Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I spent this weekend with an organization called New Day For Children, an aftercare facility for several girls rescued from sex trafficking. A couple of friends and I were invited to visit the girls for a weekend. Deann, Elba, and I have very different strengths. My strengths are obviously cooking (yay for food!) and math, so I offered to whip up two meals with the girls and help them with their math homework. Deann is great with science and make up, so she tutored the girls in science and then shared some beauty tricks. Elba is a connector and was able to chat with the girls for hours on end to make them comfortable with us and learn more of the girls’ interests, ideas about the world, etc.

Since food is my thing, I offered to prepare dinner both nights that we were there. I figured preparing dinner together would be an easy way for me to engage with the girls while doing something useful. Here was our menu:

Friday night: 

homemade pizza dough + this classic pizza sauce + various toppings
my all time favorite fall and winter salad
dessert (as chosen by the girls): these chocolate cakes and these balls

Saturday night: 

my favorite ever minestrone
no knead bread
dessert: pumpkin chocolate chip cookies

I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided on this meal plan. I’ve cooked with other people before, but I don’t do it often. Most of the time, cooking is a solitary activity for me. In this case, not only was I cooking with a group of people, I was also cooking with a group of kids who had no idea how to do basic things like measure flour or double a recipe. About 15 minutes into our pizza making experiment, I realized that I had to make some changes immediately if we were going to eat before midnight. Eventually, our dough and ingredients came together and the girls were delighted to make their own pizzas. These girls have very little choice over what they eat since food is served cafeteria style. To make their own pizzas and to decorate them however they wanted was a big deal! They shaped their pizzas into various designs, stuffed the crust with cheese, slathered the dough with pizza sauce or pesto – or both! – and loaded them with cheese and other ingredients (including the apples and pears from the salad!). As we removed the pizzas from the hot stone, the girls declared them masterpieces and devoured them in minutes. It was fun to watch so much excitement around something so simple!

I let one of the girls decide what we would serve for dessert that night. Knowing that not everyone shares my dessert preferences (chocolate!) I brought ingredients for several recipes. The girl in charge of dessert chose my favorite chocolate cakes…. and ruined them. To be fair, the recipe does call for whipping egg whites to stiff peaks, something I had completely forgotten until I was trying to troubleshoot why the cakes had crumbled had crumbled into pieces like dirt clods. I wasn’t about to let her creation go to waste so I suggested we crumble all the cakes and serve them as “brownie bits” over ice cream. Success! The girls don’t often get dessert, so there were no complaints about our dirt clod ice cream sundaes.

I had prepped the no knead bread on Friday evening for Saturday’s dinner, but I quickly realized that we were going to have a problem. Their kitchen is about 50 degrees, which is not warm enough to proof bread. I decided to put the dough buckets in a warming oven. When I returned the next day, the dough buckets were literally steaming. The yeast was surely dead as the dough looked more like bread soup than dough. I am fairly confident that these girls don’t eat homemade artisan bread very often, so I hoped that I might be able to salvage the dough. My afternoon schedule was double booked, so I attempted to cook the bread while simultaneously doing math tutoring in another building. Every 15-20 minutes I sprinted from one building to another to remove a lid or remove a cooked loaf and start more dough. Needless to say, we ended up with hockey pucks. We found a bread knife that could saw through the burnt crust and chopped the bread into small pieces for dunking in the soup. The girls were none the wiser. Mental note: if I want to make bread there in the winter, I will need to come up with a solution for letting the dough rise!

The minestrone was a huge success even though the girl in charge of measuring the spices decided to put her own twist on the recipe and double the pepper. The purist in me was a little mad that she has messed up MY recipe, but I decided to shrug it off. One girl was in charge of grating cheese to sprinkle on the soup. These girls love cheese, so there was no sprinkling of cheese… there was only piling on of cheese! One of the leaders even came to us with a plate and asked if she could have a plate of shredded cheese. I was amazed when this container, which was filled to the brim, emptied in minutes!

There were so many hilarious moments from this weekend that I want to share. A photo journal is the best way to do so!

