Writing

Host a Make Your Own Pizza Party!

/ ceckman / 1 Comment

I have been putting this post off since, (let me check my calendar quick), yeah, MARCH 11TH. Has it really been over a month since my last post? No, it hasn’t. Never mind, April 11th. I can’t read a calendar. The point is that I have been avoiding the blog. Probably because of this post. I have been building it up like it’s going to be a huge thing and that’s causing me to dread writing it. So, thanks to Steam, I am now going to do what is probably going to be something fun and easy in a focused and totally beautiful atmosphere. Why I don’t walk to this place every single day I have no idea. If nothing else, I think I’ve at least discovered my new blogging spot.

Without further ado, the long awaited (by me, mostly) blog post on How to Host a Make Your Own Grilled Pizza Party!

Let’s be real everybody, I am partial to attention. To the point where if my friend is having a birthday party then I offer to throw it so I can take the credit for whatever delicious food or tasteful party favors were enjoyed by his guests. By his, I am referring to my very close friend Matty, who just (well… you know… back in Marpril) celebrated his birthday. I offered to cater the party with a make your own pizza setup, where I would bring a bunch of premade uncooked pizza rounds and let everyone put their own personal toppings on their own personal pizzas. And then grill them, because grilled pizza is one of those things everyone seems to be a fan of but no one has really tried. (If you’re on the fence, try it. It’s so easy and adds a ton of flavor.)

Okay. So. The first thing I did was to find a recipe for pizza dough which could be portioned into mini pizzas (in this case four, and then I tripled it because I need 8 and wanted 4 extra pizzas).

A quick word on grilled pizza.
Grilled pizza can be a little bit of a challenge if you aren’t dealing with cooperative dough. The hardest part of grilled pizza is getting the pizza on to the grill. The grill needs to be hot, and the dough needs to be thick enough that it doesn’t fall apart while you are trying to get it from the pan to the grill.
Have you seen Aliens? There is a part in it where a failed clone cries out “Kill Me!!!!”, asking to be destroying because it was such an atrocity. Once upon a time, a friend and I rolled our dough out on a cookie sheet very thin, without much flour to keep it from sticking to the bottom. It came apart in pieces when we tried to slide it on to the grill, fell through the cracks, and is still cooking off today everytime I heat the grill. If you listen closely enough, you can still hear it screaming “Kill me!!!” when I heat the grill.
This is not what you want, right? Right, I am not doing this blog for Buffalo Bill, so you need to make sure the dough is thick enough that it will hold together during the transition, that there is flour on whatever surface it’s sitting on to help it slide off, and that the grill is hot enough to cook the crust before it starts to drip down between the griddle and you create suffering sentient life. There are two ways to do this.

  1. Put a LOT of flour down on whatever surface the pizza is being built on, keep the raw dough a little thick, and quickly slide it off the plate onto the grill. This isn’t as hard as it sounds, and is actually how I did it the first time I tried to make grilled pizza, which was a huge success if I do say so myself, which I do.
  2. Pre-cook the dough just a little bit so it begins to firm up, and then use a spatula to transfer it from the plate to the grill. (We could have put that baking sheet in the oven for a few minutes to help the thin dough stiffen up and slide off easier, but instead we massacred it). Interestingly enough, the dough recipe I found says you can do this the night before, and so that’s what I did. 

I used a combination of a recipe from food.com for Honey Pizza Dough and a technique I found on the blog Cheeky Kitchen.

When you finish making the the Honey Pizza Dough, just divide each batch into fourths, roll out the pizzas, and then bake them at 400 degrees for about 7 minutes. This helps the dough firm up, but not completely set. You can then wrap them in plastic wrap to keep them moist overnight, and bring them to your party the following day. A few more tips on how to get a great pizza dough:

I always weigh my flour rather than measure, because it’s much more accurate when you’re not using a sifter. Which honestly who has time to sift these days. Besides through e-mail. Which I don’t do. My inbox is another thing that shouts out “Kill Me!!!!”. Sorry, anyway, use the conversion 1 cup = 4.25 ounces for flour.

