Recipe: Pizza Dough (baked on the barbeque!)

The weather is looking good (20 degrees+ from here on in!) and we have neighbours that cook everything on the barbeque. If you are outside enjoying the weather, you are also smelling their dinner. So we decided to top their hamburgers last weekend with pizza on the barbeque. We went with our standard pizza dough recipe with a few twists.

Besides getting that slightly charred thin crust, I love pizzas off of pizza stones (or ideally from real pizza ovens) for that grainy flour texture on the bottom of the pizza and the sound of the paddle removing it from the stone. It reminds me of my parent’s restaurant, sold years ago now, where pizzas came fast and furious from the ovens. There’s something about the smell and sounds of pizza straight from the pizza oven that is ingrained in my memory and heart. Trying out our new pizza stone on the barbeque brought back memories and brought the neighbours over to ask what we were cooking!

Pizza Dough
40 grams of yeast (or 2 packages of instant yeast)
1 cup of lukewarm water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3 cups flour (plus extra for dusting)
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for rising process)

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Eating Italian: our food groups and food pyramid

It’s time to forget the Canadian food groups and follow something Italian!

After getting married last year, a Calabrese-Pugliese-Sciliano wedding, I’ve done my fair share of eating. It’s been an all-Italian free-for-all, starting with antipasto buffets and ending in a sausage and sopressata making fest this last weekend. It’s time for a diet. But I still want to eat Italian!

My largest problem with dieting has always been what prescribed diets want you to eat. I have no desire for cottage cheese or bananas or some bland chicken breast. I still want Italian food – in my own way. I was trying to create a healthy menu for this week and I remembered when I was young being taught the “Canada Food Guide”, particularly the 1980s version. It told you how much to eat of all the food groups. Great. Except the food groups didn’t include taralli, polenta, figs, tomato sauce (is that considered a vegetable serving?), ricotta or anything else recognizable. I hated that. Just like we all hated having the smelly mortadella sandwich at school when everyone else had peanut butter.

Searching for the food pyramid or food groups these days shows just how far thinking in diets has come. There’s an Italian Food Pyramid (and an Indian one, Mexican and so on.) Finally something I can relate to! It inspired me to put a nice looking one together – for all those young Italian-Canadians learning about food groups, this is for you! Polenta and foccaccia for grains, figs and grapes for fruits, artichokes and rapini for veges, parmesan and calamari for proteins. Did I miss anything integral? Let me know in the comments!

(images are courtesy of various sources from depositphoto.com)

Mini meatball lasgana Sunday

Nearly every Italian-Canadian I follow on Twitter has pics of their Sunday dinners (at Nonna’s or elsewhere)…so here’s mine. Mini meatballs for lasagna making today.

Cooking Sunday

It was cooking/baking Sunday on the weekend! What you are looking at is pasta dough, gnocchi dough and canoli dough. Which is which?

New books – new thoughts

This year was the first time in many years (thank you paid employment) that I was able to attend Toronto’s Word on the Street. I’ve never had that weekend off. This annual festival of books, magazines, readers, writers and general literary folk has long been calling my name – I love to read and most of all, I love a good deal on a book.

Quite by accident I came out with the two books above only to realize on the way home that they are exactly what I’ve been about all year. I didn’t buy them with that purpose, they were just the two I loved on the table in front of me, but they are two things that this blog is all about.

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Lidia’s right

I just finished reading Karen von Hahn’s article about Lidia Bastianich in the Toronto Star and couldn’t help feeling even closer to the kindly woman I have taken to watching on TV so often.

In the article, Lidia talks about our connection to food and why there is a North American fascination with Italy. Among the things she says that rings true to me is the how she learned to make everything from the land and by hand. It makes such a difference in our appreciation of food and our enjoyment of others. Here’s a sampling from the article.

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