One of the foods that Misha just can’t get enough of is pizza. He told me that as he was growing up in the Soviet Union, he couldn’t have imagined how good the combination of dough, tomatoes, cheese, and sausage in the right proportions could be until the late 1990′s, when he first experienced it himself.
We’ve since had plenty of practice at making pizza, which has improved drastically since the first time we made it together, when he spread ketchup, a can of mushrooms, and grated cheese on a homemade thin crust and called it a date. A romantic idea though it was, we would go on to do better. Much better.
The one thing that has stayed almost constant in our pizza adventures, though, is the thin homemade crust that Misha makes. I just can’t see how to make it better or easier: eggs, flour, water; knead, roll, top, bake, chow. Fabulous. Enjoy!
Pizza
There are a few things I usually do when topping a pizza. First, I usually spread a very thin layer of olive oil over the unbaked crust before adding any other toppings, which keeps the crust crispy and gives those cute little brown circles on the bottom when all’s done. Second, if I’m using a tomato sauce and not a white one, I usually go with a thin layer of tomato paste just over the olive oil, for flavor, and I use a homemade plain tomato sauce (yeah, recipe’s at the bottom) just over the tomato paste. Third, I put any dried herbs I’m using below the cheese so that they don’t burn in the oven.
The pizza is, of course, your canvas to paint with whatever toppings you fancy, and that’s what we all love about making pizza at home. Want to put eggs, pineapple, and Tabasco sauce on it? Nobody’s looking. My favorite above-the-cheese pizza toppings are fresh mushrooms sauteed with eggplant (well in advance, chop the eggplant, coat the pieces with salt, and drain in a colander to remove bitterness before cooking) and garlic and onions; chopped black olives; and generous amounts of raw garlic and as many fresh herbs as I can find, usually including oregano, basil, parsley, thyme, and rosemary. Of course, just before sticking it in the oven, I coat the top of the pizza with chives and grate some hard cheese on top. Misha loves sweet bell peppers, and although I usually have a very low tolerance for anything with sweet peppers, I also think that they’re not bad as a pizza topping, as long as they’ve been sauteed with onions and garlic. When I was a vegan, my personal heaven was eggless pizza crust topped with whatever fresh vegetables I could get my hands on, hold the cheese and with some peppery oil tossed on top.
2 eggs
2 cups flour
3-4 tbsp water
toppings!
Mound the flour on a clean table, and make a deep well in the center of the mound. Crack the eggs into the well, and mix gradually with the flour. Add water as needed, and mix and knead with your hands about ten minutes, or until the dough is elastic. Roll with a flat rolling pin or wine bottle to roughly 1/8 inch thick, and cut to fit a baking sheet. Or a pie plate, or an oven rack, whatever you’ve got. If what you’ve got is a pizza stone, then I’m jealous. Line your baking surface with parchment paper, put the crust on it, and top as you like. Bake in the oven at its highest temperature until the cheese bubbles and starts to turn brown.
After the pizza comes out of the oven, we cut it, grate fresh black pepper on top, and eat it accompanied by lots of wine and a good movie. This is, of course, the recommended serving technique (:
Tomato Sauce
Good tomato sauce, as I’ve found out, depends on the quality of ingredients and the time you put into preparing it. I tend to not use canned tomatoes, because I think fresh ones taste better, although it takes a while to skin (optional) and seed them. Seeding, by the way, isn’t something I consider optional, since seeds really do make the sauce taste bitter. To make seeding tomatoes easier, choose round, medium-sized tomatoes (not an heirloom variety), and after washing or skinning (to skin, cut an “X” in the top and bottom, blanche in boiling water until the skin splits, dunk in a cold bath, and peel the skin with your hands), cut the tomato in half through the middle. Use your fingers to dig out all of the gelatinous seed mass in each compartment.
Tomato sauce can be simmered for as long as you want, but absolutely cannot be boiled. I repeat: do not boil tomato sauce! This burns the natural sugars in the tomatoes, and as a result makes the sauce taste like burned sugar. Or carbon. Or both, since they’re partly the same thing.
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp butter
2 large onions, chopped
1 tsp granulated sugar
6-7 cloves garlic, minced finely
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 cups dry red wine
2 kg (4.5 pounds) fresh tomatoes, washed, seeded, and roughly chopped
Melt the butter in the olive oil over very low heat, add the onions and sugar, and cook until transparent. Add the garlic, and cook until fragrant (the onions should be caramelizing at this point). Add the tomato paste and wine, and stir until homogeneous. Add the tomatoes, and cook until they’ve broken down and separated from the skin (if you left the skin on), stirring intermittently. Use a stick blender to blend the entire sauce, and simmer for anywhere from 30 minutes to an entire weekend.
