Sweet Potato Pizza

Our publisher at HarperCollins once said that people want to braise in the summer and grill in the winter. They yearn for what's not in season.

For my part, I get impatient with the stand-bys at the holidays--and then want them at other times of the year. A roast turkey mostly gets a "meh" from me on the holidays. I mean, I like it. It's fine. But I'm much more excited when Bruce makes cowboy rib-eyes or some succulent racks of lamb.

But that said, I love roast turkey on an average Wednesday night in January--or June. When it's not so expected.

This past week, I asked Bruce if he could revamp the standard sweet potato casserole, found on so many holiday tables. We've got lots of company over the holidays--kids, too--and I was wondering if we couldn't play around with what's expected. What if we still had a sweet potato dish, one that's kid-friendly, but we morphed it a bit?

His answer: sweet potato pizza.

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Smoked Olive Oil

In the last post (here), I dropped a hint about one last finishing touch on the pizza made from the antipasto bits and bites off the salad bar at our supermarket.

Once the pizza was cut into its pieces, Bruce drizzled each with smoked olive oil from The Smoked Olive.

Holy cow. Or olive. Or whatever.

If you don't know this stuff, you must. Now. It's a decadent, fantastic drizzle, great over a slice of this pizza--or any pizza. We used the Sonoma bottling, a little heavier on the smoke, with a nice fruity finish.

No cooking with it. Rather, dot it over the top. Of just about anything: scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, creamy goat cheese, a piece of pan-fried fish. In other words, it's a condiment, like a high-flavor, expensive olive oil, but with smoke! Check out the full line of products and order your own bottles here.

The Smoked Olive recommends using it over shucked oysters. I can't wait!

Salad Bar Pizza

Although I'm blogging about a great pie, I'm actually still having that real food discussion, the one that got started on this blog the other day (at this spot and this one).

I've been thinking about it a lot. Pondering what's real and what's not. And trying to come to terms with why I see the high-falutin' pretension of so much of the current foodie world--let them eat grass-fed cake--so darn overbearing, so silly.

Yes, Bruce and I are real-food mavens. Yes, we do such crazy things as buying our beef from a local farm (see it here), our pork from our local CSA (see it here), and our eggs from several little roadside stands near us. Bruce spends most of the summer canning. Witness how many jams and pickles have appeared on this blog.

But then there's the silly stuff, the macho stuff: making your own sauerkraut, killing a wild hog, and showing the world your chest hair. Or the Earth Mother stuff: wearing your Birkenstocks, nurturing your own vinegar, and cultivating your whole-grain pantry. Neither is a real answer to the food dilemmas strafing the developed world.

Here's one of my answers: a real-food pizza that's not a make-it-yourself. Everything here is from the store. Everything here COULD be made at home--if someone had the time. But in the end, everything here is good and real, nothing fake, no chemical chicanery, no excess fat or sugar to mask half-hearted flavors. Just delicious.

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Pizza with Prosciutto and Artichokes

It's the last of the weeks of our ham tour on this blog. All to celebrate the publication of the new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER--which is now officially out and, as they say, available at fine stores everywhere. Or skip the stores and go online. Get yours here. While it's hot!

Today, we've got a pizza with prosciutto, one of a couple pies in the book--but one of about 25 recipes in a larger chapter that deals with all the European dry-cured hams, from jamón ibérico to sunca, from presunto to jambon d'ardennes, speck to jambon de vendée.

In some ways, these hams represent the very origins of pig curing. They are undoubtedly the ancestors of American country hams, like Virginia hams (and the Kentucky ones I found in the trip narrated in the book). And for many foodies, they're the sine qua non, the (as Aquinas called such a thing) first and final element.

Ha! A reference to Aquinas on a food blog. And a direct tie between medieval scholasticism and ham. My work is done here. Except for the recipe for today.

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Melanzane Pizza

People always ask us if we have a big vegetable garden. Mostly, we have a CSA. Our travel schedule this summer doesn't allow us to plant a big garden. Flowers aplenty, sure--but we do have a few things in pots on the deck. Tomatoes, mostly. And chiles. Or at least we thought we did.

Earlier in the season, we shot a series of videos for weightwatchers.com, technique videos that will soon be up on the site. One of our editors brought her dear parents to the shoot at our house, an older Italian couple. Frankly, I wanted to blow off the shoot and spend time with them. Italians are some of the world's best foodies! We had lunch out on the deck and they were checking out our pots. "Melanzane!" her mother exclaimed. We were very patient. "No, no, peppers. Chiles." But she was insistent. We showed her the little tag from the farm where we got the plants. "Peppers," we kept saying.

They were eggplants. She knew. We should have listened. Italians, after all. So we've now got eggplants growing on the deck. Not such a bad thing. And certainly worthy of a good pizza.

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BLT Pizza

Bruce calls ham "the most Christian of all meats." Funny, but when I was growing up in the South, I could have sworn it was bacon.

Maybe ham was too much of a given, like loud-mouthed preachers at a state fair. But bacon? Now that was real religion. Along with donuts. Which we buttered. Yep, slathered it on, one bite at a time.

But I digress. Bruce and I have been doing quite a few pizza demos from our grilled pizza book this summer--and the BLT is always a hit, no matter its religious orientation. Here's the drill:

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