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Jonathan’s Favorite White Broccoli Pizza

White Broccoli PizzaUpon tast­ing this, Jonathan informed me that I must never make any other type of pizza again.


Ingre­di­ents (makes 2 pizzas)

Crust:

  • 2 1/4 tea­spoons active dry yeast
  • 1/2 tea­spoon brown sugar
  • 1 1/2 cups warm water (110 degrees F)
  • 1 tea­spoon salt
  • 2 table­spoons olive oil
  • 3 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

White sauce:

  • 4 table­spoons olive oil
  • 1 small yel­low sweet onion (Vidalia!), diced
  • 4 cloves gar­lic, minced
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1 tea­spoon minced fresh thyme or marjoram
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Pizza:

  • Corn­meal for dust­ing peel
  • 1 1/2 cups ricotta cheese
  • 2 cups moz­zarella cheese
  • 1/4 tea­spoon salt
  • 1/4 tea­spoon dried or chopped fresh thyme
  • 1/8 tea­spoon coarsely ground black pepper
  • 1 cup baby broc­coli flo­rettes (cooked). For sim­plic­ity, I use microwave steam-in-a-bag broccoli.
  • 2 table­spoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Direc­tions

Crust:

  1. In a large bowl, dis­solve the yeast and brown sugar in the water, and let sit for 10 minutes.
  2. Stir the salt and oil into the yeast solu­tion. Mix in 2 1/2 cups of the flour.
  3. Knead in more flour until the dough is not sticky. Place the dough into a well oiled bowl, and cover with a cloth. Let the dough rise until dou­ble, about 1 hour. Punch down, cut in half, and form two tight balls. Allow the dough to relax for a minute before throwing.

White sauce:

  1. Heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté for 5 min­utes or until translu­cent. Add the gar­lic and stir for 1 minute longer. If you must, strain out the onion/garlic. Add the cream, lower the heat and sim­mer for about 5 min­utes, or until the cream reduces.
  2. Remove from the heat, stir in the thyme, and sea­son to taste with salt and pep­per. Cool before using.

Pizza:

  1. Pre­heat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. Stir together the ricotta, salt, thyme, and pep­per. Spread the White Sauce over the 2 crusts, leav­ing bor­ders uncov­ered. Spread the ricotta mix­ture evenly over the White Sauce.
  3. Sprin­kle shred­ded moz­zarella over all. Add chopped broc­coli, then remain­ing mozzarella.
  4. If you are bak­ing your piz­zas on a pan, lightly oil the pan(s), sprin­kle with corn­meal and let the dough rise for 15 or 20 min­utes; pre­bake for 8 min­utes before top­ping and then com­plete the bake time. If bak­ing on a stone, place top­pings on the dough, and bake immediately.
  5. Bake piz­zas in a pre­heated oven, until the cheese and crust are golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Posted in Recipes.

By David
June 6, 2010

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Silk-transfer egg decorating

I want to try this.

Posted in Art & Design.

By David
April 10, 2010

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I don’t do bunnies

And I really don’t do those pop­u­lar “cute” sites that are just lines of sac­cha­rine pho­tos. But these aren’t bun­nies; they are Rab­bit Over­lords of Doom. And the pho­tos are more fright­en­ing than saccharine.

Might as well end with a champion:

Posted in Miscellaneous.

By David
April 4, 2010

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These chocolate chip cookies are better than yours.

cookies

These choco­late chip cook­ies are bet­ter than yours.

I’m almost happy with this recipe. It gets slightly bet­ter each time, and I’ll tweak the recipe as I make refinements.

Prep time: 3 weeks, give or take 3 weeks.

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 cup real but­ter (see note 1 below)
  • 1/4 cup honey, warmed (see note 2 below)
  • 2 eggs
  • 3 TABLE­spoons vanilla extract, the real stuff (see note 3 below)
  • 1 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 cup white sugar (see note 4 below)
  • 1 tea­spoon bak­ing soda
  • 1/2 tea­spoon salt
  • 3–3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups Ghi­rardelli 60% cacao bit­ter­sweet choco­late chips (see note 5 below)
  • 1 cup milk choco­late chips

