Garden Pizza

After six months of just about bi-weekly late night stomach aches and next morning groans of "Ugh....damn you Pizza Night", I think I have made - and eaten - enough pizza dough to start the Italian grandmotherly process of muscle memory training. There are pizza muscles just as there are pasta ones, potato gnocchi muscles and pie crust ones, as many muscles as there are culinary traditions to carry on. And so after many failures (edible nonetheless), I am beginning to recognize a pizza dough when I feel one. But just beginning.

I was weeding the garden yesterday, sporadically and randomly and just trying to make a dent in the jungle that the garden has become, when I pulled up one after the other oblong beige tuber. I had forgotten that I had dropped off some sprouted spuds several months back, in a back corner of the un-scientific experiment of our vegetable garden, and, sure enough, they had taken hold and flourished. On my way back inside I snipped some broccoli that was getting pretty leggy, and thought that our house-marinated olives would round out the pizza toppings nicely. Still in possession of around 20 pounds of yellow onions left from last week's event, I caramelized a bowlful for good measure. Add to that some ricotta I had made earlier in the day for some cookies, and we were sitting on quite the pizza larder.

While the cooking was not ideal this first attempt on the Big Green Egg - I'd like more radiant heat to blister the top crust before the bottom crust gets too dark - it was plenty successful as a first attempt, tasted absolutely delicious, and didn't heat up the entire house as the kitchen oven used to. We dined al fresco, mere steps from the land that had given us the toppings. And, learning my lesson from abundances past, I only made three pizzas.

Local Love

I've been preparing for this Saturday's 120 person luncheon for the last month, brining meats and pickling veggies and contemplating with steadily growing anxiety. Now that the cooking is underway I'm less worried about the food and more concerned with the sheer logistics; 120 people, whoever they are, translates to a lot of food (turns out even with my recently acquired second refrigerator I am woefully short on space). But Saturday will happen (third refrigerator be damned!) and the food will be tasty.

What I really want to write about is the joy, deep down in every member of the human race, of cooking for loved ones. I got the chance to take a break from event-worrying for a few days when my family was in town, the first time we were all together for quite awhile. As it was their first time in Portland, I decided to give them a good thorough taste of the Pacific Northwest.

Celebrating the Do-it-yourself mentality out here we snacked on freshly un-crocked garlic-dill pickles and sauerkraut and sipped homemade root beer and ginger beer. We roasted local Chinook salmon, covered in dill and lemon wedges, on cedar planks, and tossed just-from-the-garden snap peas with local hazelnuts and sharp sheep's milk cheese. Willapa Bay clams steamed with morels and baby turnips and finished with a generous shaving of Oregon black truffle kept it close to home. And a sourdough pumpernickel bread to go with the array of NW cheeses and Netarts Bay salt really sealed the deal. Those famous Oregon berries found their way into a crostata made with leaf lard from local pigs and joined by homemade vanilla ice cream, and to wash it all down, of course, a Willamette Pinot (Chehalem) and some black currant liqueur from Clear Creek.

A celebration of the place and of the people sharing it. What else is cooking about?