Pizza & pups

Today is my due date. You are not going to get a cohesive sentence out of me, so let's try pictures instead.

Puppies! No Baby Hay yet, but we bred Fisher in July, and his little ones have arrived. My sister and her boyfriend and I went to see them this weekend, and they did a fairly good if temporary job of satisfying our need to snuggle with a small mammal. They're almost four weeks old, big enough to open their eyes and wobble around and chew on each other's chins and tails, but not big enough to do much else. There are five black ones, two yellows, and one tired nursing mama. Fisher came in and took a sniff, but he seemed pretty scared of the whole situation, and quickly backed out. We spent the rest of the weekend teasing him for being such a deadbeat dad.

Oh! and we made pizza.

I'd been wanting to make homemade pizza for a while, and I finally found a good recipe for whole wheat crust. Alex's nieces were over, and my sister was visiting, and it seemed like the perfect night. The only thing was, we didn't have any of the traditional pizza toppings on hand—the tomato sauce was all tucked into the freezer, the basil was dwindling, and there wasn't even a ball of plain mozzarella in the fridge.

And so we went unconventional, and I am so, so glad that we did. Alex caramelized an onion, then stirred in some finely chopped rosemary and a good dollop of homemade fig butter to make a spread. He smoothed this on the crust, then layered on arugula, bits of cooked bacon, pieces of sauteed eggplant, goat cheese, and slices of fig and almond burrata from Kathleen Kadlik. It was sweet and savory all at once, and very, very good.

FIGGY BURRATA PIZZA

This is a pretty loose recipe. We used one ball of the whole wheat crust from the New York Times link up there, and I made fig butter from fresh figs, not dried, following Kim Boyce's recipe in Good to the Grain. This preserve is full of butter. If you use fig jam, be sure to add a few tablespoons of butter when you melt it with the onions.

1 ball whole wheat pizza dough at room temperature

cornmeal, for the peel

1 medium size onion, sliced thin

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

1/3 cup fig butter

olive oil

1 small eggplant, cut into thin strips

salt

a handful of torn arugula

4 strips cooked bacon, torn into 1/2-inch pieces

1 ball fig & almond burrata mozzarella

2-3 ounces chevre

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Roll out the dough as thin as you can. We used a half sheet pan, so we rolled ours into a rectangle, but obviously you should roll yours into whatever shape your pan is. Sprinkle the pan with cornmeal and lay the dough on top.

Caramelize the onion in a heavy skillet over medium-low heat. When it's tender, add the rosemary and fig butter and sauté another minute or so, until they're warmed through. Spread this mixture evenly across the pizza dough.

In the same skillet, warm up a glug of olive oil. Salt the eggplant slices and sauté until tender, about five to eight minutes. Layer the cooked eggplant strips evenly over the pizza. Do the same with the arugula, bacon pieces, and the two cheeses.

Bake the pizza for 15-20 minutes, or until the dough is crispy around the edges and the cheeses are bubbling. Enjoy hot.

Happy 4th

Have you had breakfast yet? I hope not. It's a holiday, and holidays are prime time for lazy breakfasts and sleeping in. If you have already eaten, that's okay. We can do this another day. But if you haven't, do me a favor:

Grab a colander and the kitchen scissors, and run outside barefoot to the garden. Cut a whole bunch of arugula. It doesn't matter if it's gone to seed, or even started to flower—the leaves will still be good. Fill your colander, then come back in to the kitchen. Light the flame under a cast iron skillet, medium high, and drizzle some olive oil in. Cut a slice of toast—some good, rustic bread—and grab an egg from the fridge. While the pan heats up rustle through your cheese drawer and look for a hunk that's hard, Mediterranean—something like Parmesan or Pecorino or Manchego, even.

At the stove, crack the egg in the pan and start back a little when it sizzles. Then watch as the white spreads and thins and finally gets golden around the edges and forms tiny bubbles on top. When you think it will hold, flip it—but only for a minute! You want that yolk still runny, just barely hot.

