recipe: pizza with chard, goat cheese & egg.

I know. Pizza topped with egg. Sounds weird, but apparently in places that aren't Cincinnati, it's fairly trendy. But then I spotted in our hometown newspaper a recipe for pizza topped with veggies and finished with eggs. What caught my eye wasn't just the combination of toppings—sauteed onion and chard, goat cheese and prosciutto (oh, yeah)—but the idea that the egg, justbarelycookedtilitsniceandsoft, would create a rich, almost creamy sauce when you mashed your fork into it before taking a bite.

Which it did.

Pita bread is the ideal base for this (though my homemade pizza crust is good, too); the pita's cupped shape creates the ideal platform into which you crack the egg. Plus, individual pizzas are the way to go here—you want one egg per person. (Slicing an egg-topped pizza would get messy, methinks.)

pizza with chard, goat cheese & egg

(makes 2 individual pizzas)

2 8- or 9-inch pitas (whole wheat or plain), or 1/2 recipe pizza dough formed into 2 individual crusts

1/2 a grocery or market-sized bunch of swiss chard, chopped

1/2 onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

pinch of red pepper flakes

2–3 slices prosciutto, chopped or torn into pieces

4 ounces fresh goat cheese

2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. If using fresh pizza dough, pre-bake crusts until lightly browned.

Saute onion, garlic, red pepper flakes; add chard and saute until wilted. Divide vegetables between pitas or crusts, spreading evenly. Top with prosciutto, crumble goat cheese over top. Bake for about 10 minutes until the cheese starts to soften. Remove from oven; crack an egg in the center of each pizza, then bake another 10–12 minutes until the egg whites are set but yolks are still runny.

spc.

Today, April 1, the temp hit 80 degrees. It's a Thursday. Rob is on hiatus, and I've decided it just isn't in the cards for me to go into the office tomorrow. It's the official 2010 debut of the Side Porch Cafe.

It's a glorious evening: we've chowed down on leftover party food from last night's get-together with Rob's former colleagues. The party was fantastic: good food, copious wine (today reminded me of going to class hung over during Little 500 week at I.U.) and great people. What amazed me, as always, was the genuine respect, friendship and admiration that Rob and his co-workers share(d). People think he's really neat. I think he's really neat.

Wrigley scored big-time from a few folks who kept sneaking tortilla chips and pita bread to him. Tonight, we went for a really long walk. Wigs was tired by the end, but then, so were we.

Life is good. It's good. It's April 1, and we have the house open. Spring is here. It's like winter never even happened. I think I have a new mom's amnesia for the pain of childbirth ... I can't even remember how awful February was, and it seems like the Side Porch Cafe has been in continuous operation forever.

Forever.

too delicious.

There are two food-related (obsessed?) blogs that I wish I wrote: 100cookbooks.com and smittenkitchen.com. Neither fails me whenever I bookmark a recipe.

So when I spotted this recipe for Tomato and Corn Pie on smittenkitchen.com earlier this week, I made a note to make it this weekend.

Holy Mother of All That Is Delicious!

There is simply no better thing do to with late-summer corn and tomatoes. If you're a food person who reads this (that would be: Mom!), please do yourself a favor and make it while the fixin's are good.

Allow me to back up just a bit for a seasonal musing. Around the Fourth of July, I sink into a midsummer melancholy, sad that my favorite days are passing while I'm chained to a desk 9 to 5, mournful that I can't manage (even with summer's blissfully long days) to accomplish all I want to do.

Then, sometime in early to mid-August, when the days start to shorten perceptibly and the sounds from the swim club across the street stop a bit earlier in the evening, I recognize that summer isn't waning ... it's beginning. There remain weeks and weeks of 70- and 80-degree temps, summer produce and bouquets of zinnias that last until, around here, the end of October.

So I feel better.

Now, as the farmer's market kicks into high gear, really, and tomatoes and corn are still in full bounty, recipes like the Tomato and Corn Pie really resonate. There's something fall-ish about making any kind of pie, and the fact that it's packed with summer's best vegetables is just, well, a double crust.

Heaven.

Seriously, make this recipe. It doesn't note how many servings it yields, but Rob and I polished off nearly half the thing.

what to do with leftover phyllo.

Last weekend, Mom was here for an awesome visit. We had a great time, starting with a wine tasting Friday evening, followed by Chinese takeout. Then she and I stayed up way too late just catching up. It was great.

