Anne Can Cook

I don't think I've ever mentioned it before, but I am a big fan of StumbleUpon, which is sort of like internet roulette with your relevant interests. You install a toolbar into your browser, hit the "Stumble!" button, and get taken to a random website. I have found so many excellent food sites this way. My food bookmarks through StumbleUpon are so full of stuff that I will never be able to cook it all.
A couple of week ago, StumbleUpon brought me to this pizza recipe, and I knew I had to make it. It has so many things I love: pizza, pesto, potatoes, and garlic. I couldn't resist it, especially since I had just received a mandolin slicer in the mail and had yet to test it out.

Now, I have a few things to say about the logistics of the recipe. I think it's more complicated than it has to be. Admittedly, I used store bought dough, which immediately made quite a few of the instruction irrelevant. There was no need to let it rise, for example. There was also no need to knead the dough or to flour anything or to find a pizza peel (peal?). I just rolled my crust onto a standard cookie sheet and spread it out to meet the edges. Easy, and it tasted just fine. Oh, and I also baked the pizza on the cookie sheet. No worrying about trying to slide the pizza onto the baking stone. My baking stone wasn't large enough for that, anyway.
What I'm getting at here is that you can follow the directions precisely if you'd like, but you don't have to.
I also want to comment on the amount of potatoes this calls for. Granted, I sort of halved the recipe, since I didn't need to make two pizzas (one alone is going to feed me for the next few days). However, I didn't even make it to two potatoes before I said, "This is way too much potato." Maybe the authors were slicing their potatoes more thickly than I was, but one potato would have been sufficient for me. As it was, I probably sliced one and three-fourths potatoes, and ended up with enough slices to cover the pizza, make microwave potato chips, and STILL have a good two dozen slices left over.
My new mandolin slicer rocks, by the way. This could be the source of my issue:

Look at those! They're translucent they're so thin. They may even be waffer thin. (I will give ten points to anyone who gets that reference)
Anyway, my experience is that 2 thinly sliced potatoes is too much.
Dough and potato opinions aside, this pizza was pretty awesome, if a touch salty. The potatoes had a really great texture, and the garlic was soooo good.

I did make one major mistake, though. I over-oiled the baking sheet when I should have floured it instead. Therefore, my crust was a little overly oily on the bottom. Overall, though

I can't complain.

Sorry for the lack of updates last week. I cooked quite a bit, but it was all tidbit type stuff. Hence this post: Snacks for dinner. Sometimes I come home and say, "Screw it, I'm just going to have [insert snack here] for dinner." I try not to do this too often, but I probably eat popcorn and nothing else at least once a week.
Anyway, the snacks I'm going to feature today are a little more substantial than popcorn. Like Garlicky Baked Fries:
Is your mouth watering? (It's ok if it's not, this isn't the world's best picture).
I won't re-post the recipe, but will instead direct you to the source: The Purple Foodie. I didn't augment her recipe at all, except that when I parboiled the potatoes in the microwave, I covered them with a towel instead of plastic wrap. It worked just fine. I should mention that I'm also sort of in love with this woman's blog. You should be reading it if you aren't already.

My boyfriend came to visit me last weekend, and I made him some Spinach Artichoke dip. Somehow or another this has become one of our favorite things, and so I had to try out this recipe:1 8 oz pkg of cream cheese, softened
1 cup of mayo
1 can of artichoke hearts in water, drained and chopped
1 10 oz pkg of frozen spinach, thawed and drained
3/4 c. shredded Parmesan cheese
1/3 c. sliced green onions
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. Shallot Pepper (you could probably use garlic pepper or lemon pepper or whatever)

In a mixing bowl, stir together the cream cheese and mayo. Stir in the artichokes, spinach, Parm, green onions, garlic, and pepper. Mix everything together until uniform. Spoon into a greased baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes at 300F. Serve with pita chips or chunks of French bread.
It turned out pretty well, but if I had to do it again I would half it. This is enough Spinach Artichoke dip to feed a small army.

