Recipe #24: Potato Leek Pizza

Recipe: Potato Leek Pizza
Source: Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 45 min (if you have a ready pizza crust)
Ease: 6
Taste: 7
Leftover Value: 4
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

When I must face vegetables like leeks, I always wonder who it was that first decided that a leek was food.  Who was it that observed this strange green plant and imagined that it might be worth eating?  And who later realized that it was a great flavor inducer for meals like soup and apparently pizza, too?

I'm pretty sure if I belonged to the people of the ancient days, the guinea pigs as I like to call them, I would have been one who had a very limited diet.  I would have refused to try something different for fear that it would be inedible and either taste horrible or kill me.

That said, the star of this meal is the leek.  A strange, seemingly worthless bunch of green.  The hidden star, however, is the potato.  Hubby didn't even realize there were potatoes on the pizza until he was half way through his first slice.

I, however, was more excited about the bacon.

Bacon on pizza...can life get any better?

The reason I gave this pizza a '6' for ease is because there are a lot of prep steps.  The leeks need to be sliced and fried, the bacon needs to be fried then chopped, the potatoes need to be sliced (into thin slices with a mandoline), the cheeses need to be sliced, shredded, and crumbled, and that doesn't even include making the pizza crust and pressing it into the pan.  

Needless to say, it's a lot of work! 

Though red potatoes are my favorite, I went with the Yukon gold ones because that was what I had on hand.  I scrubbed the five small potatoes the recipe called for, but only needed two to cover the dough, so that is something to watch for with this recipe.  There is nothing worse that scrubbing down a potato that isn't going to be used, do you know what I mean?

If you don't, you must be much better at planning and organizing than I am.

Good for you.

Slicing the potatoes should be saved for last to prevent them from turning color.  

Though I doubt I'll ever have interest to seek out a recipe with leeks in it again, I will admit they had a very appealing aroma as I fried them in the pan and then scattered them on top of the cheese.

Then again, so did the bacon.  I had to restrain myself from nibbling the especially crunchy looking pieces.

From this pizza and this recipe that you might remember from summer, I have determined that I do not prefer goat cheese.  It isn't unbearable, but it isn't a flavor which I prefer.  It is a little too strong for me and I always find in recipes that call for it, I wish in the end that I had used half the amount called for. 

Parmesan, on the other hand, I can never have enough of.

More than likely, I won't make this recipe again, but I would certainly eat it again.  Reason being, it was simply too much work for pizza only.  I might even say it falls into the fried chicken category.  I'd love to eat a gourmet pizza of this sort, but I don't find the need to spend my own time making it.  I'd rather pay for it.

Or have a good friend cook it for me.

However, I do think I will experiment in the future with potatoes on my pizza, sans leeks, sans goat cheese, perhaps with the addition of ground beef and a white or pesto sauce.

Recipe #23: Rib-eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce

Recipe: Rib-Eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 30 minutes
Ease: 2
Taste: 10
Leftover Value: No leftovers!
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

Confession time.  It has been ten days since my last post.  No, I have not given up on my recipe challenge.  Yes, my new job has occupied some of my time and energy.

Have no fear, I have still been keeping up with cooking, but the blogging piece has had to sit on the back burner in order to keep myself from spiraling out of control into a stress tornado.

When I mentioned to Hubby that I hadn't posted recently this was his response, "What? You had better. I'm not eating all these strange recipes for you to not be blogging about them."

Ah, I love my husband.

I think it might have been the cheese grits, or the recent Sherried Tomato Soup* from which this response was derived.

*Coming soon!

I'm almost half way through and I have learned so much during this challenge.  I've learned that though I love reading what Pioneer Woman has to say about each step in a recipe, when I'm in the midst of cooking a recipe the lengthiness of her descriptions can aggravate me.

I'm also learning a lot about meat.

If ever I were to write a recipe book, I would make sure that the only meats I used were ones that all supermarkets carry, and ones that the at-home-chef would never need to awkwardly search through the meat section for only in the end to convince herself that such a meat does not exist.

Also, meats that don't break the bank.

At my local Shop Rite, the only option I had for rib-eye steaks was a package of three steaks priced at $65 that looked as though they had been portioned for giants.  I couldn't reason making such a purchase, even in the name of a most important recipe challenge, so I bought these:

They were boneless so, as I stood in the meat aisle confused and wanting desperately to be back home, I assumed since the description included the word "rib" that these would count.

