Pixelated Crumb

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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Over the last few weeks I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the number of people talking about summer drawing to a close, the fall catalogs piling up at my door, and Halloween candy appearing in the grocery store. I wanted to scream, “No, summer is not over! There’s tons of summer left!” But now that August is almost over and Harvard Square is suddenly getting a lot more crowded with students returning, I’m starting to begin to come to terms with the fact that summer is coming to a close. Yes, I am almost ready to bring myself out of denial. But not yet, because it’s still summer, dang it. And as much as I love fall, it’s followed by another season that in Boston involves a lot of a certain four letter word that I refuse to think about now.

Cherries are one of my favorite things about summer and I usually just eat them straight up. And as much as I really, really love fresh, unadulterated cherries, I suddenly feel like an expiration date is drawing near on my supply and it’s been inspiring me to do more than just pop them in my mouth. I started off with the cherry almond muffins, and with Jessica and Adam visiting us last weekend, I knew I wanted to try something else with cherries. Adam loves cherries almost as much as I do and we have a family tradition of Belgian waffle brunches, so cherry compote seemed like the perfect, well, cherry on top.

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