Move the egg to a plate, add some more oil to the pan, and throw the toast in. Let it cook til it's golden, then flip it and do the same thing again. When the toast is done move it over to the plate with the egg, and add the arugula to the pan. You'll need a little oil so that it can wilt, and a sprinkle of salt on top. The arugula doesn't need much—a minute at most. When it's done it should still be fairly firm, fairly solid, just warm and just starting to wilt. Turn the heat off. Now arrange the greens on the plate with the toast and the egg and grate the cheese over top. If you use a carrot peeler, you'll get big, thick ribbons of white, which I think is nice. Finally, cut a few wedges of lemon, and squeeze the juice over the greens, with another little drizzle of oil oil on top.

Now sit down, breathe deep, and take a bite.

All sorts of keepers

You know where's a good place to find recipes? The Williams Sonoma catalog. Honestly. I find all sorts of keepers in there. The gadgets that go with them—banana slicers and salad dressing emulsifiers—get a little ridiculous, but the recipes are terrific.

Take, for instance, the roasted beet salad recipe I tried the other day. The base ingredients are pretty standard—watercress, roasted beets, toasted walnuts, goat cheese—but the dressing is something else altogether. Basically you take lemon juice and a little bit of crème fraîche and add oil and shallots and a big handful of dill. The dairy makes it creamy, the lemon juice gives it kick, and the shallots and dill make it feel big and zippy. When you pour it over the greens and beets, a sort of magic happens, and everything feels at the same time rich and fresh.

We've made it about three times this week, and today, I'm thinking of having it for lunch again. It's just the thing for a hot day—filling but not heavy, satisfying in a very summer sort of way. Enjoy the sunshine, friends.

ROASTED BEET SALAD

I made a few changes to the Williams Sonoma original of this recipe. For starters, I used arugula and spinach from our garden in place of the watercress. I also added homemade croutons (rustic bread seared in olive oil on our cast iron griddle) and swapped out the crème fraîche for whole milk plain yogurt and Cloumage cheese.

(Cloumage, for those of you who have never had it, is the newest cheese from the Shy Brothers. It tastes sort of like a cross between ricotta and crème fraîche, and they sell it at the Provincetown and Falmouth farmers markets.)

Finally, I upped the dill. I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of that green.

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 and 1/2 tablespoons Cloumage

2 and 1/2 tablespoons whole milk plain yogurt

5 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

2 teaspoons minced shallot

salt and pepper

4 cups arugula or watercress

2 large beets, roasted, peeled, and cut into wedges (for a roasting tutorial, click here)

1/3 cup toasted walnuts

4 ounces crumbled goat cheese

2 slices good rustic bread, toasted in olive oil in a cast iron skillet or griddle and cut into croutons

Combine the lemon juice, Cloumage, yogurt, olive oil, dill, shallot, and salt and pepper in a Mason jar or salad dressing container. Shake vigorously to emulsify and set aside.

You can plate the salads either individually or on a large shallow platter. Arrange the greens on the bottom, then layer on the roasted beet wedges, toasted walnuts, crumbled goat cheese, and homemade croutons. Drizzle with dressing and toss just before serving.

Wellfleet-grown fruit

I have one word for you today: FIGS.

My friend Tracy grew them, on the tall, mittened fig tree in her backyard, the one tucked up against the kitchen window on the north wall. She transplanted the tree all the way from Brewster, despite the fact that everyone told her it would never make it, that it didn't have a chance so close to the water, that it would start to lose its leaves and then a few branches, and eventually, it would peter out and die.

Instead, it flourished. It got so big that now it's taller than the window, taller even than the first story. It reaches up high, almost to the roof. And every fall, around this time, it makes hundreds of figs—fresh, ripe, bursting, Wellfleet-grown fruit.

When I play my cards right, I'm usually lucky enough to get a few. The other day, Tracy gave me four.

I knew immediately how I wanted to eat them, what I wanted to do. I got out a bag of arugula from Lucas at Halcyon Farms, and tossed it with some red wine vinegar, olive oil, mustard, and a bit of salt. I sliced up an orange heirloom tomato, crumbled a round of goat cheese we picked up at a farm stand on our trip to Maine, and tossed both in. Then I sliced the figs in half, plated two salads, and gently laid them on top—two and two.