Last, but not least, my Friday offering. I've been programmed to think that Friday night = pizza night, and so last Friday I made due with what I had lying around my house:

On chunks of Italian bread from the local grocery store, I have:
pesto
Fontina cheese
Cheddar cheese
Parmesan cheese
Penzey's Pasta Sprinkle

Bake it at 375F for about 15 minutes or until the cheese is all melted. Simple and tasty.

I have legitimately cooked quite a bit since the last time I wrote. I made myself a very tasty pizza with pesto, pepperoni, fontina cheese, mozzerella cheese, red onions, and garlic. It looked so good that I took a picture of it:

I love assembling my own pizza. I don't like tomatoes or tomato sauce, so I substitute anything else when I make pizzas myself. Pesto was a very delicious substitute, and one I'll likely use again in the future.

I actually followed a recipe this week, too. Monday night, I made Pesto Baked Chicken from the cookbook I got for Christmas. I had to reduce the recipe to suit one person, but it turned out very well:

1 chicken breast
4 Tbsp. Basil Pesto
3/4 tsp. sour cream
3/4 tsp. mayo
Parmesan cheese
Pine nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 450F. Lay the chicken in a shallow baking dish (I used a pie plate). Mix together pesto, mayo, and sour cream. Spread mixture evenly over chicken. Sprinkle with Parmesan and pine nuts. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

I did the whole thing over a bed of red onions, seasoned with any leftover pesto mixture. It was very good. I cooked it for more like 12 minutes so that the onions would caramelize more, and I actually could have left it in for a few more. The pesto effectively flavored the chicken throughout, even though it was just spread on top. This was very easy, pretty tasty, and worth the extreme burn I got on my right hand middle finger.

Yes, I burned myself taking this dish out of the oven. It was completely my own fault. I didn't put the oven door down all the way, and hit my finger on the inside of the door. It looks awesome. Kind of like I got into a fight with just my finger.

Anyway, between the pizza and the chicken, I finally used up all of the prepared pesto. I'll probably stay pesto-less for awhile. A week, at least.

I also did some baking over the past couple days. My fellow VISTA and her friend came over to my hovel to help bake some standard Peanut Butter Cookies (recipe from Better Homes and Gardens).
The cookies turned out well, especially well considering we used organic peanut butter (unsweetened!), organic sugar, and a farm fresh egg. They were the most environmentally conscious cookies I've ever baked.

Last night I tried my hand at short bread. Short bread is insanely easy to mix up. It consists of flour, sugar, and butter. That's it. You can get fancy like I did and add cinnamon, but it is still crazy easy. The hard part was the baking. I tried to get my dough into a nice circle like the picture in Better Homes and Gardens, but what I got instead was a questionable looking mound. Oh well. The edges got a little too brown, but the rest of the shortbread is pretty tasty. Note to self-invest in a rolling pin.

I am currently 5 miles away from my new apartment at what I can only assume is the nearest location with free wireless internet. What have I gotten myself into?
My name is Anne. I'm 22 and a recent college graduate. I've just embarked on a year of service with the AmeriCorps VISTA program.
There isn't a short answer for my job specifics. I work for the local private college and serve as a liaison between that institute and the local middle school. Most of my time, however, will be spent at the middle school teaching 8th grade students in their new capstone program. My "areas of expertise" are literacy and 21st century skills. This is in keeping with the relatively new state Core Curriculum.
This blog is to document that experience. It is also to document my experiences in the kitchen. I love to cook, but that doesn't mean I'm good at it. I'm still a relative novice, as today's Pesto Disaster proves.

It didn't start out so badly. Pesto, in theory, is not hard. 10 basil leaves from my mother's award winning herb garden? Check. 2 Tbsp. pine nuts? Check. 2 Tbsp. olive oil? Check. Several cloves of garlic and some Parmesan cheese? Check, check, check, and blend. My major error occurred when I went to heat my sauce. I microwaved it for too long. Instead of a paste like consistency, I had grainy chunks that were not willing to be broken apart. What did crumble was at least tasty. My recipe for Pesto Rocks, however, does not seem to be a hit. Back to the pesto drawing board.