When Mom's here, we tend to make dinner into a special occasion, particularly since she's fun to have in the kitchen. Rob dug into an old favorite cookbook, a Junior League behemoth from San Francisco, to find something we hadn't tried before: chicken in a mustard cream sauce wrapped in phyllo, bûche de noel-style. It was really terrific. But it left us with half a box of phyllo.

What to do?

This: Salmon Filets in Phyllo. Really, where else would you go for a recipe to use leftover phyllo than Martha? It was terrific, and ridiculously easy: spread salmon filets with a bit of horseradish, do 2 layers of phyllo (with a bit of parsley between), then wrap up burrito-style and bake for like 12 minutes. Delish!

a meal to remember.

Last night, Rob and I went out for a fantastic dinner at a Fancy White-Tablecloth Place. (Actually, the tables were dressed in lovely terra-cotta French Provençal linens.) Jean-Robert at Pigall's is probably Cincinnati's top restaurant -- its name a combination of the top chef and one of the city's finest old establishments. Back in the 1960s, Cincinnati somehow produced three of the 10 exclusive Mobil Five-Star restaurants in the country, and Pigall's was one of them.

It was an amazing meal and a terrific evening.

We started with cocktails at the lounge next door, then moved into the dining room. The space was gorgeous -- an inviting, long, low-ceilinged space with interesting decor and the above-mentioned linens. From the moment we sat down, the service was perfection -- proper and professional but warm and unpretentious.

And the food. OMG, the food.

We opted for the three-course menu, though the five-stepper beckoned. As a couple of fairly accomplished home cooks, we're always awed when a restaurant takes things that we prepare at home -- in this case, roast chicken and roast sea bass -- and turns them into something we could never possibly accomplish in our own kitchen.

We started with a lovely amuse bouche -- three of them, actually: a warm potato soup, a duck-confit salad and a phyllo purse of sauteed red cabbage and cream cheese.

First courses were, for me, a composed crabmeat/avocado/cucumber salad with a perfect scoop of cider-vinegar sorbet; for Rob, gorgeous duck ravioli with an intensely flavored duck/wine sauce. They were as different as can be, but both were just perfect.

Second courses: for me, the roast sea bass, which sat atop a bed of roasted fennel, sauteed shiitake mushrooms (which gave a creamy, earthy quality), orange segments and blue potatoes, and which was doused in a gorgeous orange butter sauce. I was amazed by the little garnish on top of the fish -- I thought it was shredded carrot, but one bite produced this intense, velvety flavor of candied orange peel. Rob had the roast chicken, which was topped with a wine sauce and sat alongside a sort of potato/cheese/mushroom croquette.

Dessert, as if we needed it, was for me a cheese assortment and for Rob an amazing dark-chocolate molten cake that was elevated to sublime with a scoop of pumpkin ice cream. The first and last entries in my mild-to-strong cheese plate were both Basque sheeps-milk cheeses that tasted similar but impossibly different.

All the way home, we talked about the individual flavors and tastes like we'd dissect the scenes of a complex movie. Every single dish was built from a pantry-full of ingredients, and you could taste each and every one of them individually. You could tell that all the elements had been prepared separately, seasoned minimally, and composed like instruments in an orchestra.

It wasn't a cheap night out, but it wasn't a bank-breaker, either. And it (obviously) left quite an impression. We'll most definitely go back.

last saturday in november.

Following an unconventional yet fun and satisfying Thanksgiving weekend (we visited Dad & Ellen and Grandma, but missed seeing a sick-y Mom), we're home on a cozy Saturday evening. While Rob played golf this afternoon, I napped and puttered -- the latter including putting up some outside lights and baking a pumpkin pie. Inspired by Ellen's use of candles and seasonal decor on their front porch, I picked up some artificial greenery and some huge red candles, which I assembled on the front porch using the pots that held summer flowers and fall mums, and the huge Ball jars I use for candles on the side porch. All in all, it looks pretty.

For dinner, we hopped into the Wayback Machine and dragged out the February 1997 issue of Bon Appetit. I subscribed to B.A. for years until I stopped (which makes publishers like me crazy), and I saved years' worth of issues and created my own index to recipes we'd tried and loved or dog-eared for future reference. Tonight's dinner is one of those oft-made recipes:

Fettuccine with Sweet Pepper-Cayenne Sauce
Bon Appetit February 1997 (marked with a handwritten note on the page: great!! 1/97)
3 Tbsp butter
2 large red bell peppers in strips
3 minced garlic cloves
3/4 tsp. cayenne
1 cup whipping cream (hi, Mom!)
3/4 cup chicken broth
3/4 cup shredded Parmesan
12 oz fettuccine
1 cup frozen green peas
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil

things are good.

