This was a really successful variation on our favorite lamb pizza. I topped it with the usual mix of ground lamb and sweet onions, flavored with cinnamon and tamarind, but then added butter-soft, long-cooked broccoli rabe. A recent issue of Saveur had a feature on vegetables cooked until very soft and sweet, and it occurred to me that bitter greens done this way would be a fantastic pizza topping, especially paired with the richness of lamb. I added mozzarella as well, but it would have been equally good with feta or no cheese at all.

My mother has, in the last year, gotten sort of obsessed with arugula pizza, and it’s gradually infected us as well. Tutta Bella makes a particularly good one, which we had recently on a day when my parents and I converged on Seattle. A very simple pizza, it was topped only with prosciutto, a bit of tomato and cheese, with fresh arugula leaves added after cooking so they stayed fresh.  When Jon and I stopped by the Dunbar Gardens farmstand last week, that pizza being fresh in my mind, a huge bunch of fresh arugula called out to me and demanded to be made into dinner.

I had been thinking in terms of putting the prosciutto on the pizza before baking it, then adding the greens partway through. But I noticed over on Epicurious that another option is to bake the pizza with nothing but cheese, then add the prosciutto and greens after it comes out of the oven. We tried it, and it was very successful – instead of crisping up, the prosciutto melts softly into the hot cheese, and the arugula perches on top, wilting only slightly where it touches. A little awkward to eat, perhaps, but you can always use a fork to snatch extra leaves off the plate. We ate the leftovers for breakfast the next morning with…yup…a fried egg. Fantastic.

Our soccer team got thoroughly stomped in Bellingham last weekend, so we went to two of our favorite places to cheer ourselves up.

Boundary Bay Brewery came first. These folks make some of the best beer in the Northwest, and I’m thankful that the IPA has become pretty common on taps around the area. Jon’s partial to the Scotch, which is rich and smooth. On this visit we both got the Best Bitter, which isn’t normally available anywhere but this brewpub. Back when we were playing Irish music here every Sunday I drank quite a lot of the bitter, and I rather missed it.

It was happy hour, so we picked up a couple of barbecue pork sliders to go with our beer. The food here is always solid (we really like their lamb burger and the fish tacos) but we didn’t feel like getting dinner this time. For that we went to La Fiamma.

Just up the block from the brewery is our favorite pizza place, La Fiamma Wood Fire Pizza. We developed our standard order here years ago: a small salad, a half-carafe of the house red, and a medium Grecian Formula pizza. Sometimes we break out and get a Diablo instead, but it’s usually the Grecian.

What’s on the Grecian? Thin pieces of steak. Peppers. Spinach. Olives. Feta. Tomatoes. And a wonderful herbed white sauce that, depending on the night, either bubbles up around everything else or provides a quiet background accompaniment. We’ve tried reproducing this pizza at home but it’s never quite the same. And I love the crust on the pizzas here (not burnt, as they say, but “kissed by the flames”).

This is one of those dinners that always makes us happy, is always the right amount of food, and always keeps us coming back, even though we live half an hour away. We love La Fiamma.

This was a good pizza.

It evolved naturally, inspired more or less equally by our usual Middle Eastern Lamb Pizza, the cover of the latest Food & Wine, and a recipe in Tessa Kiros’ book Falling Cloudberries. I knew I wanted to try a pizza with a leek-based sauce (I’m on a leek kick right now), but I wanted spiced lamb on it as well. In the end, it wasn’t quite like any of the source recipes, becoming something quite perfect all on its own: a melange of braised leeks tossed with hot pepper and tamarind-spiced lamb, layered with mozzarella and adorned with small ripe tomatoes, all resting on a chewy part-whole-wheat crust.

Savory and wonderful as the pizza was, there was something that made me stop mid-chew and stare at my plate for a minute. I realized that I knew where everything on that pizza had come from! Leeks and gorgeous fiery red peppers from Hedlin Farms in La Conner, lamb from Linda Martiny, local mozzarella, Shepherd’s Grain Stone-Buhr flour, salad (with flowers sprinkled in it) from Frog’s Song, and tiny tomatoes from our deck.

The only products I couldn’t put a face to were the salt, yeast and olive oil (well, okay, and the tamarind and cinnamon). I think that’s pretty cool.

Plus it was an incredible pizza.

It was serendipitous, really. We were already planning pizza for dinner, but hadn’t given much thought to the toppings; usually we just go with tomato sauce, pepperoni and sliced olives if nothing else is really calling to us, and we always have those on hand.

