Go The Extra Mile-8/4/09

Richard and I realized that in the 5 months I've been making recipes from Gourmet magazine, I've never made a pizza for this blog. Tonight, I not only made the Eggplant, Green Olive, and Provolone Pizza on page 58, I made the pizza dough to go with it. The recipe called for store-bought pizza dough but I decided to make my own. Several years ago, I found a great recipe for pizza dough on epicurious.com by Giada DeLaurentis. It's my go-to pizza dough recipe because it mixes up quickly in the food processor and rises well after a 1-minute knead. I'd never grilled a pizza and wondered how my homemade dough would hold up. I was impressed. The dough cooked all the way through without burning and tasted great. I used my grill rack over the stove and put my wok cover over the pizza to melt the toppings. It worked great. I may try this with more conventional pizza ingredients on an off-night.
I mentioned in the last post that this month's Gourmet has a lot of sauce recipes. For tonight's dessert, I combined a sauce recipe with another common theme from this month's issue, frozen desserts. I made the Minted Honey Mango Sauce on page 8 and served it over the Tangy Frozen Greek Yogurt on page 104. The mango sauce was good but pretty basic, just what it said it was, mint, honey, and mango. The Frozen Greek Yogurt was very good and though I no longer do a calorie breakdown for each recipe, probably pretty healthy by ice cream standards. The Greek yogurt I choose, in fact, the only Greek yogurt I could find, was nonfat and had less sugar and more protein than regular yogurt and a whole lot less fat and sugar than heavy cream. There was a tangy kick but I actually found this yogurt a little less dramatic taste wise than the sour cream ice cream I made last week. Eyrleigh loved it too. When does that kid not love ice cream?

Eggplant, Green Olive, and Provolone Pizza- B

Minted Honey Mango Sauce-B

Tangy Frozen Greek Yogurt-B+