Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Newest Obsession: Food Blogs

Lately I've been reading blogs alot more often than writing (as if that weren't already obvious).
Like the title says - I think I'm kind of wandering around trying to decide what it is that I want to do when I grow up. 'Course at this point, it's what I want to do when my kiddos grow up - since that's when I'll really start having some time for myself again (at least that's the theory I'm working on...).
My little iGoogle page is kind of the barometer of where my life is, all the baby/mom blogs started to give way to craft/garden blogs and those are starting to give way to food blogs (with the standard tech/geek blogs always remaining as they are the constant in my life). Food writing is fun to read for so many reasons, but the best reason is that food is fantastic - to make - to eat - to look at - to smell - to read about - well, you get the idea.
In the tradition of blogs, one leads to another, leads to another, until suddenly I have 12 food blogs that I'm reading and mixing and matching and enjoying.
This was a really long setup - but all of these blogs led me back to what a friend introduced us to a couple of years ago: GRILLED PIZZA!
Yep - totally crazy - but I actually even think it was Martha Stewart who was the initial inspiration for these.

And since my children (especially my son) will eat pizza more than anything and LOVE to help roll out the dough, we celebrated the 20th sunny-day-in-seattle-in-a-row by grillin' up some 'za! The kid-caveat here is that they don't always like the burned parts of grilled food, and they didn't get to build the pizza themselves since the grill is hot-ish but it was still a pretty huge success.

My treat was that I got to fill up my pizza with whatever I wanted! I used up all my farmer's market treats (in Seattle, the Spring Farmer's Markets are a little slim pickins). Here's what we did:

Roll out your pizza dough (either pre-made or bought) into round-ish shapes and let it rest for a little while.
Heat up the grill so it's REALLY hot.
Grab a pizza peel/non-edged cookie sheet and sprinkle some corn meal or similarly-textured flour (semolina) on top and load up the dough.
Slide the dough onto the grill and close it. Give it a couple minutes to puff up a bit and get brown, then flip it and let the 2nd side do the same.
Then TURN OFF THE GRILL! (otherwise... burn marks)
Dress your pizza time!
Our kids: prefer just tomato sauce and cheese.
Hubby: tomato sauce, cheese and any cured meat - preferably Salumi
Mine: olive oil base, potatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, gruyere and bleu cheese. I think if I could have fit more on, I would have!

I think we'll be grilling lots of pizza this summer.

I'll keep reading food blogs for ideas, and maybe even find a few more to pass along.

until next time...
yum