DIRECTIONS

  1. Place but­ter in a microwave-safe bowl. If the brown sugar is clump­ing at all, place it in another bowl. Microwave both at 30% power. Watch closely; you want the but­ter to melt com­pletely, but not get extremely hot. Brown sugar gets nice and fluffy when microwaved a lit­tle. I like it. It doesn’t make any dif­fer­ence in the cook­ies, but do it my way anyway.
  2. Beat the eggs together. While mix­ing, grad­u­ally driz­zle in the but­ter. (Too fast and you’ll cook the eggs. Bad.)
  3. Heat honey until warm and thin; add grad­u­ally to eggs and butter.
  4. Add the vanilla.
  5. Cream in the white sugar and brown sugar until smooth. Mix thor­oughly, mean­ing high speed for a long time. This should be, let me empha­size, smoooooth.
  6. In a sep­a­rate bowl, whisk together the bak­ing soda, flour, and salt, then man­u­ally stir into batter.
  7. Stir in the choco­late chips.
  8. Cover the dough and refrig­er­ate for at least 30 min­utes. More is bet­ter (to a point). Overnight is best.
  9. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees.
  10. Use two big spoons to scoop out a “ball” of dough. If it’s cold enough, this will be pretty hard to do. Wash your hands, since they are cov­ered with germs and bac­te­ria that are absolutely dis­gust­ing, and squish/squeeze/roll the dough into a ball some­where between an inch or two in diam­e­ter. Spread them across your cookie sheet, or save the cleanup and use parch­ment paper.
  11. Bake for about 14 min­utes, or until edges are golden brown. Don’t over­bake. If any­thing, under­bake — they are sim­ply mar­velous that way.

NOTES

  1. But­ter vs. Crisco: I have always been a really big pro­po­nent of using the highest-quality nat­ural ingre­di­ents avail­able. No mar­garine or syn­thetic vanillin here. How­ever, if you’re not going to eat all the cook­ies at once (which is almost unthink­able), you might want to replace a third of the but­ter with Crisco. This will help them stay softer longer. Except that they are nasty with reg­u­lar Crisco: you must use the butter-flavored Crisco. But they are bet­ter eaten fresh with all real but­ter, so just go that route. Invite a friend you really love, if you don’t want to eat them all your­self. And tell your­self it’s health­ier with­out the trans fats anyway.
  2. Even bet­ter with orange blos­som honey.
  3. Please, please use real vanilla if at all pos­si­ble. Look, these cook­ies are meant to be ridicu­lously deli­cious, and you are already not doing your­self any health favors by eat­ing them. Make those calo­ries taste fantastic.
  4. Oooh, yummy is if you use vanilla sugar. You’ll have to make your own, since you can’t buy it. Here’s how: buy real vanilla beans. Now that you can get excel­lent qual­ity vanilla beans for a low, low price off eBay (right now you can get a quarter-pound for $4.99 plus $3 ship­ping), you have no excuse. Buy a bag and sell the extras to your friends. Any­way, take 4 beans and slit them. Put a cou­ple pounds of reg­u­lar white sugar into a Rub­ber­maid con­tainer. Scrape the seeds into the sugar and mix. Add the beans in an even dis­tri­b­u­tion. Seal the con­tainer with its air­tight lid, and let sit for at least two weeks. When ready to use, remove the beans.
  5. Choco­late chips: I rec­om­mend the spec­i­fied choco­late for a cou­ple rea­sons. The Ghi­rardelli melts in the cookie (unlike Hershey’s) and has a won­der­ful, almost fruity over­tone (which is per­fect if you use orange blos­som honey in the recipe, and even bet­ter than per­fect when com­bined with the sub­tle fruit under­tones of real vanilla); in fact, in this recipe it is even liked by peo­ple who swear they don’t like dark choco­late. I find the brand of milk choco­late chips are less crit­i­cal; but they do pro­vide a nice and manda­tory bal­ance to the inten­sity of the dark choco­late. If you like dark choco­late, the 2:1 ratio of dark to milk choco­late is per­fect. If you lean toward the milk vari­ety, you could split it with a cup and a half of each. 3 cups total is plenty, but heavy-duty choco­late lovers can push the recipe to 4 cups of chips before they stop being cookies.

Posted in Recipes.

By David
March 2, 2010

No comments

To see perfection: Fabergé

Yes­ter­day morn­ing I had the oppor­tu­nity to inspect a piece of gen­uine Fabergé from the late Impe­r­ial period, in prepa­ra­tion for a future exhi­bi­tion on which I have the priv­i­lege of work­ing. The cura­tor first showed me a piece that is claimed to be Fabergé; it was inter­est­ing, though not par­tic­u­larly well made, and I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed. As I told him, I could have made that! He saved the best for last, how­ever, and when he pulled out an amaz­ing lit­tle jade let­ter opener my brain shot through the back of my roof. (Of course that doesn’t make sense. It didn’t to me, either.)

Not the one I saw.

There aren’t many times in a life that your eyes land on some­thing and have instant com­pre­hen­sion that you are look­ing at some­thing spe­cial. This tiny piece of per­fec­tion, a lit­tle bun­dle of rocks and met­als and minis­cule mol­lusk secre­tions, was like that.

It prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been like that a few years ago, before I started jewelry-work. Now I know what it takes to cast and braze and engrave and repoussé, and I’m not very good at it. I’ve seen a lot of jew­elry from peo­ple bet­ter than me, too. But it’s a lit­tle like a magic trick: when you know the trick, it’s not so magical.

I don’t know Fabergé’s tricks, though, and the result is sim­ply mag­i­cal. I’m amazed and a lit­tle dumb­founded, which is why it took me more than 24 hours just to sput­ter out a post about it. A few things are clear: he hired the best in each branch of the busi­ness, and divided the work among each expert. So the guil­loché was done by the best guilloché-man he could find, and the sub­se­quent enamel by the best enam­eler, and so on. With the bud­get to hire the best in the world, hire as many of them as he needed, and take as much time as required to cre­ate per­fec­tion, the result is some­thing that no sin­gle mas­ter could create.

The letter-opener is quite sim­i­lar to the probable-Fabergé let­ter opener listed at All That Glit­ters and pic­tured left. Sorry I don’t have a pic­ture of the one I saw, but their piece is rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Unlike the one I saw their opener has a bust at the top, which appears awk­ward in com­par­i­son. But a few char­ac­ter­is­tics are extremely close: the jade blade is vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal, the orna­men­ta­tion on the blade, the sig­na­ture guil­loché and over­laid metal. My ver­sion was more finely detailed, with strands of seed pearls and twisted wire, more carved appliqué, and flawlessly-implemented cus­tom alloyed gold to cre­ate a range of col­ors. Then very care­fully added pati­nas — just a lit­tle, just here and not there, per­fect control.

That orna­men­ta­tion on the blade, shown far right, demon­strates one ele­ment that intrigued me. Fabergé used tube set­tings for many of his pre­cious stones, bezels for oth­ers; few of his stones are in prong set­tings. That makes me feel bet­ter, since I love tube set­tings and use them far too much. Now I can sim­ple raise my nose a lit­tle higher and say, in a stuffy and slightly British voice, that my work is in a finer tra­di­tion. But I’m get­ting off track.

I’m left with ques­tions. How did they do that? How did they mount the han­dle to the blade yet retain strength? How did they mount roughly four zil­lion seed pearls? How did they get the enamel to not rise up where it met an edge?

And even more amazed when I think I might have fig­ured out one of the magic tricks. For exam­ple, that ques­tion of mount­ing the han­dle … it also relates to another ques­tion, that being how they attached the orna­men­ta­tion to the blade. Could it be that they have drilled through the jade, and the front and back orna­men­ta­tion are con­nected? And if so, how on earth would you sol­der that con­nec­tion with­out the heat snap­ping the jade, already ground impossibly-thin? And why is there no vis­i­ble indi­ca­tion that they did what I just sug­gested? I might be mak­ing it all up.

I can only imag­ine what impact an object like this must have had on a per­son of the time. We are accus­tomed to machined per­fec­tion; we get to see and han­dle objects that have been cut and formed by com­put­ers, with lev­els of pre­ci­sion that humans sim­ply can­not do. We are a lit­tle jaded our­selves, for­give the pun. For a Russ­ian in the 19th cen­tury, how­ever, see­ing a piece like this would have been an expe­ri­ence in see­ing the impos­si­ble. The magic trick is more pow­er­ful when you remove CAD design and CNC rout­ing out of the equation.

Finally, I’m reminded that tech­ni­cal pre­ci­sion and an artis­tic eye are com­pletely dif­fer­ent things. With all that com­put­er­ized per­fec­tion going on, you would think that our lives would be sur­rounded by ever-more-beautiful objects. But it cer­tainly isn’t so. What Fabergé brought to the table was the ideal com­bi­na­tion: the best tech­nique in the world, guided by artis­tic sen­si­bil­ity. Even in some­thing as mun­dane as a lit­tle letter-opener, the result is breathtaking.

The Fabergé “Empress Josephine” tiara was pur­chased in 2007 for £1.05 mil­lion. Not by me.

Posted in Art & Design. Tagged with , .

By David
February 6, 2010

1 comment

The recipe that didn’t make me famous

This being Super Bowl week, I’ve been reminded of my close brush with culi­nary great­ness one year ago. It all started when Noble Pig came up with a Super Bowl recipe con­test. It was a no-brainer: my sig­na­ture recipe, one of the two best foods I’ve devel­oped, was a per­fect match. With a $250 Sam’s Club gift card dan­gling as a vir­tual car­rot, 1,026 entries found their way to the Noble One’s mailbox.