I took Friday off to ... putter. I puttered around the house as if it were my job. Having lost several weekends to travel lately, my putter gauge was on E. So I puttered. The house has never been so orderly.

This morning, we took Wrigley to Findlay Market for probably the last time this season. EVERYONE wanted to make friends with him, and lots of other market regulars stopped by to scratch. The Apple Guy forked over a bit of his blackberry scone for Wigs, and a nice lady offered up a bit of her fresh bread after the boy stuck his nose in her market basket.

Today was a gorgeous Indian Summer day, perfect for a round of fall golf. Now, we're well into a bottle of wine and a hearty fall dinner: roasted pork loin with roasty apples and red onion and (my fave) mashed potatoes.

I love Rob and Wrigley.

it's not really soup weather.

Except that it is. I scoped out a recipe for Late Summer Minestrone as I was perusing the NYTimes.com Wednesday food section, and it sort of begged to be made this weekend. So I did. A few minutes' worth of chopping (including our own beans and tomatoes), a few minutes' worth of simmering ... and voila. We won't have this for dinner for another night or two -- soup always needs time to develop. I'll put a bunch of it into the freezer; it'll be amazing come January.

dinner with doofus.

I spent most of the past week in Chicago, hosting-slash-attending a HOW conference for freelancers. It was the first event we've done for this group, and by all accounts a home run.

Friday after the conference wrapped, Bill picked me up and we spent a fun weekend together. He introduced me to Algerian crepes and to Vietnamese food that afternoon and evening, and then we hit a neighborhood spot Saturday morning for brunch. The place bills itself as featuring coastal southern cuisine, and it was all grits-and-gravy goodness.

We hit two (count 'em) farmers markets on Saturday morning and stocked up on items for an all-veggie dinner: a rainbow's worth of cherry tomatoes, some fingerling potatoes, some local broccoli, arugula, goat cheese, beets, bread ...

dear regina: sorry about the stove.

Since Rob and I both love cooking, it's a real treat to be able to do so on vacation, especially when we have amazing local ingredients and a gorgeous kitchen to work with. (I also love the provisioning part of these trips, making a list of things to bring with us and curating a collection of recipes to make.)

With the recent remodel of the house, Regina had installed a stunning six-burner AGA stove. It's a real beauty: a gleaming black cooktop and white enamel front, with three ovens (of different sizes and functions) and about a zillion parts that naturally all need cleaning after you've put the sucker through its paces.

Which we did last night. All due apologies to the nice girls who came this morning to clean.

Sea Bass and Confetti Vegetables with Lemon-Butter Sauce

For the fish
2 sea bass fillets (sprinkle with salt)
Heat olive oil in a large skillet; add fish and cook until it flakes easily when tested with a fork.
Remove from pan, place on a plate and tent with foil.
Add 1/4 cup white wine and the juice of a lemon to the pan; cook over medium-high heat 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in 1 Tablespoon chopped parsley and 1 teaspoon cold butter.

For the vegetables

Cut the kernels off 2 ears of corn; chop a tomato and a zucchini (two if they're tiny). Sliver a large handful of fresh spinach. Add corn and zucchini to pan, saute 2 minutes. Add tomato and spinach, cook 1 minute until spinach wilts.

Spoon the vegetables onto 2 plates; top with fish and pour butter sauce over all.

a terrific dinner.

Tonight, we made a dinner out of side dishes, and it was wonderful, the perfect thing for a warm evening. Both of the recipes came from Williams-Sonoma's "Grilling: New Healthy Kitchen," which Mom gave Rob last summer. Nothing we've made from that book has disappointed. Here's what was on tap:

Mushroom Bruschetta
1 lb. portobello mushrooms, cleaned and stemmed and sliced into 1/4-in slices
tossed with a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed
olive oil
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
salt and pepper

2 slices of country wheat bread (per person), drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt

Marinate the mushrooms up to 1 hour before dinner. Grill over medium-high heat for about 3 minutes per side. Grill bread slices for about a minute per side.

Arrange grilled mushroom slices on grilled bread; top with crumbled Feta and slivered basil.


Chickpeas with Baby Spinach
In a baking dish, toss a can of chickpeas (drained and rinsed), 1 thinly sliced tomato, a good glug of olive oil and salt + pepper. Broil about 8-9 minutes until browned on top. Remove from the oven and immediately toss with a big handful of sliced fresh baby spinach and the juice of a lemon.

