Pizza on the Grill & Recipe

I recently saw an episode of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" where he grilled pizza.  I knew I had to try it.  He used a pretty specific pizza dough recipe but hubs just whipped up a batch of pizza dough in the bread machine, same formula we usually use. 

Recipe: 
1 1/4 cup warm water
2 cups white flour
1 cup wheat flour
2 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1 1/2 t yeast
2 T oil

Place the ingredients in the bread machine in this order, put it on the dough setting.  Watch it to make sure that it mixes everything together properly.   (Course you can just go pick up a ball of ready made pizza dough at Wally's for 99 cents.)

After the machine was finished with the dough, I took it out, divided it and worked it into two balls and let them raise on the counter under a towel.  Then I stretched them out into pizza shapes.  I preheated the grill and put some olive oil on a paper towel to wipe the grill.  I used a bit of cornmeal between the dough and a cookie sheet so that it wouldn't stick and just slid the dough on to the hot grill.  I adjusted it a tiny bit once it was on, but for the most part the heat of the grill will start to make the dough into crust pretty quickly.

I poured on some olive oil and brushed it out into a nice even coat.  I flipped it over and while the fire was browning the other side, I put olive oil on the baked side and brushed it around to an even coat.  I put some garlic through the garlic press and tried to evenly distribute that over the surface, I followed that with thin sliced onions, peppers and fresh chopped basil.  Then some cheese, mozzarella and some extra sharp cheddar.  I had to work quickly because the fire was browning the other side of the crust in a hurry.   


Then I closed the lid for a bit for the cheese to get a chance to melt.  When I decided it was done, I slid my cookie sheet under it and took it off the fire.  I cut it with scissors and got a very satisfying sound of crunchy crust along with the melted stringy cheese.  Yum!

I'm looking pretty pleased with myself, I'll tell ya.. I hadn't tasted it at that point but I had certainly smelled it!  I helped myself to a slice while I started the second one - YUM!

Believe me, you want to have everything you need right there beside you because it doesn't take long to put this together and you don't want it to burn while you're running back to the kitchen to get the cheese.

The second one was more of a rectangle... a very ugly rectangle... but I added some pizza sauce (highly over rated) and pepperoni to this one.  It took a little longer for the cheese and pepperoni to warm so I ended up getting it a little dark on the under side.  Oops... but still yummy!

It had a very satisfying crunchy crust and the kiss of the flames had worked their magic on the flavors.  The crust cooks quickly and it can't be over loaded with toppings.  It's all about texture and flavors!  It was thin, crunchy and smokey... yum yum yum!

You have got to try this!!  Make sure to gather everything you need around you while the grill is heating.  Here's a list,
Hmmm... let me see:
Pizza dough.
Olive oil and a pastry brush to distribute it all over the crust.
Tongs for flipping the crust when it's half way done.
All the toppings, thin sliced veggies, pressed garlic, basil, good cheese, salt and pepper.
Cookie sheet or a pizza peel.
Scissors or pizza cutter.
Plates,and or napkins.
Something cold to drink.

Is there anything I missed? 

With the size of my grill and the size of the recipe of dough, next time I think I'll divide it into three instead of two.  That way maybe I can have two side by side on the grill and just do them one right after the other.  That may work to serve more people at once, can't you just see grilling up a bunch of these for guests?  I can, that would be FUN!

We may never make pizza indoors again.

Fire up the grill and let me know how it goes, ok? 

Yummm....

Savor the flavors,

-Carmen Rose

Quail Eggs with Alton Brown & Benedict (perfect for the Hollandaise!)

Hmmm... I have two dozen quail eggs from my CSA... what to do? What to do! As a child I hated eggs and realized later that I had been allergic to them. I would eat them when I had to, then be nauseous for most of the morning. In recent years have I tried them again and realized that they didn't make me sick anymore, plus - I kinda liked them. I'm not a fan of yellow goo oozing from a fried egg. I don't like the texture of whites or yolks in a hard boiled egg. I do, however, LOVE a good scramble or omelet. So with all that in mind... I am going to try to make something wonderful with quail eggs.

It seems to me that the first step in doing something wonderful with quail eggs must include... Bacon! I cook bacon in the oven, it's so ultra easy and nobody has to hover over the range while a fine spray of grease coats everything nearby. Just line a pan with foil, spread out the bacon and cover it with foil (to keep that fine spay of bacon grease off of the inside of your oven) and bake at 400 until it's the crispness you prefer (between 20 - 30 mins.) I like it crispy, DH likes it chewy. (So I make it crisphewy.) While I was at it, I tried making some little cup like shapes out of bacon, just to see if it would work.  I curled up some bacon in some foil cupcake cups and covered that with foil.