I knew that some­thing was very right and very wrong when I got an e-mail ask­ing a sim­ple ques­tion: what’s que­sadilla cheese, and where do you get it? That meant two things to me. First, she found my recipe intrigu­ing; sec­ond, there was an ele­ment of the recipe that was going to kill my chances. Turned out I was right. I answered the ques­tion, but the wrong way; I should have said, instead, that any white meltable cheese, and even white cheese dip, would work.

You can see the after­math here. Sure enough, she spec­i­fied there that she chose recipes with “easy to find ingre­di­ents.” Of course, cheese dip is pretty easy to find; que­sadilla cheese may not be. Of those 1k entries, I made the top 11, end­ing up with an “hon­or­able men­tion.” Still and all, not a bad show­ing for a non-chef-dude.

So here it is, folks. This the recipe that didn’t make me famous.

Chipotle-Cinnamon Apple-Compote Quesadillas

Prep Time: 10 min.
Cook Time: 20 min.
Ready In: 30 min.

Serv­ings: 4 (Yields 16 triangles)

Ingre­di­ents

  • 13 oz. can chicken (doesn’t have to be breast) with pack­ing liquid
  • 1.5 Tbs. butter
  • 1.5 Tbs. olive oil
  • 2 tsp. chipo­tle rub (recipe below)
  • 2 Tbs. apple but­ter (from Apple Barn in Gatlin­burg; if not avail­able, as good qual­ity as possible)
  • 8 oz. shred­ded que­sadilla cheese
  • 4 slices white amer­i­can cheese (the really cheap wrapped sand­wich slices. Trust me on this one)
  • 4 burrito-size white soft tor­tilla shells
  • yet another Tbs. butter
  • CHIPOTLE RUB:
  • 1/2 tsp. chipo­tle chile powder
  • 1 tsp. smoked paprika
  • 1.5 tsp. gar­lic powder
  • 1/4 tsp. dried basil
  • 1/4 tsp. marjoram
  • 1 Tbs. sea­son salt
  • 2 Tbs. cinnamon

Direc­tions

  1. Mix the chipo­tle rub ingre­di­ents together. You’ll have extra rub left over for another day.
  2. In a skil­let, melt the but­ter with olive oil over medium heat. Add chicken and liq­uid; crush chicken to shreds with spat­ula. Add chipo­tle rub. Mix well. Add apple but­ter. Stir­ring reg­u­larly, sim­mer until there is no stand­ing liq­uid but meat is still very wet.
  3. Spread 1 oz. shred­ded cheese over half a shell. Spread 1/4 of the meat across the cheese. Spread another 1 oz. shred­ded cheese over the meat. Take one slice of amer­i­can cheese, tear into sev­eral thin strips, and spread out evenly. Fold shell in half.
  4. Melt a table­spoon of but­ter in a large skil­let or grid­dle heated to 275 degrees and add the que­sadilla. When golden brown, flip. Remove when gor­geous, make the other three. Cut each into four tri­an­gles and enjoy this spec­tac­u­lar culi­nary delight.

Posted in Recipes.

By David
February 4, 2010

2 comments

“Tin” tiles for ceiling and backsplash

Faux Tin TileI just ran across a some­what ugly site, Dec­o­ra­tive Ceil­ings, with an aston­ish­ing selec­tion of dec­o­ra­tive faux tin tile. Avail­able in indi­vid­ual adhe­sive tiles that can be applied over pop­corn (!), tiles that can be inserted in a dropped ceil­ing, and 2′ wide strips that come any­where from 5′ long to 25′ long, intended for back­splashes. The prices are rea­son­able, the metal­lic fin­ishes actu­ally look like metal, and they offer free sam­ples. Good, eh?

They aren’t the cheap­est option out there. In fact, you can get sim­i­lar prod­ucts off Ama­zon for as low as $3.59 per panel — but that’s only if you are will­ing to buy from “Ceil­ing Tiles by Us.” I’m not sure why dec­o­ra­tive tile sell­ers have no taste in com­pany name or slo­gan. Take Ceil­ing Mag­nifique, for instance. Not so bad a name, until you get to the bot­tom of the page and see the slo­gan: “qual­ity plas­tic prod­ucts since 1979.” What hap­pened to things like “Char­bon­nel et Walker Ltd., Pur­vey­ors of Fine Eng­lish Choco­lates by appoint­ment to her Majesty the Queen since 1875″? Couldn’t they at lease say “qual­ity repro­duc­tions” or some­thing? Sheesh.

Any­way, if you know of a bet­ter option for these tiles, please add it in the comments.

Posted in Art & Design.

By David
February 3, 2010

2 comments