerated herb pizza dough – I rolled it out into a rough rectangle shape and spread a very thin layer of greek yogurt on top to give a little tartness to the pie – then topped it with the onions and mushrooms and baked it for about 12 minutes at 450 degrees. So so good!
We ate the pizza alongside steamed artichokes and it seemed like such an elegant meal for very little actually cooking. As for the kid report: One loves artichokes but had to be coaxed to try the pizza while the other ate up the pizza and had to be coaxed to try the artichoke (which he said was a monster). They ended up eating and enjoying both things by the end of dinner, so another successful meal at our house.
Needing to Find Some Motivation
Do you ever just feel lazy and unmotivated? Man do I have a case of the lazies lately. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to do, it’s that I can’t bring myself to do anything. I’ve been crazy busy with the end of school for the kids so I think that has something to do with it – sometimes when I’ve got down time I just want to zone out in front of the TV or with a good book (speaking of good books, I read a great one recently: The Favored Daughter by Fawzi Koofi. This woman is amazing – she’s had an incredibly hard life in Afghanistan. Now she’s the speaker of parliament there and running for president in 2014. Reading this book certainly put my little problems into perspective). (Disclosure: The book link above is an affiliate link and if you happen to make a purchase through it I’ll receive a small percentage – at no cost to you!)
I’m trying to think of ways to jump start my creativity again. I’m going to put together summer journals for my kids that combine road trip journals with field journals, so I did a small watercolor map of our beach trip this summer. I scanned it and I’ll print one out for each journal and paste it in.
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| OK, the map is not quite to scale, obviously. |
I did also manage to put together the flower arrangement at the top of this post, and isn’t it so happy-looking? It makes me smile just looking at it. Otherwise I’ve been puttering around the house but not doing anything much of consequence.
Do you have any advice to get unstuck and get busy?
Easy Apple Blueberry Crisp
I ended up with an excess of apples in the house the other day and made Apple Blueberry Crisps to use some of them up. I mixed up apples, blueberries and vanilla and topped it off with an oatmeal crumble. So good! Ok, here’s the deal: Fruit crisps/cobblers are so easy to make it’s almost criminal. You don’t even need a recipe – seriously. Here’s how it goes:
Choose which fruit to use. Firmer fruits work better, so think apples, pears, peaches, plums. Berries are delicious in crisps too, but add some firm fruits as well for better texture. Cut your fruit into bite sized pieces – you need enough to fill whatever container you’re using to bake the crisps. You could use a pie plate, a cake pan, a baking dish or individual ramekins. Add some flavoring; think cinnamon, vanilla or almond extract, bourbon, rum or other liqueurs. Sweeten the fruit with sugar or honey, not too much, about 1/4 cup and adjust it for how sweet the fruit is naturally. Add a spoonful of cornstarch, mix it all up and pour the fruit and juices into your baking dish.
For the topping mix up some uncooked oats, a bit of flour, some brown sugar, a pinch of salt and a few chunks of butter. Crumble the butter into the other ingredients until its into little pieces and evenly combined, then dump the whole mix on top of the fruit in the baking dish and bake it at 350 degrees until the fruit is soft and bubbly and the topping is browned.
That’s it! No measuring, no fuss, just a yummy fruit dessert.
Tomato Plants are in the Ground!
Well I finally got my tomato plants in the ground – it’s probably super late for most of the country but just fine for the northwest. I actually plant them in planters because the least shady spot in our yard is up against the side of the house so they sit on a gravel strip with a nice southern exposure. I planted a roma, a supersweet 100 cherry tomato, and ‘champion’ which seems like a slicing tomato. I also put in a few jalapeno peppers and pot of sugar snap peas.
The big project of the day was pulling the fig tree out of the planter box next to our patio – we always loved to eat the figs at the end of summer until last year, when we happened to notice the rats enjoying the figs too. That pretty much ended our enjoyment of the figs, so the tree had to go. There happen to be a lot of other plants in that planter I wanted to save, so I had to dig and cut out the fig just around the bottom of the trunk and then pull out as many roots as I could. I had to cut through a few of the roots with a pruning saw they were so thick. Look at this thing!
