Conner's Blog

So to sate your hunger for more Conner generated content, here’s a couple of photos of a pizza I made yesterday.

Spinach, onions, garlic, rainbow chard, mushrooms, homemade ricotta, and mozzarella cheese. It was pretty good, though the chard didn’t cook as well as I thought it would. Also, I discovered The Wedge carries their own pizza sauce, which is better than the canned stuff I had been buying, so that was a win.

I promise I’ll start writing again someday soon, I’m just really busy at work and bouncing around outside of work like a ball of flubber

It’s been a while since I made a pizza at home. In fact, it’s been so long that I had to lookup the dough recipe. Tonight, I remedied this and whipped up a tasty pie. I made a change to my dough and used stone ground flour. It added a bit of depth to the crust and I think I’ll use it again.

I topped this pizza with an onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning blend, a bunch of mushrooms, pineapple, and some whole milk mozzarella. I baked it and once done topped it with spinach. I wasn’t overly happy with how the spinach cooked up, but it was still better than baking the spinach on the pizza.

Looking at the photo it’s obvious I’m still getting used to my new lens.

Monday night I attempted to improve on my previous try at making squash pizza. I managed to do this even though I had a few kitchen mishaps.

This time I topped the crust with Alfredo sauce to add more flavor.  Then I added the caramelized onions and topped those with a mixture of regiano cheese and goat cheese.  I topped that with the squash which I had seasoned with cloves, coriander, and nutmeg.  Over the top I added parsley and cilantro.

It came out of the oven looking fabulous, though the crust wasn’t quite right.  I was very happy with the results and intend on making this at least one more time before squash season comes to a close.

The one thing I would change is to add more goat cheese.  The flavor of the cheese mixed with the onions and squash was exceptional and those bites without goat cheese were almost disappointing.

Yesterday a the Mill City Farmers Market I was given a couple leeks to take home.  I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them, but I had someone suggest a pizza.  Well I had leftover crust to use so i threw this together tonight.

I didn’t do a great job showing the topping, but it was tasty.  Could have used more leeks but as always, cooking is a learning experience.

I should also mention that I had a beet and green tomato salad at the Market that was pretty good.  The tomatos were the best part, the beets a little odd, and the greens just kind of fell apart.

Still, I do enjoy the Chef Shack.

How do you turn a kind of crappy day into a win?  Well if you happen to have some squash, pizza crust, and few other ingredients, you can make a very tasty pizza.

I had made pizza on Saturday and had some leftover dough and had been to the Farmers Market on Saturday and picked up a few different varieties of squash.  On a tip from a friend, I hunted down a recipe for a squash pizza.  Epicurious came through with this recipe.

I had to track down a few ingredients but it was really simple.  First you need to cook the squash, I roasted mine in the oven as I do not own a microwave.  While that was happening, I got the dough ready.

I rolled it out and let it warm up a bit as it had been in the fridge.  After the squash was done I cooked it at 425 for about 8 minutes to get it mostly done.  The recipe is technically for grilled pizza, so you need to adapt if you want to use oven baked crust.

I seasoned the squash with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.  I used whole nutmeg for the first time ever.

Topping was simple, top with cheese, add some carmelized onions, and then dollops of squash and a sprinkle of parsley.

Throw that in the oven for about 7-10 minutes and you have one tasty pizza.

My recommendations are to use plenty of cheese and salt.  I was a little dissapointed in the amount of contrast between the squash and cheese.  It was still good, but would have been better with about an extra 1/2 cup of cheese and some more salt on the onions.

You can find a few more photos on Flickr.

It’s still asparagus season which means every time I walk into the Wedge or go to the Farmers Market I’m tempted to buy a bundle of green.  My first bunch was turned into a delicious stir fry type dinner, steamed it, and added it to an omelet.  The question was what to do with the second bundle.

Monday was a brutal day and I decided I needed pizza.  I wasn’t really in the mood for anything traditional though so I went over what was in my fridge.  I had bacon, chicken, peppers, and asparagus which sounded like a pretty good combo.  So after mixing up a batch of pizza dough and setting it to rise, I ran off to The Wedge for a few necessary ingredients.  I added mushrooms, fresh mozzarella, and feta to my ingredients.

After getting home, I started chopping up some of the veggies and cooking the chicken.  I’m slowly becoming obsessed with the chicken from The Wedge.  I buy the bone in breasts and they are not only huge, but incredibly tasty.

After doing a bit of knife work, it was time to roll out the dough.  This went pretty well and nothing is quite as nice as crust topped with sauce.

Add toppings:  Asparagus, onion, chicken, bacon, bannana peppers, and mushrooms.

Next I topped with cheese, a combo of fresh mozzarella, crumbled feta, and grated parmesean.

This is where disaster struck.  I didn’t take any photos as I was too busy trying to solve my mistake. I had put the dough on my work surface to top, but made the mistake of not putting down flour or corn meal.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the appropriate tools to scrape the dough off the work surface so moving the pizza onto my baking stone was a disaster.  I had toppings on the floor, the counter and cooking on the pre-heated pizza stone.  It turned the beautiful looking pizza you see above into something from a pizza horror film.

Of course it was still tasty, and I did have two crusts available so I redeemed myself with the next pizza.

Just looking at that makes me hungry for the leftovers sitting in my lunch bag.

It’s been a while since I posted one of these.  The Internet is littered with great content, here is just a taste. Remember, you can always follow my shared items for more links.

• The Big Picture has posted one of my favorite photo sets yet, Robots.
• If you have a website and you Google Analytics, here is a guide detailing ways to find out too much about your readers.
• NPR has a great site detailing the Presidents proposed budget.  
• An awesome poster for Photoshop shortcuts.
• My friend Marissa is raising money for Habitat for Humanity, consider making it your cause for the month.
• Emily shows you how to make a crappy day better with food complimented by beer.
• Cheap Healthy Good writes about homemade pizza.  I’m trying this sometime soon.
• In another food related post, Lifehacker posts about bulk breakfast burritos.  This will have to do until Chipotle gets their act together.
• Spring in St. Paul, a photo.  Which of course makes the waiting even more unbearable.
• Over at the new MN blog ambulancedriver.net, Duke writes about his encounter with a state legislator.
• Fivethirtyeight interviews the representative from my native state.  John Tester is an interesting guy.
• Another amazing photo, this time of the blue winter sky of Minnesota.
• Ryan Air is not exactly up to speed on the whole blogging thing.
• I have nothing else to say except Bacon Stuffed Waffles

There you go, another list of links to keep you occupied while waiting for the weekend to get here.  It’s Friday tomorrow, and now you have a recipe for bacon stuffed waffles you can try on Saturday morning.  How can the next 3 days get any better?