Days 12 and 13: I tried valiantly to finished off leftovers and gave into my need for gluten.

Day 12 was Saturday, and I think I may have had too much fun on Day 11, or ate too many french fries, so my stomach hurt and I was feeling unmotivated. Luckily, I still had leftover soup and chicken crock pot stuff so I didn't starve.

Then, all my pent up cooking urges EXPLODED on day 13 and I made 3 different things throughout the course of the day:

Scalloped Turnips and bell peppers: Slathering veggies in cheese sauce is one of my standard moves for things that I get in my CSA. This week, I had some turnips and bell peppers that seemed up for the job. I base all my au gratin attempts on this recipe. but I vary the veggies based on what I have on hand. My most common variations are doing cauliflower instead of potato, and wedging swiss chard between the potato layers, which is delicious. Here's what it looked like:

Delicious right? uh.... sort of. As I was cutting the turnips, I noticed that the large one that I used for the bottom layer smelled really horseradish-y. Guess what that turns into when you cook it: INCREDIBLY BITTER TURNIP. So, this was an incredibly uneven dish. Some bites were delightful, others I had to spit out. So after eating about half of it, we decided to pitch it. Any advice on picking out good turnips?

Later in the day, I got a vicious craving for pizza. And because Naked Pizza is mysteriously temporarily closed, I decided to make my own. I used the basics of Bobby Flay's pizza crust recipe. (Wait, isn't he the grilling guy? Whatever, it worked.) The only sub that I made was that I used half whole wheat flour, and the dough ended up rising and resting for longer because I was doing other things.

I also made the sauce by sautéing about 6 garlic cloves in 2 tbs of olive oil. Then I added a 4 oz can of organic tomato paste, 4 oz water, and a splash of port wine, making a denser variant on the port wine marinara sauce from previous in this blog.

I however DID NOT make my own cheese, despite the fact that I have a mozzarella kit waiting on my counter. SHAME ON ME! I have other plans for that though. Muahahahhahahaaa!

Also I topped it with grape tomatoes and broccoli.

That is the pre-baking picture. It was so delicious that I forgot to take a post baking picture, but it looked pretty much the same, only with melty cheese and browner crust. Oh yeah, I baked it at 375 for 20 minutes. 

You may have noticed that the dough recipe makes TWO pizzas and I only had ONE pizza. Well, that is because I got crazy and used the other half to make fatayer , i.e., delicious spinach pies. The only major difference in the dough recipes is that there was less oil. Also I used frozen spinach instead of fresh, which was a mistake because it took way longer to than than it would have to wilt. Oh yeah, and I didn't have lemon. I think they would have benefited from the lemon. Also i overstuffed them because i forgot to half the filling recipe. OOPS.

These are AMAZING!! I have eaten them for all meals of the day. Not all in one day though, that could be considered excessive. I plan on making a whole batch (which would make about 2 dozen) and freezing some, because they are as I mentioned earlier: AMAZING!!