Grilled Pizza

We've been enjoying a LOT of grilled pizza lately because the weather has been so HOT.  On Friday evening, I finally decided to take a few shots of the action.  We made a pretty simple grilled pizza--no tomato sauce, just pesto on ours and tomato paste on Lulu's.  We did have a beautiful roma tomato from the garden that we used on our pizza in lieu of sauce though.  I think after a couple more tries, we'll have this grilled pizza thing down flat.  (and on the plus side, the grilled flatbread makes a great transfer medium for hummus!)

first pizza of the night (for Lulu)

flipping it over in a thwack works better than sliding it off the peel

Lulu's pizza

the mise en place

such concentration....

our basil pesto pizza with mixed cheeses

adding a little smoky char to the roma tomato

Blueberries

The trouble with going to a greenhouse on the Fourth of July is buying the unexpected....we were there to pick up another Parrot's Beak to replace the one that died while we were gone (too hot, not enough water, outside on the patio, etc) when I came across the Pink Lemonade blueberry bushes.  My eyes lit up and Gropius hung his head and said, "Okay."

Resistance is futile.

acidic soil, sand, and vermiculite

Once we got it home, we had to decide where to put it (I hadn't gotten that far) and ultimately decided that it would be best to rip out the horrible bush/refuge for scary spiders next to the carport and put it there.

action shot with the roto-tiller (i.e., best birthday present ever!)

Then, Gropius did some additional research and discovered that blueberries do better when planted with another species of the same plant (even though they are self-pollinators).  So, we put in two:  a pink lemonade (with pink berries) and an O'Neal (with blue berries).  And we also picked up a star jasmine when we were at Home Depot getting the necessary soil amendments for the blueberries.

pink lemonade on the left, o'neal on the right

two (edible) bushes are better than one

And of course, we decided to do this unanticipated landscaping project on a day when the temperature topped out at 100 degrees F.  Luckily, we could escape into the shade of the carport to elude the sun, and I insisted that Gropius drink water every time I saw him pause, but that still meant he was pretty tired at the end of the day.  And dehydrated.

The finished product with star jasmine in the back corner

But the new plants look beautiful.  And I hope that we get to enjoy some of our own pink/blueberries next spring!

Strudel

So, I have dedicated myself to learning how to make strudel--the real thing with actual strudelteig that you pull until it's so thin you can almost see through it.  The idea of being able to use that strudel dough to make sweet and savory strudels makes my mouth water....

But, before then, this recipe for Apricot Baklava Strudel called out to me from Sunset magazine.  I bought a handful of pistachios earlier in the week and a friend gave me a bag of apricots from her backyard tree--I figured this recipe was kismet!

Once I started getting everything assembled though, I realized that I didn't have the ground cardamom after all.  I had green and black cardamom pods, so I ended up splitting the green pods and grinding the cardamom up myself.  As my friend Hellen told me when she sampled some that afternoon, "You bake with love."

my miss en place, ready to assemble

the ground nuts, sugar, and cardamom

the finished product

Then, because I had plenty of the honey/sugar mixture leftover from macerating the apricots and half a package of phyllo dough, I decided to make a small cherry strudel, too.  Rather than using pistachios, I chopped up some almonds instead.

a little cherry peeking out....