Anna's Inspiration

Our good friend Anna has been keeping a blog of (nearly?) every meal she has been eating for the last little while. I am inspired to present, at least, one of my meals.

My latest craze is pizza. I have always loved it in most of it's non-frozen forms. Recently, Wendy made the grand mistake of allowing me to get a fantastic new book (amazon.ca) from McNally Robinson. The author spent many years in southern Italy and provides a wealth of traditional techniques blended with some common sense updates (e.g. the food processor). While I have found that the flour to water ratio in the basic crust recipe is suspect (perhaps altitude or strange measuring devices are to blame...), the instructions and description of how the dough should handle were so accurate that I have been able to make crusts that far surpassed any of my previous attempts (and there have been many). Then there is the sauce that is rendered from fresh vine tomatoes right on the stove as the dough rises. Fresh spices and the finest uncured mozza -- you get the idea. Wen complains that there is too much oil in the recipes, but hey, its x-virgin olive -- the acetaminophen of the oil world (without the abdominal bleeding)! For this particular meal, we invited January and the Plow, so I went all out and destroyed the kitchen. With Ms. Orange's acumen, the remnants were swept away and what remained were an incredible red pesto and these terrific walnut parsley buns which are from the same book.