success

So here’s my first salad. It’s spinach topped with strawberries, gorgonzola, and candied pecans with a champagne vinaigrette.

It’s good, but not good enough to convert me into a regular leaf-eater. The homemade dressing was spicier than I’d anticipated, maybe because I subbed white wine vinegar for champagne vinegar and went with Dijon when I couldn’t find spicy apricot mustard. Joe wouldn’t try any because of the gorgonzola.

The bigger success was my homemade pizza. I’m not a big cheese person (I am actually mildly lactose intolerant), but we’ve been on a provolone kick for a while. This week, I got some from Wegman’s that was purely inedible. The stuff wasn’t cheap, though, so I was determined to figure out a way to eat it. I found a recipe for a provolone and mushroom pizza—yum.

Making the dough was actually pretty easy, even though I got cake yeast instead of dry. I made Joe his own pie to top, but we had no tomato sauce or mozzarella, so we improvised with chunky spaghetti sauce, garlic and fresh basil.

His margherita style pie was decent, but the mushroom was out of this world. I swear it may be the best pizza I’ve ever had. The secret is this little bottle:

Black truffle oil. You finish the pie with a little of this and some oregano. It’s seriously a miracle ingredient, but it’s expensive (eight bucks for this little bottle) and has more calories per teaspoon than a truckload of bacon. But it makes you seem like a freaking genius in the kitchen. I made Joe try a slice and actually got a compliment out of my picky eater.

I think we’ll have a make-your-own pie night again soon. I’m curious to see what Belle thinks. And if she’ll want chicken nuggets as her topping.