In the nick of time, though, I saw a tweet from Michael Ruhlman about a homemade pizza topped with bacon, egg and asparagus. It looked amazing, and I thought, “Why have I never thought of putting bacon on a pizza? What have I been doing with my brain all this time?” Plus I adore eggs on pizza (especially with bitter greens, like one I tasted at Serious Pie), but I haven’t ever gotten the hang of it. It was time to try again.

I did my usual crust, because I still think it’s one of the best ever – just a little whole wheat, and plenty of crunch without being crackery. I like to transfer the rolled-out crust to a hot pizza stone and top it right there on the hot oven rack, which takes a bit of quick work and gets you all hot and bothered, but is much easier than trying to move a fully loaded pizza. We didn’t have any asparagus, but we did have some diced tomato left over from last week’s kebabs, so I tossed that on with the lightly sauteed bacon lardons. After five minutes I added a raw egg and let it bake another ten minutes.

It ended up being a little overdone, due to my apparent inability to tell the difference between a nicely baked-but-still-runny egg and a completely raw one – next time, I’ll take it out sooner. But it was still a swell pizza, chewy and cheesy and bacon-y. It looked so good we had to cut into it while it was still molten from the oven, and burned ourselves extremely thoroughly – ouch. It was totally worth it though. We’ll be doing this again.

As part of the Campbell Road 2009 Saint Patrick’s Week Tour (such as it was), we drove up to Lake Chelan last weekend. Chelan, which tends towards the hot and crowded in summer, is pretty calm this time of year – the hills are gray, the streets are empty, and the water level is so low that the jetties end up some distance from the actual lake. But there are still a few things to do in the area, and we did them: visit a winery, eat pizza, and hang out at the Vogue Liquid Lounge.

Chelan has one of the newest winemaking communities around – our B&B hostess remarked that there was only one winery when she moved there just a few years ago, now there are over a dozen. And they are doing some very fine work indeed. When we arrived in Chelan we had plenty of time to spare, so we headed around the lake up to Manson to visit Tildio Winery (tildio is Spanish for killdeer, a common bird in the area). We’d tasted their wines at the Vogue on previous visits, and really liked their style.

The winery and tasting room are perched on a hilltop overlooking Roses Lake, which was still frozen over on our visit (apart from a small area of open water at one end which was thinly coated with small birds). We tried all the wines available for tasting: a chardonnay-viognier blend, a riesling, a gorgeous big red blend called Robusto, a syrah and a tempranillo. All were good. We bought some. The winemaker also talked us into buying one of his malbecs and a cabernet franc, untasted – we’ll probably be waiting a while before we open those, apparently they’re still pretty tight. We stood out on the tasting room patio in the cold air, smelled the artemisia and lavender, and promised ourselves a return visit when it’s warmer.

(note: Tildio’s malbec just got selected as one of Seattle Magazine’s Best Washington Wines – check it out!)

On to dinner. For delicious, affordable food in Chelan, it’s hard to do better than Local Myth Pizza. They were celebrating their 11th anniversary when we stopped in, and as they said, in Chelan years that’s quite a lot! We got a “garden pizza” with pepperoni, and “sausage two,” which has chicken sausage and artichokes on a creamy leek sauce – a beautiful combination.

We washed down our takeout pizza with a bottle of Benson sangiovese, an estate wine from Manson which isn’t very Italian tasting, but still has a nice acidity to match pizza. And to finish, chocolate cheesecake from the Vogue. And live Irish music (by us), of course.

My favorite pizza dough recipe of all time (so far) is from the book Home Baking by Alford and Duguid. It’s just the perfect blend of white and whole wheat, with just the right amount of chew and crispiness and not at all doughy. The recipe I got it from, however, isn’t a traditional pizza – it’s a middle-eastern lamb flatbread often made as a street food.

In the original recipe, the pizzas are cooked one at a time as small, personal-size breads in a skillet, then finished under the broiler, rolled up like burritos and eaten immediately with mint and yogurt. This time, though, I wanted to have it all done at once so we could sit and enjoy our pizza together. So I followed my usual pizza-making format and baked two pizzas at very high heat, adding the toppings at appropriate points. It worked! The other way is good, but this was very, very tasty. And I was so excited to find a little bit of fresh mint in my garden to sprinkle on top!

While we were eating, I was reminded of a pizza that my friends and I often got in college – the “gyros pizza” from the two local Greek-owned pizzerias (run by competing brothers). I don’t remember the exact toppings, but it was a spiced beef or lamb pizza that always came with a container of tsatsiki sauce. It was delicious. You could definitely do the same sort of thing here, just by crushing some garlic into a bowl of yogurt, maybe adding a bit more mint. Yum.

