Recipes

I was shooting a scene for a commercial recently on a sidewalk in Beverly Hills.  Between set ups, I wandered into a juice bar and found a little jar of spicy Mediterranean pistachios sitting on the counter.  I bought them as a snack, but as soon as I tasted them, I thought “Pizza”!  These would make a great option for a pepperoni-like vegetarian pizza.  Pistachios add a nice crunch that…Read More…

Happy New Year! This is my first belated post in this calendar year we’ve now entered. 2014!  It can be a wonderful thing to start into a new year.  There are all of our hopes and dreams before us. Yet it’s also bittersweet because we are leaving behind yet another moment of our lives, or a measure of time. Time seems to move faster and faster as we get older….Read More…

My father-in-law is a hunter and I’m lucky enough that on our last trip up to his place for Thanksgiving he sent me home with some “fresh” Spicy Italian Venison Sausage he and a friend made up after a recently successful hunt. When I got home I started thinking about how to use some of the sausage to make some pizza. I wanted to make something that sort of celebrated…Read More…

“Lions Tigers and Bears!” Oh my, this turned out to be a great pizza!  Take a walk with me down the wood fire brick road. I had some Brussels sprouts sitting in a bowl on the counter that we hadn’t gotten around to cooking and I figured I better do something with them before I had to send them on their way.  I pulled a dough from the freezer and…Read More…

I’ve made a number of pizzas over the years with seafood.  I like the uniqueness of how seafood blends and stands out as a topping on a pizza. When you do it right, shrimps on a pizza literally snap when you bite them, and that’s a good thing!  Clams are right at home on a pizza.  After all, what do you do when eating steamers?  You sop up the sauce…Read More…

Oh my god!  I found the most amazing vegetable!  I don’t think anyone knows about it.  They are these little bulbs called Brussels Sprouts and I’m the first one to ever think of cooking them and eating them. Ok, maybe not the first. Boy are these things the hot item these days.  I bet they run out of favor soon because they seem to have exploded so big as THE…Read More…

What’s a pizza roll? If you fold a pizza it’s called a calzone.  If you roll it up, it’s a stromboli.  I’ve seen something in between simply called a sausage roll.  I found out recently when breaking in my new wood fired oven and learning to use a metal pizza peel that what starts out as a pizza may end up flipping over while going in and end up coming…Read More…

I’m in the middle of the beginning of a journey that started quite a while ago.  That’s a mouthful, but believe it or not it’s true!  I just got a Primavera 60 from Forno Bravo and I am beginning to chronicle my tales of learning how to drive this new oven.  I recently posted Part I of my wood fired oven journey (see a few posts below). But…. “Stop the…Read More…

The perfect piece of fish!   Fresh piece of Yellowtail Sea Salt A little Pepper Chopped Garlic Olive Oil Fresh Squeezed Lemon Juice Fire Smoke Timing   Perfection is not easy and once achieved is no longer perfection because it seems there is always something better coming.  That’s interesting to think about. Have you ever seen the most beautiful girl you thought you had ever seen in your life?  How…Read More…

Quite literally, this dough truly is a brew in Germania!  I’m “working on” a keg of Firestone Double Barrel Ale.  I’ve had it a while and been too busy to use it up!  No time for friends to come help me get to the bottom of this keg. So, I thought I’d draw a pint or two and also use it in my Germania Flour blend from Central Milling. I…Read More…