Pizza Topping - Spinach, Pesto, Feta, Calamata

This is a vegetarian pizza that doesn't need a name like Guenevere's Garden, Veggie Medley or Southeast Engine Delight to lure you from it's carnivorous cousins. And, it's not soggy like many veggie pizzas. The key to success is enough corn meal on the pizza peel to enable the movement of the dough and some architectural savvy to manage a cascade of olives and cheese when transferring the pizza to the stone. Like constructing a city on land fill, this could be added to your resume if applying for Civil Engineering jobs.

Above: 10 oz. bag of spinach, you can do better if you have a garden, jar of homemade pesto, kalamata olives without pits (you can use olives with pits if you warn people), block of feta (check the per/pound price as sometimes crumbled feta is actually cheaper than blocks).


Ingredients
1 pkg (10 ounces) fresh spinach
1 block feta - crumble up at least a cup.
Pesto (fresh or a jar) - you'll probably use about a half cup
Kalamata olives - at least a cup

Process
Make the Pizzer Dough and shape a 14" pizza on your pizza peel COVERED WITH A HEALTHY LAYER OF CORN MEAL or, learn the hard way.

Spread a couple of big globs of pesto across the surface of the dough. I used twice what's pictured here. It doesn't need to be a solid floor of pesto but you can get away with more pesto than tomato sauce because it's not watery.

Chop up the spinach into chunks and pile that over the pesto. This is a spinach mountain to which my photo does no justice. You should be afraid when you imagine trying to move it.

Ready the feta. 

Sprinkle the crumbled cheese over the spinach hill and then add olives. Haaaaah!. You probably just did this and half the olives ended up on the floor. Wipe them off and place them one at a time in cozy little spinach pockets so they have a chance of staying part of the monument when the big move happens.

Heavily laden, unstable and ready to launch. 

Give the pizza a little jolt to confirm that you have movement - stay below Richter 3.0. You can go higher if your building structure is sound. If not, make a Calzone.

Above: small fallout (1 spinach leave, two feta crumbles) after a successful jolt event.

Above: Disinterested, unhygienic onlooker against a backdrop of rotting parsley and never used garlic chives cannibalizing a leg bone of similar genus. 

Pizza slid into the oven. If you end up with a few crumbs of feta on the stone, I'd suggest brushing them off with a tool. Don't be stupid and think you can pick them off quickly with your hands (like I did). 

When the crust is golden, pull it out -- this task is much easier as the spinach has sagged and the feta has welded the olives in place.

Final result.

Sushi Party Postmortem

Coming as soon as I finish the dishes....

Sushi - start here

Back in the 80s, Bill Scott and Aleksey Novicov invited me to join them at a friend's sushi party. Bill decided we should dress as the Kami-Kazi pilots who destroyed the USS Arizona. Not being up on my history, I wasn't burdened by the insensitivity of our statement.

Bill purchased three disposable white painting jumpsuits which we adorned with war slogans and topped off with head gear - rolled up bandannas with Kanji on them. Having lived in Japan when I was 12, I was appointed translator and trained my co-pilots to speak English with bad Japanese accents. We maintained these accents throughout the evening. It might be necessary to point out that there was an enormous amount of pre-flight gin consumed.

We made our dramatic entrance. Once the novelty of our joke ran out and the delta of our collective drunkenness became apparent we were more or less shunned. Perhaps strategically to draw us into another room, the hosts, Bill and Kathy Wright, set up Blade Runner on an endless loop substituting the sound track with popular Japanese music. I was riveted. I do recall the sushi was meticulously prepared - extraordinary in fact. I don't recall eating, or much else about that evening.

Since Bill and Kathy managed to make masterpieces of everything they tackled, I just assumed sushi was another one of those impossible projects. This view was confirmed by another sushi party I attended years later where the rice was too hot, the fish too fishy, and the presentation too frumpy.

Fast forward to Troy's son's birthday present last October -- a Sushi Kit. I was cynical about the results but compliant. It took a few attempts at the rice but I was astonished that we could produce something really good without props or massive amounts of gin. We did preserve the bad accents.

(I just ran this story by Bill Scott who has an alternate and truer version. I will be appending this shortly - if at least to provide a gestalt of the damage that large quantities of gin will have on historical accuracy but not on good times.)

Among the most important things; getting the rice right.

This Sushi section has a few parts:

First, Sushi Ingredients and Tools
Second, Sushi Rice
Third, Sushi Ingredient Preparations and Rolls

Sushi Ingredient Preparation and Rolls

PREPARATION
Try to keep everything very cold. Since most things I buy are frozen they have a head start.

Vegetables
For sushi rolls, many cylindrical items are reduced to match sticks, or julienned. You might notice that the examples in the photos have ended up looking more like Popsicle sticks. This is to demonstrate the wide range of tolerance.