Plus, I made a quick lemon-olive oil salad dressing and tossed that with greens just picked from the garden. It all tasted fresh, light and healthy. Delish!

yum.

In addition to 101Cookbooks, which I love, I've run across another terrific food blog called Smitten Kitchen. Mom, you gotta check this out! I think the potato pizza is on deck for this weekend.

food fit for the weather.

[A rare double-post day]

OK, so here's the backstory: We invited Mom, Bill, Grandma and Hans for a Christmas visit, the centerpiece of which was to be a leisurely, multi-course dinner. I was just thrilled at the thought of having my loved-ones at our dinner table, so I started menu-planning early. Because Bill had prepared a killer beef tenderloin at Mom's over Thanksgiving weekend, I wanted to do something different.

Cue MarthaStewart.com, where I found a recipe for a roasted pork shoulder. We ordered one from Eckerlin, picked it up a few days before Christmas and ...

When we got it home, Rob realized the thing was less than $2 a pound. Hm. He looked at me and said, "I don't want to freak you out, but ... how confident are we in this recipe?" Learning that the cut was cheap, and deciding that it didn't even look like what was pictured in the recipe, I answered, "Not very." So we went to the grocery and picked up a lovely pork tenderloin roast, and the meal was terrific.

Which left us with a 4 pound pork shoulder in the freezer.

Fast forward to today: At Bill's instruction, we rubbed the thing with a mix of coriander, cumin, paprika and S&P, browned it, and then slow-cooked it in the Dutch oven under a mess of pureed roasted peppers, garlic, onion, tomato and jalapeno. It smells amazing.

That, a good red wine and the Packers game are our evening plans.

dining in good company.

Rob is stirring the final bit of Parmesan into a batch of butternut squash risotto, made with squash purchased at the farmer's market today, thyme from our own garden and homemade chicken stock. To that, we're adding a perfect fall salad: endive, apple, Swiss cheese, chives and toasted walnuts.

Joining us for dinner this evening, in addition to Wrigley and the Fellas, are the Rafanellis (thanks for the Zin, guys) and Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler.

Righteous.

when life gives you squash.

I cannot get enough of this summer's zucchini. The plant is legendarily productive (Barbara Kingsolver writes in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" of "zucchini larceny," a sort of reverse crime where neighbors clandestinely leave bags of the green goodies on your porch, which you really don't want because you have a glut of your own to deal with). We don't have zuke in the garden, but we might as well: We've been eating enough of it.

My very favorite preparation is this recipe with fregola sarda (a kind of large-grain couscous pasta that's nicely toasted, which we found at the wonderful Findlay Market shop Angelina's), zucchini, pinenuts, lots of parmesan, Herbes de Provence and a (very) generous sprinkling of coarse salt. And did I mention parmesan?

I also love the salad of fresh zucchini, mint, grilled chicken and shaved parmesan from Everyday Food. And I enjoy Heidi Swanson's salad of grilled zucchini and quinoa. Both make a healthy and satisfying lunch.

Tonight, I concocted another use for zukes, along with other summer produce: Spaghetti squash with a vegetable cream sauce. I sauteed (in a bit of butter) chopped garlic, then added diced carrot, red pepper (from our garden), zucchini, cremini mushrooms and sliced sun-dried tomatoes. I deglazed the pan with a bit of white wine, then poured in a cup of heavy cream and let the whole mess boil for a minute or two. In went the contents of a baked spaghetti squash -- the strands shredded with a fork. Salt, pepper, parmesan. Done. Delish.

oh my goodness.

Rob just did something blog-worthy: He opened a bottle of 1997 Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

Oh, my.

We've just poured into our ginormous red wine glasses and are waiting for it to open up and settle before taking a sip.

Dinner tonight definitely merits this killer bottle: Grilled steaks over sliced tomatoes, sauteed green beans from the garden, crusty bread. Not to mention the unparalleled company of my two boys.

Years ago, when Mondavi was still an independent, publicly traded company (before it the family squabbled, sold the business and watched it lose some of its luster), we bought Mondavi stock. It was a fairly minor investment -- basically, just enough to score us a wicked discount at the winery and access to their VIP tasting room (which poured a hundred bucks worth of wines, easy, just at the tasting). We bought this bottle at the winery and stashed it away for a special occasion. Like an otherwise ordinary Saturday night @ 645.