*Note: I learned afterwards that though we typically connect bone-in steaks with rib-eye, originally the term rib eye meant the center best portion of the rib steak, without the bone.

Steak alone is perfect.  Steak with cream sauce is like turkey with gravy.  It just makes things better.

The cream sauce is super simple.  Onions, butter, whiskey, broth, seasoning,and light cream.

See, this recipe is slightly health conscious.  She could have used heavy cream.  But instead, she used light cream.  Still delicious, and slightly calorie conserving.

My favorite part of this recipe is that it can be made in under thirty minutes--that is always a plus.  The only thing that could make it better is if somehow the meat and the sauce could be made in the same pan.  

I suppose if the steaks were made before the cream sauce, the sauce could then be made in the same pan the steaks were fried in.

But of course, then you would have to deal with where to keep the steaks while the sauce was being made.

It's a lot to think about for the sake of using one less pan.

The steak was perfect.  I needed to cook it a lot longer than she said to, and this is not because I am against medium rare.  Hubby always orders medium rare, while I lean more towards medium.  However, following PW's suggestion of 3 to 4 minutes on each side (for a medium rare thick steak, she says) resulted in steaks that were rare rather than medium rare. 

The only thing I would change about this recipe is that I would double the cream sauce.  This is always the case for me regarding sauces.  There can never be too much.  I want the sauce to be an ocean covering my plate, unifying my side dishes with my meat.

Yum.

Recipe #22: Meatloaf

Recipe: Meatloaf
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 15 min
Ease: 2
Taste: 10
Leftover Value: 10
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

I want you to take all your preconceived notions about meatloaf and throw them to the wind.

I have never taken issue with meatloaf.  This is probably because my mom always served it with mashed potatoes.  There was a certain point in time where I only wanted to eat mashed potatoes.  Thank goodness my second grade teacher convinced me that eating only mashed potatoes all the time wouldn't be a very intelligent choice.

Otherwise, I would have turned into a potato.

I still serve meatloaf with mashed potatoes because there will never be another way in my mind to serve meatloaf.*  

I knew this meatloaf was a winner when Hubby raved about it.  Until I made PW's meatloaf, Hubby wasn't as excited as I was for meatloaf dinner.  But now, well, it is in his top five favorite meal list.

*Except maybe with macaroni and cheese?  Oh boy, wouldn't that be adventurous?

First, and of utmost importance, is that you line the broiler pan (because everyone cooks their meatloaf on broiler pans, right?) with tin foil.  This will save on clean up later.

Another reason I love meatloaf---it's an easy meal.  I love a dish that can be made in one bowl.  That saves my head from spinning rapidly out of control as I look around my disheveled kitchen once dinner is finished.

Here is why I think Hubby really likes this meatloaf.  Are you ready?

Bacon!  How could any man resist a meatloaf laced with bacon?

Hubby, however, will claim the reason he loves this meatloaf is that the consistency is moister than most meatloaf.  He chalks this up to the fact that Parmesan is mixed in with the ground beef and breadcrumbs.

Here is my favorite part:

Perhaps a close second to my love for mashed potatoes growing up would be my love for ketchup (butter being the other condiment fighting for second place).  This ketchupy sauce has all the right things in it: ketchup, brown sugar, dry mustard, and hot sauce!  I love it.

Ketchup was a part of my meatloaf growing up, too.  At the last fifteen minutes of bake time my mom would pull the meatloaf out of the oven and slather it with ketchup. 

You might remember PW's Comfort Meatballs and how I said they reminded me of meatloaf.  This meatloaf is what came to mind as I ate the surprisingly delicious comfort meatballs.

This meatloaf is special to me, not only because it is delicious, not only because my Hubby loves it, but because I made it on the day I met my third sister-in-law.  My brother, Joel, brought Mallory over my house to introduce her to me just as Hubby and I had finished eating dinner.  I can't resist feeding people, so naturally, I offered her some of our leftovers.  She ate two servings and then we talked for three hours straight.  So, for now and always, I associate this meal with her.

Is that weird or heartwarming?  I'm not sure.

