A Slice of Heaven, Part 2

Where was I?

Ah yes! How could I forget? What to do with your summer tomatoes when they come in, right? Well, gazpacho is the route I’d tend towards, because gazpacho is the very apotheosis of the toma – what? No? That’s not what we were discussing, America?

Really? Oh. Welp. Pizza is cool, I guess…

…

Oh, who I am kidding, here? I love this! What could be more fantastic than making your own pizza from scratch? Nothing, America. Nothing is better. What? No. Nothing.

A Slice of Heaven, Part 1

Pizza is the single most divisive culinary concept in American society.

Not the proper construction of Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, not whether or not to put ketchup on your all-beef hot dog (the answer is ‘not’, if you were wondering.), not whether or not to serve pretzels with cheese or with mustard or whatever. No, America. The sectarian conflict that haunts our nation is a fight between three mighty factions. Friendships have crumbled along these fault lines, my friends. Marriages have rent themselves to shreds: Cheese goes on top! No, sauce goes on top. Floppy crust. Crispy crust! What about pineapple? No pineapple. No pineapple.

Well, you know where my sympathies lie, and that’s with the unformatted text. I’m a Chicagoan and my heart lies with deep-dish pan pizza. But I think I have moved past hometown allegiance to something a bit closer to objectivity. It is not news that Chicago-style pizza and New York-style pizza have a rivalry as big as, oh, I don’t know – Martin Luther and Catholicism, or Sunni and Shi’a Islam. The third Mighty Faction, by that token, is California-Style Pizza, which is sort of like Sufi mysticism, and it’s all like “chill, dudes; hit some charras or something.” (see, cause it’s tokin’. By that token. … Shut up, all of you.)

What my family does, because we’re economical, is when we order pizza, we tend to order cheese pizzas. Unless Dad gets sausage. A Lou Malnati’s deep-dish sausage pizza is a frightening thing to behold. God is it delicious but what an artery-stopper. We’re talking about a good quarter-inch thick disk of sausage, about 5/6ths the diameter of the pizza itself.

But what we do, because we’re cheap, is spruce up the pizza at home. Think about this: depending on where you live or the size of the pizzas you order, it might be anywhere from 50 cents to 1.50 for a topping. Now, that topping could be garlic, it could be pineapple, and it could be Canadian bacon. The cost is all the same for you, the consumer, regardless of the ingredients.

That’s a cheese pizza from Lou Malnati’s, back home. … There might be mushrooms on there. I might have violated my own rule. But don’t think about that too hard – David’s Kitchen Axiom No. 1*: do as I say, not as I have only partially done. Save yourself a buck or three and sauté some onion and mushroom with some garlic, or wilt some spinach.

Garlic and onion. And, apparently, mushroom. Look at that. I figure that’s mushroom in there; I don’t know – I took that picture back in December. But here’s the point:

David’s Living In A Recession Tip #1: If you must order takeout, do what you can to improve it at home without incurring greater cost on yourself.

(Or if you have the time, make it yourself.) Thus. Since December, I’ve been branching out and trying to make my own pizza with the help of my friends. We hit on a dough recipe that worked, from my roommate’s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (don’t ask. He won it.).

flour, olive oil, water, yeast. We used aluminum foil plates to cook the things in our dormitory’s kitchen. Next year, when my two roommates and I have an apartment, we will have Pizza Day with some form of regularity. I’m not going to hold any of the three of us to any promises on that front, but once every two weeks would be neat. Behold the dorm kitchen we wrangled with this year:

They baked, in this oven that looks sort of like a shantytown if you squint:

And when they came out, they were, well, fairly crunchy. Quite nice – it’s how I like thin crust pizza, myself (but I am not, for the record, immune to the charms of a floppy New York slice. Trust me.)

When I got home, though, about a week and a half ago, my roommate, who had shipped many of his possessions home, had not yet received the box with his Better Homes cookbook, so I had to fend for myself.

Luckily, my house has about a metric boatload of cookbooks, and I found a willing and able hand in The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook, by Pasquale Bruno, Jr. I set about making my dough, which was, as I recalled it, only slightly different from the BH&G recipe.

We’ll continue with that in the next entry: “A Slice of Heaven, Part 2″.

-D

* yeah. There’s gonna be a bunch of these. Help me keep count.

The Clean Platter by Proxy!

A new segment, to be called The Clean Platter by Proxy, or PxP when I am lazy.

The Setup:

You are hungry. You don’t know what to eat. You’re also online, and talking to me.

So you ask me:

“Lysander”: what should I eat RIGHT NOW

David: I love this game.

David: what is in your house?

<br>

The Heist:

You tell me what’s in your pantry or your fridge, and then together we make a plan of action. Then you make something perhaps loosely based on that plan of action, take a picture of the result (for better or for worse), and send it to me.

Names are changed to awesome pseudonyms to protect the identity of my friends.

The Platter by Proxy, issue 1, continues below the jump.

Auberginenschnitzel: der Zweite Teil

I told you it’d get crazier.