Our friend Justin who arranged our visit to New Day assured us that there was no snow in the forecast for the weekend. Riiiiight.

This sweet girl came out of the freezer with a pained look on her face. We asked her what happened. She explained that when she was in the freezer she wanted to see just how cold the poles in the freezer were. My friend and I looked at each other and gasped. Apparently this girl has never seen The Christmas Story (remember the scene when the main character sticks his tongue to a pole?), because she just reenacted it. This was a rather painful lesson for this girl to learn!

The first night we were at the ranch, I taught one of the girls the proper way to measure flour. On the second night I watched her teach another girl the proper technique for measuring flour. “No, no, no… this is how you measure flour! I’ll show you!”

This is my friend Deann using a food processor to shred cheese for the first time ever.  She was so ecstatic. She looked at me and exclaimed, “No wonder you cook everything from scratch! You have all these cool tools that make it easy!” Yup…. if I had to shred cheese by hand, I’d order takeout too.

My garden has been more prolific than usual this year, and those of you who read this blog often have seen more than your fair share of posts featuring tomatoes as a result. We harvested about 150 pounds of tomatoes this year, and figuring out how to use those requires a fair amount of creativity.

Every summer I make a bunch of roasted tomato soup and can it for winter. It’s easy to make since it does not require peeling the tomatoes. It’s also absolutely delicious and makes a great quick meal when I am hungry and crave comfort food. After making five gallons of soup last year, I learned that we do not need five gallons of soup. Even if it is the best tomato soup around, that’s just way, way, way too much soup for our little family of two. So, after turning our first 40 pounds of tomatoes into jars of soup for our family (plus a few to share!) I declared a moratorium on tomato soup for the season.

Last year I also canned almost two gallons of pasta sauce to eat throughout the winter months. Given how much I love pasta, this was a fabulous choice and the amount was perfect for us. The problem with pasta sauce is that you have to blanch the tomatoes, throw them in an ice bath, peel off the skins, dice them, and *then* you can make the sauce. Oh, so much work! But I did it. About a month ago, I blanched and cooled and peeled and diced for 3 hours one night while playing Princess Bride in the background (“Inconceivable!”) and getting tomato juice and seeds all over every possible surface in my kitchen. It was a real tomato sauce making party.

The next day, my mom told me she had picked out something for my birthday but wasn’t sure if I wanted it. This is a problem when you have a daughter who is a kitchen gadget collector. How do you track all the toys she keeps buying? Mom hemmed and hawed and finally decided to just tell me about the gift to make sure it was something I’d want. I took one look and said, “I have that! It’s a fruit and vegetable strainer for my KitchenAid. It’s how I make gallons of applesauce every year when my tree dumps apples faster than I can bake with them.” My mom looked at me utterly perplexed. “Then why didn’t you use that for your tomatoes last night?” I stared at her blankly. Then it dawned on me. Oh my gosh. This is a fruit and veggie strainer. That’s what it does! It strains out the icky stuff! Oh my gosh… Oh my gosh. Oh. My. Gosh. Hours and hours and hours wasted on a task that could have taken minutes. I could have kicked myself. My dad suggested that instead of buying me nice things for my birthday, they should just buy me instruction manuals. Ha, ha, Dad. Very funny.

No worries, though. My garden had one more 40 pound tomato harvest, so I decided to give it a try. It took a few tries to figure out how to maximize the results, but let me tell you, this is a breeze compared to the way that I used to puree tomatoes! Do you have so many tomatoes that you don’t know what to do with them? Here’s how to puree them with minimal effort. I made a batch of pasta sauce immediately with my puree based largely on this recipe. I adjusted the sugar and spices to taste since I was not using the traditional canned tomatoes. The sauce was so awesome that I canned even more jars for winter. More pasta for us!

tomato puree

1. Place as many racks as you can in the oven evenly spaced apart. Preheat oven to 500 degrees with convection turned on. If you do not have convection, you will need to rotate your pans as you cook.
2. Cut your tomatoes into chunks or slices and place on a pan. Don’t worry too much about how big the pieces are (I just halved or quartered my tomatoes, depending on their size) and certainly don’t bother with making them pretty. They’re about to be pureed. Save the pretty stuff for later.
3. Place the pans in the oven and cook (rotating after 7 minutes if you don’t have convection) for 10-15 minutes, or until the tomatoes are soft and the skins are bursting a bit. Remove and place in a bowl. Refill the pans with any remaining tomatoes and cook again.
4. Ladle the tomatoes into the feed chute of the food mill and watch as the water and puree pours into one bowl and the “ickies” (stems, skins, seeds, cores) plop into another.