Recipe #21: Red Velvet Cake

Recipe: Red Velvet Cake
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks*
Time: 1 hr 10 min
Ease: 4
Taste: 9
Leftover Value: 9
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

*The recipe at this link is the same as the one in the book, only she makes it a sheet cake instead of a two layer cake.

This is the last recipe in The Pioneer Woman Cooks.  Though I love red velvet cake, this was my first time making this recipe for one reason alone: the recipe intimidated me.  For some reason, red velvet cake seemed to me a fried chicken type recipe--one that isn't worth the stress of making at home.  After making my very first red velvet cake, I am living proof that it isn't that bad.

Except when you're in the thick of it with measurements.  Don't you love when each dry ingredient uses a different sized measuring cup?

Oh, no?  You don't?

Me either.

The recipe calls for cake flour, but don't you dare go out and buy a box of that overpriced nonsense.  In my Vanilla Cake Batter Pancakes recipe I tell the simple way to make your own cake flour in less than two minutes.

Alright, confession time.

This was not red velvet cake, but rather, pink velvet cake.

Since the red dye isn't an element affecting the flavor of the cake, and since I only had .25 ounces on hand I refused to go out and purchase .75 more ounces simply to affect the color of my cake.

I did battle a little with whether or not this counted as an alteration to the recipe, but since I am also  the ultimate judge in the matter I ruled that it wasn't an alteration.

One problem I faced, which I'm claiming as my fault, was that the cakes ended up sticking a little to the pan.  This is more than likely due to the fact that I didn't take the cakes out of the pans after the 20 minute cooling period.  I was juggling a few things as I made the cakes, and the cakes ended up sitting in their prospective pans for closer to an hour.

Causing this to happen when I attempted to dump the first cake out:

Actually, it looked far worse and I may or may not have screamed my anger out to the floor of my kitchen.

Not one to be outsmarted by a silly pan, I pieced the broken parts of the cake back together and moved along as if nothing happened.

In the end, no one knew the difference.

I have to confess, I hate making cakes.  I love eating them, but making them doesn't excite me.  Usually around the icing part is when I remember that I hate making cakes.  Perhaps because there is so much hype now for creating cakes that are pieces of artwork rather than items that are going to be demolished by chomping teeth and salivating lips.

Sorry, I calls it like it is.

However, despite the flecks of pinkish red in the icing, I received a compliment on my icing job.

Shocking, I know.

As my sister-in-law, Kristina, ate her piece of cake, she commented on how she can never proportion icing correctly for a two-layer cake and marveled at how well I did.*

Then I told her that I often feel the same way too.  I'm thinking it's merely a matter of women's insecurities.

*The trick is to use a third of your icing.  Short of measuring everything out, eyeballing it is the best way to go.

\

I had to include this picture of how beautifully my brother cut the cake.  I'd say he's got a future in cake slicing, wouldn't you?

It took a little effort to adjust to Pink Velvet Cake, but we managed.  The cake was dense, making one of those slices a little difficult to finish in one sitting, but it was also moist throughout.  My favorite though was the cream cheese frosting.  It was, like most frosting, good enough to be eaten by the spoonful.

Cake?  Who said anything about cake.  I'm perfectly fine with my bowlful of cream cheese frosting.

Alright, that is a bit excessive.

Or is it?

Recipe #20: Tomato-Basil Pizza

Recipe: Tomato-Basil Pizza
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 20 minutes (if pizza crust is not made beforehand)
Ease: 4
Taste: 8
Leftover Value: 5
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer 

Pioneer Woman's pizza crust, you might remember, was recipe #13 where it was used to make calzones.  Delicious, delightful calzones.  I remembered having some issues in the past with PW's pizza crust but the challenge required me to remake even recipes that I had made before, so I erased my mind of all preconceived notions towards this dough and pressed onward.

The issue I had before with the dough was that once you get a hole in the dough, you are pretty much stuck with that hole unless you gather it all back into a ball and try again.

That's a bit annoying.

After I cautiously dealt with this issue, I remembered the next problem I had--the dough doesn't exactly fit a baking sheet, even though I use the same exact kind that PW uses.  I stretched it out as much as I could, but after five or ten minutes of negotiating tray space with dough, I grew bored.

I suppose since this is a variation of PW's pizza she didn't think measurements were necessary.  Again, I live for measurements.  Also, she uses prepared pesto, so don't fault me for not making my own.

