A New Addition

It is with great joy that JustAwesome and I welcome a new addition to the Feral Cook pizza repertoire. Stolen from Roberta’s, the best (hands down) pizza place in New York City, I present:

Salad Nicoise Pizza

Potato pizza with a tuna/egg mixture tossed with arugula, green beans and a sicilian green sauce. So bright and tasty. She makes us smile.

September 18, 2010

7:17 p.m

13 inches

Salad Nicoise Pizza

Sicilian Green Sauce

Tuna-Egg Mixture

Also on the menu tonight:

• margherita

• smoked ricotta, basil, parmesan and mozzarella (2x)

Smoked Ricotta

Serve salad with Karen Skurka’s Lazy Girl Dressing (in the comment).

Drink beer in frosty glasses and homemade blueberry soda.

Young Pizza Lover with Tiny Pineapple

The Works

With less than 10 days until we go on what will undoubtably be a gluttonous trip, I have got to get serious about my waistline.

Tonight I did a ton of prep: I made my famous egg salad (for tomorrow’s lunch). I made a WW’s cabbage and carrot salad to have as sides for a few days (ugly but tasty). I roasted some brussels sprouts and carrots, like I always do. I cut up celery (peanut butter? hummus?). I cut up carrots (I do not like pre-cut carrots. Blech). I washed the lettuce (keeping the leaves whole to use as wraps). I made a salad (to eat for tonight’s dinner with canned salmon and a crusty bread from the New Amsterdam Market).

And then I remembered: I had some uncooked kale that I hadn’t used, already cut up and ready to go... Roasting pan was out from the brussels sprouts and calling my name. WOO HOO! Kale chips!! They were so tasty! I just put olive oil and salt on them and laid in a single layer. Better recipe here.

Kale

And then I thought: Why not eat it all for dinner? At once! I must be some kind of genius.

The Works

So we had: Salad with salmon (with a homemade mustard dressing), crusty bread with homemade pesto, cabbage and carrot salad, roasted brussels sprouts and carrots, and kale chips. With homemade seltzer! A weird mix, but it all worked. And a sensible Weight Watchers meal, I think.

JustAwesome is in the kitchen, right this minute, preparing this panade from The New York Times Magazine. How many POINTS is that? OY! Seriously, I can’t wait!

Oh, what a relief it is!

What a lovely weekend! A visit to The Brooklyn Kitchen yielded a brand new seltzer-maker. We don’t drink a ton of the stuff right now (because we don’t like throwing out plastic bottles) but game-on! Oh, the possibilities! Ours came with some flavor samples plus we bought a gorgeous bottle of Ginger syrup. And now we don’t have to avoid having any teetotalers over for dinner.

So, what flavors sound good to you?

Our Flexitarian Table

JustAwesome grew up eating very little meat. Naturally, she became a vegetarian and thankfully, for practical (read: traveling) purposes later started eating fish. Coincidentally, she doesn’t love shellfish beyond the occasional lobster-roll, so I think of her as a kosher-style pescetarian. And so, we are, flexitarian.

I don’t feel punished by meatless meals. We have tons of variety, especially when adding fish to the mix. I do hate when restaurants have only one vegetarian option and it is usually more like a consolation prize. I eat plenty of meat, usually when we go out, but once in a while I’ll make some meat or treif for myself. I don’t believe people should lose themselves for their spouses—avoiding onions, for example, that their spouse deems “stinky poo-poo”—like Laura Linney’s character on Showtimes new series The Big C.

Last night I decided to follow Berley’s recipe for Grilled Shrimp in Harissa, found in, of course, The Flexitarian Table. This kind of, sort of, went with-ish the cauliflower and corn and pea red curry that I made for our main entrée. (I broiled it).

Then I saw the recipe and rather than improvise and try something else, I kept going. Next thing I know, I am toasting fennel and cumin seeds and then grinding them with a mortar and pestle because we didn’t have already ground spices. WHAT??? WHO AM I?????

The mortar and pestle, by the way, we only own because I saw it at a HomeGoods store, it was really, really cheap and it matches our Le Creuset stuff!

Anyway, this cracks me up. I don’t recognize me. The shrimp was good and the house smelled amazing because of the toasted seeds. YUM!