And into the oven it went:

And then I started on the Hollandaise sauce.  I used the Alton Brown recipe that calls for butter chunks rather than clarified butter.  It sounded easier to me, plus Alton Brown is a genius.  If he says it will work... it will work!  There are three organic chick egg yolks in here (I get 1 doz free range, organic, yadda yadda eggs in my CSA box each two weeks.)  STIR!

Add a few chunks of butter at a time and keep stirring, make sure it doesn't get too hot.  Don't want to make scrambled eggs!

OO00oooo... pretty!  Add the lemon juice, salt and cayenne.  I added those, then added more for a little additional flavor.  I ended up using the juice of half a lemon, nice bit of tang!

The bacon came out of the oven looking all lovely and filling the kitchen with "ode to cooked PIG!"  (yum)

I don't have photos of the next steps cause it all pretty much happens all at once.  The English muffins went in the toaster oven and I broke four little quail eggs into a round ring in my egg skillet and began frying them.  Eggs Benedict call for poached eggs, but that's an adventure for another day when I want to work with chicken eggs.  This whole adventure started with Quail eggs... so I fried them a bit, pried them off the cookie cutter round and flipped them.  They were SO cute in there cooking away, but quail eggs are really hard to crack.  The shells are very soft and the membranes are pretty strong.  But they are O SO CUTE!  (I had to go after a piece of shell with  my tweezers, that's why there are tweezers in my kitchen.)

Get the English muffins from the toaster oven, add the bacon, top with the four fried quail eggs...

Hurry now, eggs are never good cold!

Top with the Hollandaise and run to the herb garden for some fresh chives and sprinkle those on top.  I called the man and he sat down to eat his... I looked up and it was gone while I was still working on mine.  He eyed my plate while I finished mine, then he licked his plate clean.  Yes, literally.  He kept eying mine until I gave him the last bite.  Not bad, not bad at all.

What a lovely breakfast!  (DH's second breakfast, my first)  Hmmm... I still had those little rounds of bacon, so the next experiment involved getting quail eggs into the little bacon rounds.  As you can see from the photo, it really only worked about 3 out of 12 cases.  What a silly MESS!

I decided that if they already looked that bad, flipping them wasn't going to hurt them.  So... over they went - as one solid mass.  Then I picked them back apart...  I put some Hollandaise on the plate, tucked three little quail eggs in bacon baskets into the sauce.  I sprinkled this with the rest of the chives.  Now they aren't exactly pretty, they didn't turn out looking at all like I imagined... HOWEVER!  When one pops one of these little buggas into one's mouth... it does elicit an involentary creamy-smokey-bacon-and-egg YUMMMMMMmmmmm!

Ok, so not entirely pretty food... but a pretty big YUM! 

I love my CSA!  (Community Supported Agriculture) 

I would never have tried quail eggs without them!

Savoring the Flavors,

-Carmen Rose

Such a Sushi Scenerio (A Beautiful Yum)

Tell me, is this not a beautiful yum?!

I've been wanting to try making sushi ever since I saw this amazing work of art by Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto.  To me this looks like an edible quilt and I think it's truly amazing!  I don't even want to show my own work in the same blog post, but hey... I'm a completely unapologetic novice!

My first try:  Oh, they do look a little awkward and embarrassed don't they?!  However, the rice stuck together.  Booooy, did the rice stick together!!  lolz

The second batch tastes the same but looks much better:

I'm always up for a culinary adventure. I grew up with such a limited range of foods, exploring new flavors has been a real treat over the years.  I remember the first time I had sushi.  I was with Charles, my photographer friend.  We were enjoying a concert in the park and some sushi from Martins and I was really taken by the flavors, and the way the food looked.  I got to watch a co-worker make it when I was a cake designer a few years back, it looked simple enough.  Then I saw the episode of "Good Eats" where Alton Brown dedicated a whole show to sushi.  Then I knew I had to try it.

I'm doing makeup and hair for the cast of "Lunch Hour."  It is the first production this season at Oak Grove Theater and we got rained out one evening of the run which left me with a free evening.  I wandered around town for a while, not ready to go home.  I kind of landed at the grocery in the sushi section and ended up with a lovely little collection of sushi paraphernalia.  And I didn't have time to try it until today.

As Alton would say: "Good Eats!"

As Paula Dean would say: "Best Dishes!"

& Happy Creating... 

(no matter what artistic media)
-Carmen Rose