Yeast is super pungent, and if yours isn’t, you either used water that was too hot and killed it or it was too old. If your yeast isn’t alive, your pizza will fall flat. GET IT? FALL FLAT? BECAUSE…

You’ll know if your yeast works when your pizza goes from the above to the below:

Making the dough is honestly the only mildly challenging part of this whole process. If you don’t count yourself a baker, or you just don’t have time, you can always buy a pre-made variation of these crusts. I know Whole Foods carries them, I think it’s 2 personal pizzas individually packaged. The ingredients for baking your own are cheap though, and the results are much more exciting. Not to mention you can always throw in something fun to your crust recipe, like cheese or spices. And if you’re like me (which god forbid how many of us can the world handle floating around at once), you get to brag about making all the pizza rounds from scratch. (Just make sure that when people tell you the pizza is delicious that you gracefully deflect and tell them that they’re the real chefs because they made the pizzas).

When you get to the party, be sure to set out your crusts and then all of your ingredients. Actual amounts for those ingredients can vary widely, but here is what I used for about 8 people (12 pizzas):

  1. About 16 ounces of Mozzarella
  2. Between 8 and 16 ounces of Medium Cheddar
  3. 1 Large Yellow Onion
  4. 2-3 Jalapeños, diced or sliced
  5. 1 small can of black olives
  6. 1 diced tomato
  7. Two Italian sausages, removed from casings and sautéed with some of the onion
  8. About 6 cups of sauce, or around a half cup of sauce per pizza, depending on if all of your pizzas will be red or some will be white then maybe a little less…
  9. Fresh Basil
  10. A small package of pre-silced Pepperoni (Hormel probably)
  11. 1 Bell Pepper
  12. 8 ounces Fresh Mozzarella

Honestly, the best way to setup toppings is to ask your guests what they like, and try to have a little bit of everything. The worst that can happen if you overdo it on the toppings (and admittedly I did a little bit), is that you get to make more dough and have pizza at home once or twice after your party. Just be creative… you can make barbecue chicken pizzas, pineapple ham pizzas, or you can even add a fried egg on top – which is amazing despite how unhealthy it might actually be.

The most important thing is to just enjoy yourself. Enjoy making the crust the day before because you’re doing something for other people, enjoy putting the toppings on your own pizza because being creative is liberating, enjoy cooking them – whether they fall apart on the grill or you chicken out and bake them instead, cooking should be about joy. (Note this only applies to Make Your Own Pizza Parties. Taking joy in everything you do is painfully cliche and I forbid it. Maybe.)

Happy Birthday again Matt, thanks Kristin for pushing me to get this posted, and thanks Danielle for helping me realize I was turning something fun into a chore. Until then everyone,

Chris

Blue Apron’s Beef Patty Melts with Green & Yellow Wax Bean Salad

/ ceckman / 1 Comment

I’m back everyone! My little sister was in town for a week right after we got back from Hawaii, and I’m now finally just settling in again. One of the ways I get back into the swing of things at home is of course, cooking. But in this case, I didn’t just want comfort food, I wanted something healthy. Tim and I have been doing pretty well losing weight by just eating better and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. But healthy comfort food isn’t always an easy thing to achieve because butter. And heavy cream. And bacon. You get the idea. When I used to search for recipes I would typically just google whatever I was hungry for an add “Martha Stewart” on to the end of it. (This still works excellently just in case you were wondering). Lately though, I find I’ve been using Blue Apron’s recipe finder when I have already cooked my weekly shipment. That’s how I found this recipe and the ingredients were fairly simple to find in the grocery store. 

I started off with the prep work, which included mincing a shallot. Anything from the onion family has long been at war with me and shallots are no exception. But fear not readers, I battle my onions with a healthy set of Onion Googles. They work best when no one is around to tell you how stupid you look, but since our kitchen is our mainstay for entertainment there is always someone around to say “Chris, what are those. You are ridiculous”. That may be, but at least I can cry on my own terms this way! 

There is also a yellow onion to slice in this recipe so my googles worked double duty, but it was worth it. 