The set-up:

My sister J. and I have made a veritable bounty of delicious eggplant schnitzel, laid out in detail in the previous entry.

But now we’ve got leftover egg and flour and bread crumbs.

What ever is to be done?

(More below the break)

Auberginenschnitzel

Geshundteit.

I wouldn’t call myself a vegetarian, and neither would most vegetarians. But, in the name of local eating (see The 100-Mile Diet), I haven’t eaten any poultry or red meat for about three months. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Yeah, shut up. I still eat fish, because that ecological disaster’s a horse of a different color. (I enjoy mixing metaphors, e.g., “I wouldn’t touch that one with a ton of bricks.”)

But to hell with all that. I have adjusted to my semi-vegetarianism (there has to be a better word for that.) with what I see as some level of aplomb. It only took a couple weeks before I got past that first New Vegetarian realization: “Good God! Everything is food.” At first I was going, “Nope. Can’t eat that, there’s meat in that. Can’t do that, that takes meat.”

But the world of plants is so lovely and expansive. Everything we make from vegetables need not be pale imitations of the meatly world. I am pretty sure that the Meatworld is what you call the real-life portion of a two-pronged cyperpunk society. Irrelevant. Where was I? Oh yes. Pale imitations of meatworld, and avoiding such.

Well, put that notion aside for the following experiment: eggplant schnitzel.

No, I’m not a hypocrite; I just play one on TV.

Food is food is food. At least it’s not veggie burgers (and if I have another one of those [phase one of David Learns to Forsake Meat - be glad you missed that], it’ll be too soon.)

It was my mother’s idea, if that’s any kind of cop-out. She’d gotten those skinny Chinese eggplants from the Garden Fresh and said “This should work with these, because they’ve got thinner skins.” I will eventually try this recipe with regular eggplant, and I’ll keep you posted on that front.

The Set-Up

My friend J. associates me very strongly with eggplant. It seems every time I’ve cooked in her apartment, I’ve made something, somehow, that involved eggplant. I figure I’ll do the french roman à clef thing and only refer to people by their initials. It makes me feel important and mysterious.

1. A note on cutting eggplant:

Humility is key.

A cookbook from my formative years – Clueless In The Kitchen: A Cookbook for Teens by Evelyn Raab – declared the Eggplant to be mysterious and inscrutable (perhaps this is why, wishing to be like the Eggplant, I refer to my friends only by their initials.), and not to be trifled with. But just remember to be humble in its presence, and don’t bother with using your big ol’ santoku, as I have done. This is hubris.

When you have a really, really big hammer, every problem looks like a railroad spike. Nobody’s gonna make fun of you if you use a small, serrated knife. It worked a lot better on my eggplant, because the skin was so glossy.

So slice your eggplant into quarter-inch slices, as shown. I’m going to try this again by cutting them into different, lengthwise configurations. Or you try it, and get back to me.

2. Get two plates and a bowl out. It’s DREDGIN’ TIME. I here imagine Ben Grimm (The Thing from The Fantastic Four), wearing an apron and waving a whisk.

So. Plate 1 = flour! Bowl = 1 egg, beaten, with a little water to let it out a little. Plate 2 = bread crumbs. Do the Alton Brown thing and designate one hand to be the Dry Hand and one hand to be the Wet Hand. The picture lies. my right hand was the Wet Hand. What I mean by this is that one hand should deal with the flour and the bread crumbs, and the other should deal with the egg. Otherwise you’ll just batter your hands and build up layer upon later of delicious that you’re never gonna eat.

A light dusting of flour, a quick eggy bath, and then it is to the breadcrumbs with our little slices of eggplant. Don’t feel bad for them. They quite enjoy it. See?

I couldn’t help it. Sorry.

The Heist

1. The Frying

Is everything ready?

Okay, good. Heat some vegetable oil in your favorite frying vessel (I like frying pans. Do whatever you want. I bet this’d work in a wok, too. I’m not picky.) Then place your little slices in there and GET TO COOKIN’.

I wanna say about 2 minutes on each side. maybe less. The key is getting them golden-brown and delicious on the outside – they’ll likely be nice and tender within.

2. The Eating.

Drain, serve, eat immediately.

So delicious.

But the party isn’t over. Oh, no. PREPARE YOURSELF for the second half of the night.

Yep. Part two: forthcoming. You thought it couldn’t get crazier?

You were wrong.

-D

The drought is over.

America!  I’m here.  I’m here, I’m here.  Don’t cry.  School is out for the summer, and I’ve finally got the time to lavish upon you the attention you so richly deserve.

You’d forgotten about me?  Don’t forget about me, America.

A lot has changed since I’ve been away.  I’ve become a vague sort of vegetarian.  I’ve cut out red meat entirely, and I may phase poultry back in eventually, and I certainly eat sea creatures.

So there’s that, America.  There’s that, and then there’s all the new tricks I’ve learned.  Tricks I shall impart to you, O my capricious nation.  Tricks that involve lots and lots of chocolate.

Like this:

But these are tricks I will teach you later.  For now, the bluish-black realm of sleep awaits me.  Good night.

-D