In the kitchen

Crazy week as we're still getting used to our redesign at work AND I'm trying to finish up another issue of the company newsletter. But I figured I'd mention a few recent kitchen escapades.

Pizza
I made my homemade pizza Sunday. I ended up going with a dough, sauce and pizza recipe from Parade magazine. (When I went to find this link, I realized it was a recipe from Bobby Flay so that seems pretty credible.) I found that funny since I have about four dough recipes saved up to try, but this one was pretty simple and happened to be in the paper Sunday so I thought it was a sign.

The pizza turned out well, but I think I can improve on it next time by adding some extra flavors. I had been nervous because all the recipes I found included the use of a food processor or stand mixer, neither of which I have. (Note: I do have a mini food processor, which I used to make my pesto below, but it is nowhere big enough to mix dough.) But I tackled this with mixing by hand, and it turned out just fine.

I also have enough dough left over for a second pizza. (Hey, I live alone. It's hard to make and eat two pizzas at once.) So, I tried freezing it because some of the blogs I follow talk about freezing pizza and bread dough, but we'll see if I did it correctly and if it works out when I try to use it. Also, I might have made a teeny miscalculated substitution in the sauce so that I have enough sauce left over for about THREE more pizzas. (I didn't see a 28 oz. can of roma tomatoes to puree, so I just bought 28 oz. of tomato puree, plus a small can of diced tomatoes. I think the result was just fine except that it left me with much more tomato-y goodness than the original recipe should have.)

Pesto
Because the only container of fresh basil I could find at the store Sunday was a huge box (4 oz.), I needed a way to use the leftover, so I threw together some pesto and pasta tonight. I've made pesto a few times before, but I was amazed when I had my pesto and pasta ready to consume within 20 minutes of arriving home. I have remaining basil so might make another half-batch to freeze if I have time tomorrow. (It's awesome since the mini food processor does all the work — no chopping required!)

My first thought was that I couldn't link to this recipe since my version is cut out of the Post-Dispatch (my main recipe source from my years in STL). Then I remembered all those recipes are online and my good friend Reagan had been working on organizing them when I left St. Louis. So I did a quick search and ... POW! The first one that came up was my recipe! It's the All-Purpose Basil Pesto on this page.

Pumpkin muffins
(Might as well keep it consistent with the P-words.)
I grabbed a recipe from the Frugal Girl recently for pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and had it sitting in my inbox to try them out. Then I found out tomorrow is our executive editor's birthday. He doesn't eat many sweets, so I thought muffins would be a good option. In reality, though, these are pretty sweet muffins – with a high ratio of chocolate chips to muffin. And I didn't even add any extra chocolate chips!

I had a mishap with the first half of the batch. I blame it on my baking powder, which is apparently old so I will be buying some more next week. However, once I compensated for that, the last 24 of the 36 muffins turned out pretty well, I think.

Also, I made these with the Frugal Girl's adapted recipe except I didn't have wheat flour so I used all white flour (but I did use the milk substitution for some of the oil).