Some notes that you should most definitely read:

One, you’ll notice in my set up above that my bowls are all stacked kadiwampus. That’s necessary because the ickies tend to fall backwards into the bowl of puree that you’re making. It’s a bad product design, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, so I have this system set up to ensure that my puree stays pure.

Two, if you don’t heat your tomatoes first, you will lose a lot of the good stuff to the “icky” pile. Just cook ‘em first like I suggested and you will be happy.

Three, my tomatoes are very, very watery. Yours might be too. If that’s the case, boil the puree along with a can or two of tomato paste on medium low for as many hours as it takes to thicken up to the consistency that you’re happy with. If you need to do this, stir the mixture every 30-45 minutes to ensure it doesn’t burn to the bottom.

Four: I would not add flavorings like onions, salt, garlic or any other spices until you want to cook something with your puree. Other than the puree that I reserved for use in pasta sauce, I canned the remaining puree without any additional seasonings so that I can add it to soups and stews later and then adjust seasonings to taste at that time.

My parents went to Brentwood this past weekend and bought a box of corn. Then they left it in my fridge with a note: “We left some corn in the fridge for you.” Apparently my parents’ idea of “some” corn is 50-60 ears. I think the average person would call that “a boatload of corn,” but my parents are nowhere near average.

Brentwood is the corn capital of Northern California and, according to our local paper, its corn may even be the gold standard for the entire western United States. The corn that my parents bought was so sweet and tender that I could have eaten it straight off the cob without even cooking it. Even I can’t go through *that* much corn, though, so it was time to figure out a way to store it for later use.

The whole process of freezing corn is pretty simple. From start to finish, it took my mom and me less than an hour, which is not bad given how many ears we were working with!

Have more corn than you know what to do with? Here’s how to preserve it:

Fill a *large* pot 3/4 full with water. The bigger, the better. Bring the water to a boil. Fill a large bowl with cold water. Set aside.

Shuck the corn and remove all the silks.

Once the water is boiling, add several ears of corn and cook for 4 minutes. While the corn is cooking, add a bunch of ice to the bowl of cold water. Immediately transfer the cooked corn to the ice bath until chilled. Remove from the ice bath and set aside. Repeat the boiling and ice bath procedures until all your corn is blanched.

The secret to getting the corn off the cob is to use an angel food cake or Bundt cake pan. Place the tip of the corn in the hole in the pan and use a serrated knife to cut the corn off the cobs. The corn won’t slip and the kernels will fall into the pan! After you’ve removed the kernels from the cob, scrape the cobs using the back of a butter knife. The juices that come out are liquid gold. You may eat the corn as it is, but I recommend you tread with caution. Once you try some, you’ll want to eat it all. Refrain from eating all the corn immediately so that you can have some later.

Place the corn in freezer bags and freeze. When ready to use, simply thaw the corn and add it to your recipe. Or, if you want additional flavor, roast the thawed corn in a skillet on the stove over medium-high heat until it starts to brown before adding it to the recipe.

Cherry season is upon us! Hooray! I absolutely love cherries, and this year the farmer’s market has not disappointed. Big, crunchy, sweet, juicy cherries have abounded, and I’ve spent half my grocery budget just on cherries and organic strawberries. That’s okay. I’m pretty sure these constitute half my diet these days as well.

I used to hate dealing with cherries because of the stupid seeds that make them obnoxious to eat and all but impossible to cook with. Cherry pie? Are you kidding? Pit cups of cherries by hand? I’ll pass. Then I stumbled upon this fabulous little toy.