Carrots -try to julienne these.
Cucumbers - cut in 3" sections, cut in half, scrape out the seedy middle with a small spoon and then julienne. You can peel them first if you don't want the crunchy skin.
Takuan - or Japanese horseradish pickle can be julienned.
Avacado cut in strips - see How to slice an avocado

Fish
Typically slice the fish in thin slices, maybe 1/4 inch - the geometry really depends on how you end up using it. If you're draping it over a chunk of rice, then it will want to be more substantial. Below: Kevin cutting tuna.

Salmon; peel off the skin with a sharp knife leaving the skin intact. There might be a little collateral meat stuck to the skin - that's fine. Find someone who's got a grill going and place the salmon, skin down on the grill. Don't wander off which you will be tempted to do. To get the skin crispy it has to really brown, almost blacken which takes long enough for you to lose interest. If you make it to that point, bring the salmon in and let it cool enough to, you guessed it, julienne.

Eel; if the eel is already prepared just slice it into sections. If it's not, you're on your own.

Spicy Mayo
Take a glob of mayo and squirt in some Srirachi sauce, keep going until the heat is the right level. The color I like it is dark pink with is on the hot side.

Wasabi
If you get the powder, cut open the top and pretend to take a sniff. Hand it to someone you select and ask them if it smells okay. You won't see them for minutes. Meanwhile, pour out a few tablespoons of the powder in a small bowl and add what appears to be an equal amount of water. Once you start mixing it up you'll have a better idea if it was equal or not. It's texture should resemble dry peanut butter. Add more water or more powder until you either end up with the right ratio or so much wasabi you will have to make sushi for months. Your friend should be back by now, and there will be retaliation. The wasabi sniffing set up is an undocumented kitchen fail, but it's too good to miss.

Famous Wasabi sniffers
Bill Scott's steak arrived with a stainless steel ramekin filled with wasabi. There were three of us at the table I think. He dared himself to eat the whole bit of wasabi at once.  Then he accepted his dare. We didn't see Bill until well into dessert. At least that's how I remember it.

MAKING SUSHI ROLLS

NORI SIDE OUT
Put a bowl of cold water near where you are working. This is good for getting rice unglued and gluing nori.

Lay the sushi mat on a cutting board. On top of the matt put down a sheet of Nori.

Spoon out a few globs of rice, you'll get the hang of how much to put on after you mess up a couple.
The rice is extremely sticky; I use the back of a spoon dipped in water to smooth out the rice. The layer of rice should be thin and you should leave a section (about 3/4 inch) at the far end without any rice.

Now lay down your ingredients - somewhere near the middle. The idea is to put enough stuff in to fill out the roll but not too much so the roll won't close. I have some random theme going here, avocado slices, cucumbers, dobs of wasabi, carrots... you can put down strips of tuna, eel, or other fish if you want.

It was looking lonely so I added little alien fingers (enoki mushrooms) and sprinkled on some sesame seeds.

Now it's time to roll it up. Using the matt, bend the front edge up to make the front rice meet the back rice. You will leave that uncoated 3/4 inch of nori sticking out.

 

 With the roll sitting there, wipe water over that 3/4 inch strip.

The watered strip should act like an envelope seal. Continue rolling the roll over the wet strip to glue it to the rest of the roll - lift up the matt so it's not in the way of the join.

 

Now square it up. Squeeze it lightly to give it a square shape. Obviously you don't have to make them all square, you can keep them round. This demo is square.

You may think cutting them is easy but this is made tricky by the stickiness of the rice. Even a sharp knife gets bogged down and crushes your perfect roll. Keep the knife wet with cold water. If it's slow going, wet the knife before every cut. You can also try a serrated knife. Just be careful not to saw too hard. Use a light touch. We were having a bad knife day and decided our sharpener had reached it's end of life.

 

Arrange your sushi artistically on a plate, sprinkle on some more sesame seeds. 

RICE SIDE OUT


I've not done one of these. Kevin made a few and they were great. I have some photos of that adventure.

First put the rice down on the nori as before. Leaving a little strip rice-less.

Cover the rice side with plastic wrap.

 Cover the plastic wrap with the matt and flip the whole thing over.

 

You have a matt layer, plastic, rice, nori.

 

Now fill it with stuff. I wandered away during this phase but I think he did what I did above. 

Roll it up and pull off the plastic. 

I said it looked like an inverted skunk. Kevin claims that even the fanciest sushi joints leave a little dark strip of nori. 

Sprinkle the rice with black sesame seeds. Cut it up carefully.

SOME SUSHI COMBINATIONS

Spicy mayo with strips of salmon skin and tuna.