Middle-eastern Lamb Pizza

Dough for two pizzas (you can see the recipe I use here, but you could use any good yeasted bread dough, preferably with a bit of whole wheat flour)

For the lamb topping:

• 1 lb ground lamb
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 Tbsp tamarind pulp
• 4 Tbsp hot water
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon

Additional toppings:

• fresh mint leaves, torn up
• pine nuts

Preheat the oven to 500°.

Soak the tamarind pulp in the hot water and squish it around a bit, then pour the liquid through a strainer into a small bowl. Squash the pulp against the strainer to get as much tamarind flavor into the liquid as possible. Reserve the liquid, toss the leftover pulp. 

Saute the onion in a bit of oil until translucent, then add the lamb and break it up in the pan. Add the tamarind liquid, stir well and let simmer for five minutes. Add the other seasonings and remove from the heat.

Roll out half your dough into a fairly thin round and transfer it onto your hot pizza stone. Working fast, dump half of your lamb filling onto the pizza and scatter it evenly. Get the oven door closed. After five minutes or so, pull out the rack and scatter a handful of pine nuts over the pizza. Put it back in for 3-5 minutes, until the edges of the pizza look golden and crispy. Take it out of the oven and sprinkle the fresh mint over it.

Slice and eat, dipping each piece into yogurt-garlic sauce, if desired.

I adore pizza. My parents made it at home when I was a kid, and it was classic homemade pizza – thick, soft, bready crust, lots of toppings, needed to be eaten with a fork. We sometimes went out to Godfather’s, which was a pretty standard American chain pizza. Then when I was in college I invented my own pizza using available materials: a whole wheat crust, sundried tomatoes, mozzarella and falafel. It was amazingly good (but I was starved for meat and fat that year – not the most discerning palate). I went to Italy and ate some very good and some very bad pizza (spinach with an egg on top, yum. Potatoes and salt – what was I thinking?) Then after I was married, we discovered takeout chicken alfredo pizza and stuck to that for a while.

I don’t actually remember when I started making pizza at home again. We bought a pizza stone at some point, and a peel, which I eventually learned to use without dropping the pizza down the back of the oven. I still wasn’t wild about my own homemade product – I was putting the sauce and toppings on the dough and letting it rise, then attempting to fit the whole thing into the oven without the toppings all falling off. Not easy, and not a great crust result.

Then a friend of ours who has a great deal of experience eating and making real Italian pizza had a pizza party, and it reminded me what you can do with careful attention to the crust and very simple toppings. I began to experiment with crust recipes and we scaled back to a basic mozzarella-pepperoni-basil topping as our default, then began to branch out from there. Now I feel like I have a handle on good homemade pizza, and we haven’t ordered takeout in years.

For my crust I use a recipe adapted from Home Baking by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid – it’s actually the crust for a Middle Eastern lamb and pine nut flatbread, but I really like it for pizza. It has just enough whole wheat to add flavor and it develops a great chewy crust. I use high gluten bread flour for extra chewiness.

The baking technique I owe mostly to our friend A, who makes some of the best pizza in the world. I never thought of waiting to add the toppings until the dough was on the hot stone, but it works great -

Dough for two pizzas:

• 1/2 tsp dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• about 1 1/2 cups white bread flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 small glug of olive oil (a little less than a tablespoon, I guess – I don’t measure)

Mix the yeast and water in a large bowl. Mix in the whole wheat flour and a half cup of the white bread flour. Stir it up good, cover it with a towel and let it sit for at least ten minutes. Stir in the salt, then the oil, then add more white flour and knead it a bit until it seems like a good texture. Then either let rise at room temperature for an hour and a half, or put it in the fridge for a day (I mix up the dough in the morning before work and take it out to warm up when I get home).

To bake, put a pizza stone in the oven and crank it up to 500°. Make sure it gets good and hot – just because the preheat buzzer has gone off doesn’t mean it’s really hot. Roll out half the dough into a round, flour a peel and slip the dough onto it. Then, working quickly, pull out the oven rack with the pizza stone on it, slip the dough onto the stone (it should start bubbling immediately), spread your sauce over it and sprinkle your toppings on. Pop it back in and shut the door – it should only take about ten minutes. Take the pizza out when the cheese is melted and the toppings are all bubbling nicely. Let it sit briefly before cutting.

We try to always have a good pizza wine on hand. Our usual favorite is Pietra Santa Sasso Rosso, which is cheap, tasty and comes in a seriously cute bottle. Last week we asked the wine steward at our local Haggen for something new, and she recommended a Mendocino wine, Monte Volpe Primo Rosso, which was really great – I’d buy it again.