Kitchen orgy

I thought when I retired, I would have more time for blogging. That has not happened because now I have more time for *everything*. I knit more, I garden more, I sleep more. Yesterday, I decided to cook more.

Cooking from scratch is not all that uncommon these days, but I sometimes take it to extremes. Thus baking pizza can turn into making mozzarella (recipe from Home Cheese Making), pizza sauce (recipe from Preserving by the Pint), and dough (recipe from Smitten Kitchen Cookbook). The dressing for our salad was a raspberry version of this strawberry balsamic basil one. There was already homemade vanilla ice cream (from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home) in the freezer, and it was served over this galette.

Even though most of the cooking was done by noon for our evening supper, things did not go all that smoothly. The mozzarella turned out nice and shiny, with that characteristic squeak when bitten, but I didn't get all the whey out. After cooling in the fridge, the cheese looked kind of funky. Still perfectly edible, just not so pretty. Milk from my herd share.

My Italian herb mix is rather ancient, so I used almost twice what the pizza sauce recipe called for. Also, my old eyes sometimes mistake a 1 for a 3 when the 1 has a serif, thus I used 3/4 of a teaspoon fresh ground pepper instead of 1/4. Very tasty just the same. Instead of tomatoes, I used tomato sauce from last year's garden.

The yeast for the dough was also ancient. Saturday night, I tried proofing it, twice, just to make sure it worked, with two failures. Maybe the water was too hot or third time's the charm, because I tried one more time Sunday morning (anything to avoid a trip to the grocery store) and it worked well enough to add the flour. The dough went into the fridge until mid afternoon, when I popped it into the oven with the oven light on; two hours later, it had doubled and was ready to become pizza.

For the salad dressing, I had tried substituting raspberries for the strawberries before but the result was too seedy. This time I ran the berries through my saucemaker, using the berry screen, thus turning a very simple recipe into a lot more work. The dressing turned out less creamy but just as tasty. Raspberries and basil from my garden.

The dough for the galette was also started Saturday night, with better success. The recipe warns about oozing and ooze it did, but not very much. Raspberries from the garden.

Salad fixings purchased at a farmers market and mild Italian sausage from a local farm rounded out our supper, plus beer. A very satisfying meal, plus I think I have got the cooking bug out of my system. For a while.