It feels like summer in Nizhniy Novgorod. The sunlight lasts from 4 a.m. until 10 p.m., the trees are thick with green leaves and the babushki have shed their shawls for brightly colored silk scarves.
Now is the perfect time for minestrone.
The photo is from the day after I made it, when the taste is even better and the soup even thicker. Enjoy!
Minestrone
There’s absolutely no set recipe for minestrone, and I don’t know if I’ve ever made it the same way twice, but most cooks would agree that there are a few key ingredients that distinguish a minestrone: tomatoes, pasta, beans, and vegetables of various kinds. Since I love cooking with onions and (lots of) garlic and always have some of each on the shelf, those are also essential in my minestrones, but the rest–most of the rest–and the way you combine the rest–is optional.
If you’re using different vegetables, add them at the same time as the cabbage and zucchini. Fresh herbs are always tastier than dried; if you’re using them fresh, use about three times as much as the dried ones I’ve called for, and add the basil and parsley at the very end, about five minutes before adding the lemon.
To make it vegan, nix the cheese rind, grated cheese, and butter, and choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings. And be careful to not chop your fingers into the soup, that’s def. not vegan (:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
3 medium onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced finely
1 cup dry red wine
3 tbsp tomato paste
1/4 head of cabbage, chopped
1 medium zucchini, cubed
1 can whole peeled tomatoes with liquid, roughly chopped with a table knife directly in the can
1 can chickpeas, rinsed
1 can red beans, rinsed
1 cup dry pasta, broken into small pieces
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese (I used Grana Padano)
1 carrot, grated
3 bay leaves
2 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried parsley
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh chives, chopped
hard cheese, grated
In a soup pot over low heat, melt the butter in the olive oil. Saute the onions until transparent, add the garlic, and continue to saute until fragrant, but not until the garlic has burned. Add the wine and scrape the browned garlic and onions from the bottom of the pot. Add the tomato paste and stir until homogeneous; add the cabbage, zucchini, tomatoes, and enough water to just cover the vegetables. Simmer until zucchini begins to soften. Add the chickpeas, beans, pasta, cheese rind, carrot, and spices, and simmer until the pasta is cooked. Add the lemon juice just before serving. Garnish with chives and grated cheese.
Anyone who’s known me at any point in my life knows that my greatest love has always been pasta. It’s dependable and familiar (topped with, for example, homemade tomato sauce and grated cheese), hot and intriguing (crushed red pepper and olive oil), the starting point for so many wonderful adventures, and, most lovely of all when it’s done right, simple and chic and bound to impress.
When I found this recipe, courtesy of Gina DePalma at Serious Eats, I was so impressed by the idea that I just couldn’t stop thinking about it–then after having made my first batch about two weeks ago, it got even more intense, and still now, after having eaten my fourth plate of it this week, I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night I made two batches, the first with linguine, that I sucked down at record speed, and the second with tri-color farfalle, the only other pasta I had on the shelf, to last today. It turns out that the pasta keeps okay overnight, although the garlic flavor, of course, gets stronger and hides the parsley and the delicious raw wine flavor that you get by adding that splash at the end.
Drunken Pasta
The wine that I used this time, as Gina advises, was a dry red that I wouldn’t hesitate to drink but that was still on the less expensive side–around 160 roubles, or about $4.70 at the current rates. I adapted the recipe just a tiny bit, cutting down the amount of cooking liquid so that I could get away with using just one 0.75 L bottle of wine (I’ve also made it with just a little less than half a bottle to use, and even that seemed to work fine), reducing the amount of olive oil, and garnshing with fresh chives.
To make it vegan nix the butter, don’t garnish with cheese, and take care to choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings.
0.75 L bottle of dry red wine, divided
0.75 L water
pinch of salt
1/2 kilogram thick pasta, like linguine
2 large or 4 small cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsp butter
4 tbsp olive oil
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1/4 c fresh chives, sliced (optional)
1/4 c Parmesan cheese, grated (optional–I used Grana Padano instead)
Combine all but 1/2 cup of the wine with all of the water and the pinch of salt, and bring to a boil. Add the pasta, and cook until al dente (taste-test it, and when it’s tender but still tough to the teeth, it’s done–barring that, the infamous “wall-dente” test works okay enough with noodley pastas). While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter and olive oil over low heat in a saute pan large enough to contain the pasta. Add the garlic, and stir from time to time. The garlic should come to a sizzle and be aromatic, but not browned, just as the pasta is getting done. Add the 1/2 cup of wine to the saute pan, along with a splash (about a half-cup) of the pasta liquid. Scrape up any burned garlic from the bottom of the pan and turn the heat to medium. When the liquid is simmering, drain the pasta and add it, along with all of the parsley, to the saute pan. Stir constantly until all of the liquid is absorbed. Garnish with chives and grated cheese, and serve hot.
Yield: two portions
