Friday Dinner: It's a "Goat Hill Pizza" Night!

What are you supposed to do when you have a slightly traumatic yet ultimately successful experience making noodles? I mean seriously, how do you get flour on your back? Well, you get back in the pool and make pizza dough.

Lynn, my culinary confederate, has a favorite combination of dishes: the "Special Combination" pizza, a chef's salad with blue cheese dressing and a side of garlic bread from Goat Hill Pizza, in San Francisco. We can practically smell the pizza at Goat Hill's Potrero Hill store from her back deck, but we decided on a DIY version. Homemade dough, homemade sauce and toppings plus the chef's salad and garlic bread. Have I ever mentioned that Friday night dinners are the once-weekly "Olly-olly oxen free!" of my weeks' meals?

 The dough recipe I used specified that it would make a 14" diameter round pizza. The volume was perfect for a thin-crust pizza on a rimmed baking sheet about 12" x 17". It's also very easy to make and shape - this coming from a dough-a-phobic so you can take that to the bank.

I made a very straightforward tomato sauce with nothing but tomatoes, onion, garlic olive oil, salt and a little pepper. We topped the pizza with sauce, mozzarella, Romano cheese, mushrooms, green pepper, olives, white onion, basil, sweet Italian sausage and salami - but we forgot the garlic (don't you forget it if you make it, okay?). As delicious as it was, we won't forget the garlic the next time. I also forgot to bring the chickpeas for the salad, but you should be more vigilant and make sure you don't forget it, eh?

I went a little crazy with the cornmeal, but it made for a nice picture.

RECIPES

• THIN CRUST "SPECIAL COMBINATION" PAN PIZZA
• Pizza Dough
• Simple Tomato Sauce
• Assembling and Cooking the "Special Combination" Pan Pizza
• CHEF'S SALAD with LYNN'S BLUE CHEESE DRESSING
• GARLIC CHEESE BREAD

Chile Verde

Sometimes it's hard pretending that it's summer and I should cook summer meals when I look out the window in the evening and see fog blowing up my street, my visibility is limited to two blocks and the wind is howling.  Okay I know, "Wah, wah, wah!" </end bitch session> Welcome to summer in San Francisco. At least in my neighborhood.

Last week I made chile verde and appreciated the warmth. Actually, I made it twice. The first time (a small batch with chicken) it was wimpy with absolutely zero heat. I used four jalapenos and I might as well have left them out. Coincidentally, a few days after I made it, I saw this article on CookThink. Demand for chiles has resulted in prettier, shipping friendly, but milder jalapenos.

"To meet the demand, jalapeno breeding has promoted varieties that are flawlessly pretty, easy to ship and easier to grow in cooler climates. Jalapenos used to be grown mostly in the high deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico. Hot, dry climates promote the production of capsaicin, the chemical that makes a hot pepper hot. Now, some varieties can be grown in wetter, cooler climates that don’t create enough heat for a spicy chile pepper."

Furthermore, the author provides information on varieties to look for if you want hotter or milder chiles. When I'm cooking and using chiles, I'll taste each one to get a sense of its heat - I should have followed my own advice on my first batch. Chiles are hotter at the stem end than the tip so I usually go for the middle. The ribs, core and seeds of the chile is where the majority of the heat is so if you taste the flesh and it's kinda wimpy, just trim off the stem and use the rest of the chile.

When I cook with chiles, my goal is to find the balance between enough heat without losing the taste of the other ingredients and the dish, overall.

Online Chile Resources:
Cook's Thesaurus: Fresh Chiles and Dried Chiles
Wikipedia: Scoville Scale (common method for categorizing a chile's heat)

I'm declaring my love for tomatillos. There, I said it.

Tomatillos (unrelated to tomatoes) are a fruit, related to the Cape Gooseberry. Green tomatillos are more tart than the purple-ish varieties. Raw, the taste of a green tomatillo is reminiscent of a Granny Smith apple. Tomatillos can be used raw or cooked. To prepare, remove the paper husks and rinse them in warm water to remove (most of) the sticky stuff which can be somewhat bitter. You don't have to completely remove it, so don't fret if there still some on the surface of the tomatillo.

Out of the broiler.

Sauce ingredients ready for the blender.

After blending.

Recipe: Chile Verde