Although, admittedly, I have already faulted myself.

Once the dough has been pressed to a size you are happy with, the hardest part is over.

And the fun can begin!

Since PW didn't say whether or not to use the entire jar of pesto, or what size to use, I might have gotten a little carried away with the pesto as I smeared it all over the dough.

But then again, it's pesto.  Can you ever have too much?

Do you know why I think I really loved this pizza?

Because it is Christmas colored!

Are you ready?  Only 46 days left!

The key to great homemade pizza is an oven set at 500 degrees.  Any lower and the crust of the dough will start to burn without achieving the perfect crispness to the underside.

This pizza was absolutely perfect.  It's a nice change from a typical tomato sauce and cheese pizza.  The only issue I experienced was this:

I'm not sure if oil from the excessive amount of pesto I used splattered out and caused this, or if it was due to buffalo chicken bites that were crisping on the rack above the pizza.

Regardless, the flavor was not affected and the pizza, and my buffalo chicken bites, were fabulous.

Recipe #17, #18, #19: Buttermilk Biscuits, Fried Chicken, and Cheese Grits

Recipe: Biscuits

Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Time: 40 minutes

Ease: 4

Taste: 9

Leftover Value: 7

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

Recipe: Fried chicken

Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Time: 9 hr 30 min--minimum

Ease: 6

Taste: 5

Leftover Value: 3 

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

Recipe: Cheese Grits

Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Time: 1 hour 10 minutes

Ease: 4

Taste: 2

Leftover Value: Did not save leftovers 

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain! 

As I press on through the cooking adventure that is this challenge, but also though the cooking challenge that is life, I'm continually adding to a list of foods-I-love-but-never-again-will-cook.  Fried chicken has just joined this list.

Hubby has been aching for me to make fried chicken ever since he first flipped through The Pioneer Woman Cooks and saw the recipe for fried chicken.  I always shy away from cooking recipes that involved massive amounts of oil for frying because: 1. It seems like such a waste to use all that oil for one recipe and 2. That's a lot of oil!  

But I knew it was inevitable that I would one day make fried chicken.

Since I am cooking my way through The Pioneer Woman Cooks, I decided to raise the crazy element a little more by also making her cheese grits and buttermilk biscuits on the day I chose to make her fried chicken.    

I made the biscuits before everything else so that I wouldn't have to think about them once I became consumed with rotating between dipping chicken into hot oil and taking it out.

A side recipe that I did not count in the 65 total that PW includes is for butter and honey which she serves with her buttermilk biscuits.  I will admit, my butter wasn't room temperature and I had to microwave it a little, so perhaps that affected it (which is more than obvious from the above picture).  Regardless, I'll stick with biscuits and regular salted butter.

The biscuits, however, were amazing.  Not only did they taste like the real deal southern style biscuit you would expect, but they were simple to make too.  I needed to add a little more buttermilk before I rolled them as they were too dry, but other than that they were a cinch.

Ultimately, there was nothing horribly wrong with the fried chicken.  The coating consisted of spices, flour, and a little buttermilk--which I found interesting.

However, since with this recipe I was working with a whole cut up fryer chicken, there was a lot of chicken to fry and some of the pieces were rather huge, making it difficult to gauge how long to keep it in the oil.

I did like that after frying the chicken PW bakes it in the oven for 15 minutes.  

If I was going to make PW's fried chicken again, I would let it fry two minutes longer per side, and then let it bake for five or ten more minutes.

But I'm not going to make it again.

While the coating was delicious, it was far too much work for something that Chicken Holiday has been doing perfectly for years.  

If you don't have a Chicken Holiday near you, I'm sorry.

Now, the cheese grits.

Here is the first reason I never want to make cheese grits again.

And here is the second:

Okay, perhaps the second one is my fault.  Maybe the first one is, too.  

I don't want to offend my southern friends, but I totally and completely do not understand the purpose of grits.  While they weren't horrible, they were the type of food you eat and think to youself, "Why am I eating this?"

To enjoy the grits, I mixed my bites with my mashed potatoes.  But here is my question, how does one normally eat grits?  Are they meant to be mixed with other foods?  Are grits the type of food you serve with mashed potatoes, or instead of?  

If you are a southern food expert or a lover of grits, comment below to help educate me.