Kitchen Mojo

As you know, I love to cook. I like to stretch a little, and experiment. Last night I decided to make gnocchi with browned butter, fried sage lemon zest and Parmesan cheese. Well, I didn't put enough flour in the potato dough, so the gnocchi was to soft and doughy, even though it was cooked long enough. The seasoning was great, perfect in fact, but the texture was all wrong. I am so disappointed. It would not have been so bad, but the previous night, I made carbonara for XY11's birthday dinner. I made half again as much as I usually do, but I didn't make enough sauce for the pasta. I was looking at the pancetta and white wine mixture thinking, "I really have to add some pasta water to this so there is enough to coat all the pasta."

For some reason I didn't, so the carbonara was so bone dry, it was almost inedible. That was a rookie mistake, and while making a dish I could normally make in my sleep too! That was not the one that started it though. On Sunday, I made red sauce, and eggplant Parmigiana. I salted the eggplant to draw out the bitter juices, and I forgot to rinse the salt off. The final dish was so salty it made my mouth hurt. Every other element of the dish was great. The sauce came out well, the eggplant was sliced nice and thin, the cheese was browned. It looked perfect, and tasted like a practical joke.

Tonight, I redeemed myself. Roser and I were kicking it upstairs. My brother and sister-in-law took the older three kids to the mall, and XX5 was watching Little Bear. We were relaxing and started talking about dinner.

"Let's make homemade pizza," Roser suggested. When we make pizza we generally do a barbecue chicken pizza with teeny tiny onion straws made from scratch. It tastes great but didn't appeal to me.

"Let's make a steak and Gorgonzola pizza with caramelized onions," I countered.

"That sounds good," he said, "But I was thinking we would make two. What should the other one be?"

We decided on a roasted vegetable one. My brother and sister-in-law were back and hanging out while Roser and I cooked. There was a lot of prep work for the pizzas. I made a light tomato sauce and roasted asparagus, mushrooms, red pepper and grape tomatoes for the veggie pizza. I started sauteing the onions for the steak pizza. I wanted them to have plenty of time to break down and get silky. If you do them too quickly they get hard and possibly burnt. Roser grilled a steak while I reduced cream for the sauce. I added some of the Gorgonzola cheese to the reduced heavy cream for the sauce, and I saved some to sprinkle on the pizza. We used prepared pizza dough. It's raw and you stretch it out yourself. The pizzas both came out very good. The onions were very dark brown, and so sweet they reminded me of sun dried tomatoes. The Gorgonzola cheese was just tangy and earthy enough to assert itself without overpowering everything else. the veggie pizza was delicious too, although next time I will let the veggies sit in a colander after I roast them so the pizza is not at all soggy.

I feel like I have my kitchen mojo back. Tomorrow family is coming over to help celebrate XY11's birthday. I hope I can still cook tomorrow.