Pixelated Crumb

One of the best things about the end of summer is the abundance of fresh, ripe veggies at their prime. Even better is when you have friends trying desperately to unload their gardens’ bountiful yield. So far I’ve been enjoying zucchini, summer squash, and tomatoes from friends’ gardens. A coworker e-mailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted some pickling cucumbers. Her CSA’s crop had just come in and they were giving them away. My first thought? Umm..not really. I’ve just been so busy lately and the idea of pickling cucumbers and canning them and everything was just a little too much. But then I learned about refrigerator pickles. All you have to do is make your pickles and let them sit in your refrigerator until you eat them all up in the next month or so. I love pickles, so I figured I should give it a try.

When Patty arrived at work with an enormous bag of cucumbers, I started having my doubts again. I got home and weighed my new bounty and quickly decided that there was no way I could use seven pounds of cucumbers. Seven pounds!! Luckily another coworker was more than happy to take 3 pounds off my hands, still leaving me with an incredible pile of cucumbers.

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Ironically, the same day Joseph and I went to the store to stock up on lots of garlic and olive oil so that we could start making our own garlic olive oil for our pizza instead of buying it, the store was out of the fresh tomato sauce we usually buy for pizza. Why not make that too, I figured?

Of course I’ve known all along that we could make our own sauce, and we have done this occasionally, but we often make pizza on Friday nights and after a long week, yes, I’ll admit it, we cut some corners and tend to just rely on store-bought sauce. The small Italian store near my office makes some great marinara sauce and it’s pretty cheap. So pure laziness wins out.

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Although not that many pizza recipes end up here on Pixelated Crumb, we do in fact make pizza quite often. Once a week in fact, usually Fridays. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to pizza night, and it’s not just the eating part. Pizza is one of my favorite things to make. The act of pulling out the dough, picking out the toppings, and best of all, watching it transform from some dough with toppings to a golden thing of beauty after only 10 minutes in the oven.

There’s a myriad of wonderful, jazzed up pizzas you can create, but lately we’ve been taking the deliciously easy way out and keeping it simple with just pepperoni and mozzarella. When you’re using Vermont Smoke and Cure pepperoni, you simply cannot go wrong. But there’s one thing that we always, always put on our pizza whether we’re using one topping or several, tomato sauce, pesto, or no sauce at all (like one of our favorites, sweet potato and kale pizza): garlic olive oil. We just brush it all over the dough from edge to edge to give the pizza some oomph, with the added bonus of protecting the dough from getting soggy from any wet toppings.

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The cookbook Truly Mexican has, count them, eight recipes for guacamole. Eight! If that’s not enough to get your blood pumping, then I don’t know what is. Pineapple seems to be on sale everywhere, and I’m a huge fan of fresh pineapple, so I was especially excited about the pineapple and cucumber guacamole.

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