The first sip: Unbelievable. It's brick red. Huge. Full-bodied, still a bit punchy on the tongue but smooth on the finish.

Oh my.

smokin'.

Two weekends ago—Memorial Day weekend—was smokin' weekend. Rob hauled out the charcoal-fired smoker and had that bad boy goin' all day, slow-cooking a couple of roaster chickens, a pork loin, a couple of onions and, finally, pasta. That's right: Pasta. We'll get to that in a minute.

In my mind, there's a uniform for smoking: a wife-beater T, jean shorts, tube socks and a trucker cap. Fortunately, Rob was wearing none of these. Although he tended the charcoal starter and fed Miller Lite and wood chips into the smoker like a real pro.

Tonight, we truly enjoyed the fruits of his labor: the Mooth house specialty: Smoked Chicken Risotto with Smoked Onions, Peas and Tarragon. Delish!

The smoked pasta is a recipe that comes from a cookbook that we've had forever: it's a ridiculous combination of cooked fettuccine, fontina, parmesan, wine, chopped parsley and cumin seeds. You toss the whole lot together, dump it into a foil tray of your own making and set it on the smoker for a half hour or so until it all gets this gooey, smokey, delicious character. The perfect foil for grilled or smoked seafood. Unusual, but really memorable.

cold-weather food.

Seems kind of strange (almost disheartening) to think of April as hearty-food weather, but there you have it. Rob found the perfect recipe for 35 degrees and rainy: A Basque-style chicken and chorizo ragout from one of our favorites, the Jimtown Store Cookbook. We roasted a chicken in the afternoon (its remains are in the stockpot now), then shredded the meat. We sauteed some chorizo, then a load of sliced onions and red peppers, poured in a glug of white wine and a can of diced organic tomatoes, then let the whole mess simmer for a bit. In went some Pimentón (a smoked paprika that's nicely spicy and wonderfully aromatic), salt, pepper and the chicken. A bowlful, plus a simple green salad, a wedge of crusty bread and Three Rings Shiraz, was the perfect foil for crappy weather. That, and thoughts of St. Bart's next weekend.

pizza.

It's a rare occasion that we have something at a restaurant and think, "Gee, we should make that at home." Like, I'll have a really fabulous roast chicken at, say, Jean Ro Bistro, and there's no way we could replicate it at home. Unless we unplugged the smoke detector, cranked the oven to 11 and figured, what the hell: we'll just burn the place down.

A visit to our favorite little California town, Healdsburg, offered up one of those "gee" restaurant dinners. On a visit a couple of years ago, we stopped into the Healdsburg Plaza Farms, a little storefront collective of local purveyors (including DaVero and Scharffen Berger). Tucked in the back was a mostly takeout joint called Bovolo. They dished up a pizza that we've made countless times since. Including tonight. Here goes:

Pizza with Prosciutto and Arugula
Pizza dough (we like Trader Joe's)
Grated Fontina (or, we like the Quattro Formaggio blend from TJ's)
Prosciutto
DaVero Meyer Lemon Olive Oil
Fresh cracked pepper
Arugula

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Roll out the dough and transfer to a baking sheet or pizza stone; bake for 10 minutes or so until lightly golden. Transfer crust to a baking sheet and remove from oven. Top with a drizzle of Meyer Lemon Olive Oil, a light coating of shredded cheese and a generous amount of cracked pepper. Return to oven for another few minutes until cheese is bubbly and starting to brown. Remove pizza from oven; top with prosciutto (torn into pieces). Top with a pile of arugula, then another drizzle of oil and more pepper.

There's no better pizza. No way.

fine dining.

Last night, we opted for comfort food on a cold night (and with Mom here for a visit, that seemed apropos). So we did a little three-course dinner: fettuccine alfredo (nothing more than Italian panna da cucina and freshly grated parmesan), then veal scallops with a lemon-caper pan sauce, finished off with a bit of Madisono's gelato (the hazelnut is to die for).

Panna da cucina is a wonder: packaged in a little aseptic box and shipped over from Italy, it's an incredibly dense cream for cooking (hence, the "da cucina"). It takes heat well and doesn't separate, and renders a perfectly smooth cream sauce. Bill introduced us to it in Tuscany, where we stirred it into sauteed broccoli and dumped it over pasta. We've also used it to make a pasta sauce with dried porcini and canned tomatoes. We've found it at Italian markets in New Jersey and in Pittsburgh, but it's tough to come by. Too bad. (Tho maybe it's for the best.)