Cucumber, wasabi, tuna.

Eel, cucumber, carrot

Some of Shana's artwork: Avocado, spicy mayo, tuna, imitation crab

 

Here's a few hours worth of work by five people sharing two sushi matts.

The soup was a mistake. Nobody was hungry but the sushi was good for breakfast.

Sushi chefs Shana, Quin, Tris, Troy, Kevin

Sushi Ingredients and Tools

If you want the weirder stuff in your sushi, you will need access to an Asian market. You're not dead in the water if you have no Asian market within a day's drive - a higher-end supermarket with a good fish department (one you can't smell from seven feet away) will do. You should be able to pick up the sushi equipment in a kitchen store.

Going with the Asian market scenario, look deeply in the freezer section. They hide unusual plant and fish remains there. We have a shop called Lo's Seafood near us. It's my favorite food store. Kevin Hamer, who came to our sushi dinner last night with his fiance Shana, noted that the layout of the Lo's market progresses from Not Scary to Scary. Where Not Scary stuff, located at the front of the store, includes things like candied peanuts, savory snacks, interesting sodas, rice and fruit gums. However, as you penetrate the store, ingredient recognition quickly deteriorates until you encounter the farthest and lowest freezer - not unlike the ocean bottom where you might find creatures that have never seen sunlight or Americans. This is the Scary section.

The sushi related ingredients were almost half way between Not Scary and Scary. I found thinly slice frozen octopus, convenient and reasonably priced frozen chunks of yellow fin tuna, eel already barbecued and filleted, thin sliced cuttle fish (aka squid), and frozen imitation crab. The essential sushi ingredients such as wasabi, toasted nori, diakon pickles, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame seeds were all in the vicinity.

The toppings and fillings category really gets exponential; it's the total number of ingredients assembled in every possible combination divided by degrees of individual squeamishness. So, basically get what you like to eat - or get what you like to make and like what you make to eat. Or, as Troy completed; get what you'd like to watch other people eat.

I've put together a shopping list for the Asian store and the American store. If you see things on the American list at the Asian store, get them at the Asian store. It's politically correct to support these guys in spite of the fact that they are cheaper and better.


SHOPPING LISTS


Asian market shopping list (with wiki links in separate pages):

Sushi basics
Toasted Nori - (Nori is the green seaweed square, check for toasted, it has a nice taste)
Wasabi - ("Japanese horseradish" - the green paste that looks but doesn't taste like green tea ice cream) Powder is cheap and lasts a long time but you end up with a lot of it
Sushi Rice - Kokuho is a common brand
Soy Sauce - Kikoman is my staple (be careful of crappy soy sauce, the better the soy sauce the fewer the ingredients - Kikoman has water, wheat, soybeans, salt, okay and some sodium benzoate).
Takuan - (diakon pickle) these are usually unnaturally yellow
Pickled Ginger or Gari, often unnaturally pink
Rice Vinegar - Plain if you want to follow the recipe for making sushi vinegar, or seasoned which is already sweetened and can be used directly.
Sriracha Chili Sauce - For making spicy mayo and to use in general.
Black sesame seeds - for aesthetics, taste, crunch

Featured below: bag of wasabi powder, mostly empty bag of sesame seeds, kikoman sauce decanter, rice vinegar, toasted nori. Lower photo: mostly empty bottle of Srirachi Sauce

 

 

Sushi toppings and fillings - whatever you're willing to eat or can find:
Yellow fin tuna
Eel
Octopus
Squid
Imitation crab
Shrimp
Spring onions
Funny looking mushrooms
etc...

Sushi equipment (you may need to get these in a Kitchen supply store)

Rice paddle - you probably don't need this but it's the cutest thing
Sushi mat - we decided that each guest should have one (see sushi party post-mortem)

Rice cooker - you should own one of these anyway
It seems these cookers are inexpensive and ubiquitous these days. I've owned my rice cooker for 18 years. I saw some at Walmart for $30 which look a lot like mine. Mine is a "National" which I think is synonymous with Panasonic. I went to a web site that sells National brand rice cookers and noticed that they think the Walmart rice cookers suck. In fact, they claim any cookers that look like mine are outdated, dysfunctional and being dumped on the American market. The new ones look like Japanese cartoons. If anyone has any recent experience with rice cookers, please comment. Mine holds about 5 cups of rice which has always turned out to be fine.

American (non-Asian) Supermarket shopping list:
Regular supermarkets with good fish departments will provide you with most of the remaining ingredients for sushi rolls. You may want to tell the fish vendor that you are planning on eating the fish raw. That may cause him or her to come clean on the freshness.