Cook’s Illustrated agrees that this is the best pitter out there. You load it with your cherries, close the top, and voila! Completely pitted cherries. And the best part, as you can see, is that the pitter catches the seeds and juices meaning no mess!

Cherry pie, here I come!

Okay class…

Did anyone ever teach you the proper way to eat a strawberry? What? You never knew that there is more than one way to eat a strawberry? Of course there is! You could eat it like everyone else (which, by the way, is the *wrong* way) by holding the stem and eating from the tip to the stem. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Or you could eat it like corn on the cob, holding the stem and working your way around. Better, but still not quite right. The correct way to eat a strawberry is to hull it and then eat the strawberry starting from the fat side and ending with the tip. The sugars in a strawberry are concentrated in the tip. If you eat the fat part first, you eat the tip last. And that means you’re eating the sweetest part last… which means you’re eating the strawberry the right way.

Lesson ended. There will be a quiz tomorrow, of course.

But on to other things…

Do you have one of these nifty tools?

Surely I am not the only person who goes to the Farmer’s Market and contemplates whether three baskets really are enough (or six? or twelve? is there such thing as “enough”?). Lately I’ve constrained myself to just three baskets, but there are no promises about what future visits may entail.

When you buy as many strawberries as I do, you need an efficient way to prepare them as quickly as possible. I bought this little guy for about $2. It’s absolutely worth it. It’s sold as a tomato corer. (Aside: I tried using it to core tomatoes and honestly that was a disaster. Best to stick with the strawberries.) You could get something like this on Amazon…. if you needed a dozen. (Who the heck needs a dozen strawberry hullers?) Or just check at your local Bed Bath and Beyond.

Soon I’ll post my favorite pizza dough recipe, but the dough that I make most often is just a variation on the 5 minute bread recipe. Substitute 1/4 cup of olive oil for 1/4 cup of the water, and voila! You have 5 minute olive oil dough. The dough doesn’t have to be used just for pizza. You can form the rest of the dough into rounds of bread to be served with butter, jam, or dipped in an olive oil and balsamic vinegar sauce.

Okay, enough lollygagging… it’s time to make some pizza.

pizza with figs, prosciutto and fresh spinach

adapted from a recipe in Pizza: Grill It, Bake It, Love It!

1 recipe pizza dough (see notes in above comments)
1/2 cup pizza sauce (see accompanying recipe or use a store bought kind)
2 tbsp olive oil
6 oz fresh spinach
2 tbsp garlic, pressed
6 oz mozzarella cheese, shredded
2 oz prosciutto chopped into bite sized pieces
5 ripe figs (see note about dried figs)
1/4 tsp pepper
2 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped
2 oz Gorgonzola or Danish Bleu Cheese (optional)

classic pizza sauce*

1 (28-ounce) can of crushed tomatoes
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp dried basil
1 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
1 garlic clove, minced

*You won’t use all of this sauce for this recipe – use what you need and freeze the rest for the next time you make pizza!

Preheat the oven to 450 with a pizza stone on the center rack. The oven will need to be preheated for at least 30 minutes before you add your pizza or else the pizza will stick to your pizza stone.

To make the sauce, combine all the ingredients and bring to a simmer. Simmer with the lid slightly ajar for at least 30 minutes, or until the sauce is a consistency you like.

If you are rehydrating dried figs, simply pour boiling water over them to cover. They’ll plump back up as you assemble the rest of your pizza.

In a large sauté pan, heat the oil over medium high heat. Add the spinach and cook until it is wilted. Add garlic and sautee until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Let cool.

Roll out your dough into a 13″-diameter circle. Sprinkle semolina flour or corn meal on a pizza peel or rimless baking tray and place your rolled-out dough on the peel. Spread sauce evenly across the dough. Top with mozzarella cheese.

Add the spinach mixture and spread evenly.  Distribute prosciutto and figs evenly across the dough. Sprinkle with rosemary and pepper and top with additional Gorgonzola or Bleu cheese if desired.

