A Very Belated January Recipe Post

I am ever the procrastinator, and I guess that's already well apparent on this blog. Oops! Well, as I mentioned in my intro post, I wanted to learn a new recipe every month this year. I will kick off with my January creations: homemade pizza & roasted brussel sprouts on the side. 

While I have always loved baking, I was (and still am) intimidated by yeast. The only successful yeast-containing recipe I've ever dabbled with was soft baked pretzels (yuuuum). Anyway, I wanted to make the dough for the pizza myself, so I looked for a simple, no-knead recipe. Enter Smitten Kitchen. I love Deb and have gifted her cookbook to many of my foodie friends. I used her aptly named "lazy pizza dough" recipe (link). 

I added a couple cloves of minced garlic to the overnight version, and it worked like a charm! I split up the dough into quarters (for personal sized pizzas), wrapped three of them in plastic wrap for the freezer, and hand-stretched one of them out into a crude circle. Instead of continuing with Deb's margherita pizza recipe, I added some sliced tomatoes, mozzarella, parmesan, and slightly sauteed mushrooms. After sticking it into an oven for ~12-13 minutes, I pulled out this creation:

I was actually quite pleased with how it turned out. The dough was chewy enough, yet the crust had that nice outer crunch that I love. I will definitely be playing around with different toppings. I'm thinking a white pizza with spinach? 

So I was being ambitious about this whole new recipe thing and decided to prepare brussel sprouts for the first time on the same night! I was inspired by a salad I had at a BBQ joint that had the most delicious roasted brussel sprouts (not to mention the wonderful nuts in it, too). The very next day, I bought brussel sprouts from the store. After a quick Googling session, I picked Ina Garten's recipe to work off of (link).

A couple of notes and tweaks. First, I halved the brussel sprouts before drizzling olive oil and sea salt. I also prepared them in my toaster oven since my real oven was busy making pizza. Not sure if that is why, but the brussel sprouts were done waay earlier than 35-40 minutes. More like 20 minutes? Here is a close-up of the result!

Yum! As you can see, a couple bits were a bit burnt, but that's because I neglected to toss them around halfway through. 

Anyway, I declare January a success! Unfortunately, February flew by so quickly and with guests staying over and a plethora of other excuses, I didn't get to try out a new recipe. I did, however, try two of them in January and will try to do two more in March to make up for it! I've already got plenty of recipes bookmarked to pick from, I will just have to be more persistent about making the time for these adventures. 

-jennkay

Categories: brussel sprouts, cooking, january recipe, pizza, resolutions