Avocados (this is where you discover you should have started this project four days ago - usually there are no ripe avocados)
Carrots
European type cucumber  the thin really long ones that seem always to come shrink wrapped)
Mayo (if you're doing the spicy mayo thing)
Salmon (get a center section, not the tapering end part, with the skin on)
Spring onions if not available at the Asian store

Next step: Sushi Rice

How to slice an Avocado

I stumbled on this from cutting mangos. Actually they don't have much in common.

Slice the avocado longitudinally and pop out the seed. If you want to exhibit a kitchen fail, impale the seed with the tip of a sharp knife and flick.

Score thin slices length wise on one half of the avocado - obviously not cutting hard enough to add your palm to the mix.

Take a large spoon and loosen the slices while scooping out the lot.

Sushi Rice

Sushi Rice
Shopping List
Sushi Rice - Kokuho Brand if it's around
Rice vinegar
Sugar
Salt

Notable Tools I ended up using
Rice cooker
Strainer
Saucepan
Big glass casserole dish (11 x 13)
little wooden rice paddle (comes in most sushi kits)
Clean damp cloth

Quantity
1/2 of what you'd need to feed four people.

The recipe:
2 cups sushi rice
2 cups plus 3 ounces (6 Tablespoons) cold water
1/2 cup Sushi vinegar

Sushi vinegar

1 cup rice vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons salt

In a sauce pan add the rice vinegar, sugar and salt. Turn heat on low and stir until the sugar and salt is dissolved. Pour into a non-metal container and let it cool to room temp. You will have plenty of time for it to cool because you will be spending the next fifteen minutes washing rice.

 

 

The rice part
Wash rice until the rince water becomes clear. I found a huge strainer and set it in a big bowl letting the water fill up while shaking the rise around, then lifting out the strainer of rice and dumping the water. There is an inordinate amount of rinsing involved. I lost patience when, after the fifth rinse, the water still looked milky. Dedicate this job to someone who is stoned.

When the rice is cleaned, put it in the rice cooker and add the cold water. Measure this water accurately, it will give you one less thing to blame if it doesn't come out right.

After the cooker says the rice is done, let it sit covered for another ten minutes. Not more, not less. (that's superstition)

Dump the rice into the glass baking dish. Spread it out with a paddle. It will be steaming. Find someone to wave a sheet of cardboard, or a Japanese fan, if you have one, over the rice. I'm not kidding. The rice needs to cool quickly while you spread it out. The stoned person might be good for this job too. With the rice spread out in the glass dish, drizzle your prepared sushi vinegar over the surface and integrate it with the paddle using a chopping and sliding motion. Don't mush the rice, just cut it in and kind of toss it to get the vinegar distributed.

 

 

(young man in unaltered state above waving sushi cookbook as fan while vinegar is "chopped" into rice) 

Cover the rice with a clean wet cloth and let it sit at least until it's room temperature (about 15 minutes?). You probably won't be using it right away since there is so much chopping and slicing to do. Just leave the rice covered with the cloth and at room temperature until your ready to assemble.

Next step: Sushi Ingredient Preparation and the Making of sushi rolls.

Tomato sauce - Pizza or Pasta Sauce

You can always buy a jar of pasta sauce and it will be faster and probably cheaper than making it yourself but it will never have that amazing tang of homemade. Even if the only tomatoes you can buy are crappy hothouse tomatoes that never saw a day of sun in their lives, they still taste better than sauce that's canned or bottled. Something about the heat involved with the processing that takes away this special flavor. (Can one of you chemists help me out here).

All sauce recipes take time. Not so much in the assembly of ingredients but simmering on a low heat for a couple of hours kind of time. Use a heavy pot (dutch oven) and set the heat on low. Careful when you stir it which you should do every now and then; molten pockets of tomato seem to become excited by this and spew lava.


Critical Equipment
Dutch oven or deep heavy pot


Key to Success
Low simmer for hours, stirring now and then

Quantity
Too much for one pizza. If you are only going to use this for pizza, freeze it. It will frighten you how easy it is to forget about a jar of sauce and what eventually ends up living in it. However, if you plan to make pasta, you will use this up in a day or so.

Tomato Sauce
6 fresh tomatoes - chopped
6 cloves garlic- pressed
1 big can tomato puree
1/2 can chicken consume. Or use a bouillon cube, Vegetable if you want and six ounces of boiling water.
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon marjoram
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 onion chopped finely - see How to chop an onion

Chop tomatoes:

 

  

Saute onion and garlic until soft in hot oil.

 

 

Add the rest of the ingredients.

 

 

Cook slowly for hours until thick. Stir off and on. If the heat is low and the pan is thick it shouldn't burn. Keep the heat low enough that the tomato lava doesn't splatter your pristine and clutter free stove.

 

See the Pizzer Dough recipe for this sauce in action.