I planted a bougainvillaea in the fig’s spot, which will look nice against the shed wall and will complement the Mediterranean herbs that are growing there now (rosemary, lavender, marjoram and sage). It normally won’t overwinter here, but I’ve got it in a little microclimate so I’m hopeful. I still need to fashion some sort of lattice or ladder it to climb.
I also had a fuchsia to pot up so I planted it in an old watering can that belonged to my grandfather. I think it’ll look really great once the fuchsia starts to flower and droop over a bit.
Finally, here’s a peony that’s just bloomed – beautiful isn’t it?
I hope you’re all enjoying your June gardens! What’s blooming in your yard?
Peppers and Onions with a Plancha on a Grill
Yum, we had pork loin chops on the grill tonight and I cooked up a batch of peppers and onions to go with them. I read in a magazine recently (Sunset maybe?) about cooking steaks on a plancha on a grill (a plancha is a heavy cast iron griddle) and as I was getting the coals ready I remembered we had a plancha stuck in a cupboard somewhere around here so I pulled it out and dusted it off.
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| Peppers, onions pork and the plancha – before and after |
It’s so nice to cook outside and if I can cook more of the meal outside it’s even better. I let the plancha heat up over the coals, put a bit of oil on it and then dumped a whole pile of peppers and onions on top. They didn’t need any precise cooking time – just an occasional stir as the chops cooked and by the end they were soft and caramalized and smokey and delicious. Alongside the grilled pork and a scoop of white rice they were excellent. I’m already dreaming up what else I’ll cook on the plancha this spring and summer.
Cook the Collection #7: The Art of Simple Food
I’ve been craving potato leek soup for a few weeks now, and thought I’d better get to it while the weather’s still cold and dreary and calling for warm soups (such is the end of May in the Pacific Northwest). When I went to the bookshelf to find a good recipe I knew just which book I hoped would have one: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. Hooray – happily there was a potato leek soup recipe and I was good to go. Its such an easy soup with just a few ingredients but with great flavor, and the family loved it and ate it all up.
All of the recipes in this book really highlight individual ingredients and let the flavors of each shine through. This is a book that encourages the reader to not just cook but to be a cook, by offering lots of potential variations on recipes and by honoring the cook’s intuition and skill. For example in the potato leek soup recipe one of the handful of ingredients is salt, but there is no amount listed. Its up to the cook to add the amount of salt that they feel the recipe needs. This book is a great read and also great to cook from – a winning cookbook combination!
Turn Old Jeans into Jean Shorts
I had a pair of jeans that had seen better days, and recently one of the knees gave out. My kids were a little too obsessed about how I ripped my pants and made a deal about it every time I wore them, so I figured the time was right to transform them into something new.
Ok, I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence by offering a tutorial about how to make jean shorts from old jeans. I mean, step 1) cut the legs off the jeans above the knees. There, done! Although not quite done – think of this as the midway point since I want to do something else to the shorts. I can’t decide if they need to be more distressed, or have some patches or something. I’m going to have to mull it over some more.
Cook the Collection #6: The Bread Bible
I had the chance to hear Rose Levy Beranbaum speak years ago at a reading and book signing and she was just what you’d expect a baker to sound like: warm, witty, compassionate and helpful. She took questions well past the scheduled end of the talk and was thoughtful and thorough in her replies.
“The Bread Bible“, her companion book to her popular book “The Cake Bible” is just like that – a serious book, just like you’d expect with ‘bible’ in the name, but thoughtful and warm as well. It’s comprehensive and thorough, covering breads from quick breads and muffins, through flatbreads, sandwich breads and rolls to hearth breads, sourdoughs and brioches. All the recipes include three types of measurements: cups and spoons, metric and imperial weights. I like having the choice of how to measure because weighing the ingredients gives great results, but sometimes I’d rather be less fussy and just toss everything in.
So we made scones from this book and OMG they were the best scones ever! We usually just use the Fisher Fair Scone Mix which is quick and easy and makes pretty darn good scones, but these scones blew those scones right out of the water. These were amazingly good scones, like ‘eat too many in one sitting’ scones. These scones were so good they made me want to immediately bake from another recipe in the book. Of course I probably won’t do that right away because I have so many more cookbooks to cook from (on that note – my lovely children got me a cookbook for my birthday (“Kids Parties!” – I think there was a bit of self-interest at work) so now my collection total stands at 153.
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| Look at this mint leaf – I think its prettier than the scones! |
TV Tokens: Teach Your Kids to Limit Their TV Time On Their Own
Sometimes I feel like I’m locked in a never-ending battle with the TV. My kids will whine and whine constantly to try and break me down and get me to let them watch another show. I try to limit their screen time to two hours a day (which seems like a ton) but man is that hard some days. Things around the house always seem to go more smoothly when the kids know their limits and the house rules, and we definitely need those when it comes to the screen (Netflix is my nemesis, seriously).
Last year I came up with TV tickets as a way to limit their viewing time and those worked reasonably well, but I got tired of printing out tickets (or writing out tickets) every day. Plus the tickets were using up a ton of printer toner so I needed to find a better way. I wanted to find something durable and permanent so that I could reuse them every day, but also so that I could customize them to cut down on the chance of forgery (my daughter became quite a dedicated forger when we used paper tickets).
I decided to use plastic poker chips: they’re cheap, they come in a box of 100 so I had lots of spares for mess-ups or other projects and they’ll be durable. Plus they come in three colors so I could color-code them for each child. In our system each chip is worth 30 minutes of T.V. (“one show”) so each child gets two – if they each watch each others’ shows it is two hours of screen time, but sometimes they don’t do that for whatever reason and that cuts down on the T.V. time. I also made two bonus tokens – if they have an excellent day behavior-wise I have the option to give them a bonus 30 minute token but that’s not a regular thing. Of course if your kids are less devious than mine or you toss out the rest of the box of poker chips then you really don’t even need to label them – just assign each kid a color and you’re good to go!
The tokens were super simple to make. I used PicMonkey to create images for the labels on each side of the chip. I started with a blank PicMonkey image, cropped it into a square and then used a circle overlay and stretched it to fit the size of the square. I then changed the background of the overlay for each separate chip color (green for the blue chips, purple for the red chips and blue for the white chips) and added text for each chip as well. I have a 3/4″ craft punch, which happened to be just the right size to make the paper labels for the center of the chips (you could just freehand cut the circles with scissors).
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| 1) Plastic poker chips, 2) Mod Podge, 3) your token images printed on paper, 4) craft punch or scissors. Not pictured: paint brush. |
Now there is probably a better way to print the images out so that you can attach them to the chips, but this is how I did it: I opened a text document and inserted each image into it, then resized them to be a bit more than 3/4″ in diameter, saved and printed it out. I punched out the images using the punch and then used Mod Podge to affix the circles to the poker chips.
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| Clockwise from top left: Put Mod Podge in the center of the poker chip; Add the paper image; Cover the image with more Mod Podge; Let dry. |
The Mod Podge took about 20 minutes to dry and I only used one coat. The directions say you can seal it with acrylic sealer to keep it from feeling tacky but I didn’t need to do that – they dried clear and glossy and smooth. So far we’re back on track with the new system and it really works to cut down on the whining and begging since they know that when their tokens are gone they’re done.
Pruning the Big Trees in the Front Yard
There is something so therapeutic about pruning – I really love to get in there with a pruning saw or loppers and just go to work on a tree or bush. We have some decorative trees in our front yard that are quite old and tend to overgrow their spaces if they aren’t pruned occasionally. The worst culprits are a Japanese maple and a magnolia tree (although my husband would say the oak is the worst, I saved that one for another day). They shade the yard with such dense shade that nothing much grows beneath them and their limbs drape all over the roof which looks so messy.
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| These are not the best photos, but I was eager to get pruning and didn’t want to wait until the light was right to take the before picture (on the left) and I took the after picture (on the right) just after I finished so at least the light would be the same for both shots. Note the motor home peeking through in the after shot, but at least the roof-line is visible now! |
I cut them both back to neaten them up, although I don’t have a tall lopper or a ladder high enough to get to the upper branches. The only downside to my pruning party is that it ended up exposing the neighbors’ motor home, which has seen better days, honestly. The only downside to pruning is the enormous pile of branches we’ve now got to dispose of . . .
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