Test to ensure that the pizza is not sticking to the peel in any spots. If it is stuck, slip some more flour or cornmeal underneath the dough in those spots.

Working quickly, slide the pizza onto the pizza stone. Bake for 15-18 minutes until top is golden brown.

Let cool for 5 minutes before slicing. My parents bought us one of these for Christmas. We call it the “pizza machete,” although surely it has a more official name. Either way, it is the best way ever to cut pizza. No more struggles with the little wheel dragging my toppings all over the place! Brant’s named it “the best gift your parents have ever given me.” Like I said, we like it.

Last week I found a sweet deal for a Pampered Chef pie plate on Craigslist and now I’m back into pie making. You remember this season, right? Pies for summer and pies for winter and for every season in between! My apple tree just dropped over 60 pounds of apples, so now it’s time for apple pie and apple cake and even apple bread pudding.

But I digress… the point of this post is to introduce you to my new friend: Oven Liner. In the past, if I baked something and it overflowed the pan onto the bottom of the oven, smoke billowed everywhere. I have a zero-tolerance policy for smoke in my house, so the second my meal was done cooking I would put the oven on self-clean for 2 hours. I’m pretty sure this is the least energy efficient way to clean an oven, but the alternative is elbow grease, which is something in short of supply in my kitchen.

Then Amazon had a 4-for-3 kitchen sale (buy 4 items for the price of 3) and I needed a 4th item so I bought an oven liner. And wow am I glad I did! Today’s pie looked innocent enough until I went to check on it half way through cooking and realized I was already too late: the syrupy goodness that makes a pie taste delicious was all over the bottom of the oven. Have no fear, though! I simply finished the cooking process and then after the oven had cooled, I removed my oven liner, washed it in the sink (it’s non stick, so this process did not require any of that elusive elbow grease) and slipped it back in the oven. Voila! No smoke!

Here I go again, telling you how to spend your money. I am a first born and a bossy one at that, so I’m just living into my predestined personality profile. Do this, buy that. My husband loves being married to me.

Even if you aren’t an avid cook, you should own colored measuring spoons. Because I cook a lot, I have four sets of measuring spoons, and these are the ones I use the most often. When tossed amidst all the other junk in my kitchen drawer, I can easily spot the famous 1/4 teaspoon spice spoon (dark orange) or the tablespoon (bright green) without having to root around and check the lettering to make sure I’m not adding 1/2 tablespoon of salt to my recipe instead of the teaspoon that the recipe calls for.

I can’t remember where I picked up my particular spoons, but Amazon has a simliar set. Bummer that they don’t offer free shipping on these! Bed, Bath, and Beyond has something in the same vein as mine. I think mine are cooler, but hey. Not everyone can be as cool as me.

Beware! I built a white box with my father this week and now am photographing every single thing in my kitchen that I love so that I can tell you about them. Start saving money now because I am a Kitchen Gadget Addict (KGA) and hope to convince you to become one too.

Because I didn’t grow up with a bench scraper, I had no idea how cool this particular tool is. Now that I own one, I use it all the time. I use it to transfer veggies from a cutting board into a pot of soup. I use it to scrape flour off the counter so I can avoid making my sponge all gummy when cleaning up from some baking project. I use it to salvage rather messy desserts.

I paid $4 for my bench scraper at Ross. If you are so inclined, you could pick one up on Amazon or at your local kitchen store. Keep it handy in your kitchen and you’ll find yourself reaching for it again and again!

It’s strawberry season where I live and I’ve already spent a small fortune on flats of strawberries to use in strawberry eclairs, strawberry jam, and strawberry rhubarb pie. I have a friend who used to be a Pampered Chef seller and last year at her garage sale I picked up a strawberry huller. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever use it, but I’m a sucker for kitchen gadgets so this was a “must have” for my kitchen. This year, after processing loads of strawberries for all these fun desserts, I now know why they invented these things. I can easily hull buckets of strawberries in no time flat! I haven’t been able to find this exact huller on-line, but check around at all the various options Amazon has! Or, if you know someone that sells Pampered Chef, ask them to order one for you!