Joel and I made a home-made pizza Friday night and it was really good. I had planned to make the pizza that Susanne Oakley gave recently in the Look Who’s Cookin’ column, but realized I had goat cheese on hand. Her recipe uses Roma tomatoes and mozzarella cheese.
Lisa McNeece
An online search for goat-cheese pizza led me to this recipe, and it was delicious.
Goat cheese is one of our favorite things and we have tried it in many recipes. This is one of the best:
Goat Cheese Pizza
10 oz. fully baked thin pizza crust
1/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic minced
3 cups (packed) baby spinach leaves (1-1/2 to 2 oz.)
1-1/2 cups thickly sliced mushrooms
1/2 cup drained roasted red peppers from jar, cut into thin strips
1/2 cup paper-thin red onion
8 large fresh basil leaves, cut into thin strips
5 ounce package of fresh goat cheese, crumbled
Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Place pizza crust on large baking sheet. Mix olive oil and garlic in bowl. Then brush 2 tablespoons on crust. Top with spinach leaves, then mushrooms, roasted red pepper, onion slices, basil and goat cheese. Drizzle with remaining olive oil.
Cook 10-13 minutes.
I will say right off the bat, that I don’t do raw onions or red onions of any kind. So I sauteed yellow onions until they were practically caramelized before putting them on pizza.
And, it’s pretty hard to crumble goat cheese. It’s just too creamy. We just pulled it apart with a fork and dropped it on pizza.
I finished the book – The Invention of Wings, and loved the first 2/3 of it. I kind of lost interest in the last portion, but still recommend it.
Up next– Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs. Quindlen’s books are quick reads and usually entertaining.
The granddaughters spent the night with us Saturday night, and it was one adventure after the other.
We took them to Oxford to eat Hibachi. It’s a great place to take kids, even two year old Ellie Kathryn. It’s loud with a lot of activity, and both girls love the food.
After dinner we stopped by a store to get a couple of things, and at the checkout, I heard Addi Claire say to Joel “what’s that?”
She was pointing to a slimline telephone hanging on a post by the register. Joel and I both looked at each other.
I guess she had never seen a phone like that.
Imagine growing up without ever dialing a rotary phone.
My grandmother had a rotary phone at her house in Bruce until she died. She kept a pencil by the phone to put in the holes for dialing.
When we got home from Oxford Saturday night, Addi Claire, Ellie Kathryn and I did some Play-Doh creating. Addi Claire was using a child size muffin pan to make cupcakes for us and pretended to cook them in the oven.
I didn’t think another thing about it until Sunday morning about 10 minutes after I asked Joel to pre-heat the oven for biscuits.
It’s hard to describe the smell of baking Play-Doh. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t pleasant either.
I made a deal with Sheriff Greg Pollan… if he would watch the television show Breaking Bad, which I was addicted to and he had never seen, that I would watch The Walking Dead, which he was addicted to that I had never seen.
We both got hooked. I will readily admit, that I can’t believe I watch Walking Dead, and that I like it.
I can’t watch a boxing match on tv. That’s just too brutal for me.
But I love this show. It’s about a zombie apocalypse and a group of unaffected humans trying to navigate their way to safety and to secure the basic essentials to survive.
It’s more about that group of people than the zombie walkers.
I’ve tried to get Joel interested, but not happening so far. If there is ten minutes of human drama, the second he walks in the room, it changes to a brutal zombie attack– every single time.
As of press time, we are trying our best to get the papers where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there, but none of us has control over the weather.
It does however seem to us here that it always happens on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The determining factor in a pretty snow and ice storm misery is electricity.
Having electricity makes all the difference in the world.
E-mail Lisa McNeece: lisamcneece@gmail.com follow her on twitter @lisamcneece