Once I was done with hell, I tossed the shallots in with the Red Wine Vinegar and prepped the green beans. I couldn’t find yellow green beans from Whole Foods this time of year, and the beans I did find were a little peeked but no big deal. Step two was fairly simple, caramelize the onion. So in they went with some olive oil and heat to my Le Cruset 4.5 Quart Round. 

Let me take a moment to tell you about how much I love my cast-iron dutch oven. When I decided I was going to be cooking more frequently, I went out and bought a very nice Cuisinart Stainless Steel Cookware Set. I immediately loved how durable it was and for the most part not too sticky. After watching Julie and Julia for the 78th time, I decided I needed whatever the hell it was they were both cooking in, which it turns out it this weird orange pot thing that costs nearly as much as an iPad. This scared me off for a while as I wasn’t quite ready to explain to Tim why this single pot cost half the price of the entire set we had just purchased a year ago. Then I met my friend Danielle. We were supposed to be cooking Boeuf Bourguignon at the house after I made her sit through the movie with me. Which she has forever slightly ruined for me, for the record. Halfway through, she chimes in “I hate Amy Adam’s hair in this movie. She looks like John Denver.”

I hate Amy Adam’s hair in this movie. She looks like John Denver.

She’s right. Just look at this photoshop I made to prove her point. 

You’re right. I do make a better cook than graphic designer. But now that image is out there, on the internet, forever. Sorry random google image search victim, but don’t blame me, blame Danielle. Anyway, I was trying to impress my new friend, so I went out and bought this thing for this one recipe. I didn’t know it would be my other new best friend. Suffice it to say this cooking vessel has become almost the only one I use to cook in anymore. It regulates heat perfectly, it’s porcelain sticks to absolutely nothing, and it can go from grill to oven to stovetop seamlessly. I have since purchased a second for big meals (think thanksgiving), and can’t imagine cooking in anything else. That being said, it took a while for the onions to caramelize so here are a few in progress shots. If your onions are like mine and pissed that they couldn’t get at you because you had such stylish goggles so are taking a lifetime to cook, take comfort for they will be lovely soon enough. 

And finally…

Beautiful. 
The rest of the recipe is fairly simple. You boil the green beans for a bit and then submerge them in ice water…

Combine the breadcrumbs (I used a piece of the marbled rye I got for the bread from Whole Foods), Worcestershire sauce, and ground beef and form into patties…

And finally make the sandwiches a lot like you would make grilled cheese. 

Fried, plated, and delicious. 

Think meatloaf sandwich with spicy green beans here. I know I rushed the end a little bit but I have to go make turkey meatballs for dinner tonight and I really needed to get this recipe posted so I can at least say I have posted SOMETHING about cooking on my blog. Signing off for now – 

Chris

Adding Social Media

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I haven’t had a Facebook in a very long time. In fact, I’ve completely shied away from Social Media the last few years. There are multiple reasons for this, but in general its made life easier for me and I haven’t missed it. 
But now I want to blog, and I am realizing that if I am ever to get any sort of traction, I’m going to need to engage – at least partially – in social media. Sort of the whole reason I created this space was to have a way to share my life and interests without Facebook. I was spending the majority of my day on it in the past and not in a very enriching way. It prevented some relationships in my life from naturally ending because it forced constant contact. It allowed people from my past to track me in a way I wasn’t a fan of. It was a security issue (not that anything isn’t anymore). That last part in the parenthesis is confusing. I mean to say that everything you say or do online is a security issue these days. There is no escaping us, me, you, if it’s out there it’s staying out there. For now anyway. 
This is getting a little deeper than I had originally intended to go. The main thing I want to say in this post is that I’ve cleaned and updated my twitter and Pinterest accounts to interact nicely with the blog. It will automatically tweet on my account when a new post has been added, and I’m experimenting with a Pinterest board as a widget below. Additionally, all posts and special pages have now been integrated with social media sharing tools so if I post something especially interesting, hilarious, or embarrassing, I’ve made it easier for you to spread around. It’s also a shameless plug for me to get more readers. Or readers that I haven’t personally begged to come here, read, and comment. Not that those readers aren’t dearly valued, they are. Just, they can’t publish me. 

Chris