We have our own fig tree coming along—potted, and still quite petite—but with a little nurturing and a sunny winter window, I'm hoping we'll be eating our own figs some fall soon.

If you know someone who has a fig tree, you can take a cutting and it will root. Ours started out that way—as a tiny shoot with only one leaf, and now it has nine! (I know, still tiny.) If you don't know anyone with a mature tree and you're inspired to plant figs, I know Bayberry Gardens in Truro has a few.

A very real possibility

I realized at lunch the other day that you might have some misconceptions about my husband-to-be. I mean, based on the picture I've painted around here, I can understand how you might think he just sits around popping out diamond rings and bringing home tubs of chocolate chip cookie dough and taking me out for Sunday boat rides. But really people, he has flaws. Take the other day, for instance. He came home to a first-rate afternoon spread of cold gazpacho, white linens, plated silver, a shady deck, and an arugula test salad for the wedding and informed me without a trace of regret after just one bite that he Did Not Like It. He said it perfectly nicely, of course, but it reminded me that he does have a flaw. Somehow, he missed out on the bitter-flavor-appreciation gene.

I first found this out over a bar of dark chocolate. I then rediscovered it over braised endives, a radicchio salad, and my cousin's Italian dandelion greens tossed with the most delicious green goddess dressing.

The man can't stand to put anything even the slightest bit bitter in his mouth.

He tells this story about when he was living in Vietnam, where he ate things like live, beating snake heart without batting an eye, about the time his host mom made bitter gourd soup—and he almost always, at least once or twice during the delivery, says he thought he was going to die. It's a little melodramatic, I think, but when I imagine the way I feel in front any quantity of tapioca pudding, I sort of see what he means. Some things just aren't meant to go down.

The point of all this is to say that even though my groom didn't like the arugula-wheat-berry-cherry-tomato-Parmesan-lemon-juice-calamata-olive wedding salad, I think you will. The exciting part about it—and the reason we started experimenting with it in the first place—is that the wheat berries will be coming from Maine. We're trying to keep our dinner as local as possible, but for a time there, it seemed like an all-Maine grain side was going to be an impossible thing. Then of course enter Katy and my mother and their combined love of Heidi Swanson, and what seemed like a reach was suddenly a very real possibility.

To that end, I'd appreciate any comments or variations or suggestions you might have on this. As you might imagine, I won't be hearing a lot at my table, so whatever goes on at yours, please, please let me know.

ARUGULA AND WHEAT BERRY SALAD

This recipe is adapted from one Katy found on 101 Cookbooks. I ordered wheat berries from Wood Prairie Farm in Maine, and they have proven to be an excellent new addition to the grain cupboard.

I changed things up a bit from Heidi's version—added fresh cherry tomatoes since we have them around in droves right now and went a bit heavier on the arugula—but for the most part, hers was a pretty fool proof combo. If you have something else nice you throw in, please let me know. I have a feeling that this version of the salad is just the beginning and there are endless directions in which we could go.

Oh, and where the recipes—there's one for the salad and one for the arugula pesto that dresses it—where they say grated Parmesan, I mean made from a block of cheese with a grater, not the granular type you buy at the store. If you use that, you'll want to use much less as there's a lot more cheese per 1/3 cup.

2 cups wheat berries, cooked and chilled
3 cups arugula, loosely packed
1 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered
1/2 cup calamata olives, pitted and halved
1/3 cup grated Parmesan
4 tablespoons arugula pesto, at room temperature (recipe below)

In a large serving bowl, toss the wheat berries, arugula, cherry tomatoes, and olives with the pesto. Once everything is well-coated, add the Parmesan, season with salt and pepper to taste, and toss lightly once more. Serve at room temperature.

ARUGULA PESTO

3 cups arugula leaves, packed
1-2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, to taste
3 medium garlic cloves
1/4 cup walnuts
1/3 cup olive oil
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Combine everything in a food processor and give it a whirl. Keep going until the pesto is thick and well-blended. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste.