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.

I feel the same way about pizza as I do about soup. Just as you can make soup out of anything, you can make anything into a pizza.

Gauging from that, you can bet I'm not at all a traditionalist when it comes to pizza. I'm always mixing it up. I use different sauces and whatever toppings I have lying around, and the results are usually tasty because I have complete control over them (mwahaha).

Last week, though I didn't post about it, I made an Indian-Inspired Pizza from Booking and Cooking. The pizza was very, very tasty, and was an excellent example of taking foods you love (in this case, Indian curry) and making them into pizza.

My hot wing pizza recipe came about when I was a junior in college, and therefore is not the world's healthiest thing by any means. I was surfing the Internet one night and trying to decide what to have for dinner. One of the cooking sites was featuring a buffalo chicken pizza, but the ingredients or the process didn't look that great to me. I decided I could do it better, fasted, and tastier with just the ingredients in my fridge. And so I did.

1 personal sized pizza crust
1 Tbsp. ranch dressing (I make my own, but use whatever you like. You can also use blue cheese dressing, if that's your thing).
2 chicken strips, cooked and cut into pieces
2 tsp. Frank's Red Hot Sauce (you can use a different hot sauce if you really want to, but I recommend Frank's).
CHEESE

Cook the chicken strips and cut them into chunks. Toss with the hot sauce.
Spread the ranch all over the pizza crust. I usually do a thin layer of cheese, then the chicken, then more cheese, but feel free to top the pizza however you like.

Tonight, for cheese, I uses Gruyere, Fontina, and mild cheddar. Happy Pre-Valentine's to me!

You can easily expand this pizza to full sized. I would just adjust the ingredient amounts accordingly.

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.