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| Oven-Roasted |
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| Herbs |
Using the scrumptious pita bread I made yesterday, I made one of Ethan’s favorites for dinner. However, this time everything was a bit more legit. My mother finally has a garden!!! She’s been wanting to have an official garden for years now, and my father finally built her one, complete with a fence to keep deer from eating all the goodness. So before I left last weekend, she gave me pounds of tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, and peppers. She has a whole entire green hand, not just a thumb.
With all these extra goodies, I decided to make my own pizza sauce and use some of the veggies for topping. I started by quartering the tomatoes and oven-roasting them with EVOO and some thyme. They roasted at 300 for an hour. The cool thing about making sauce this way is that it can be made the night before. I roasted the tomatoes when I knew I’d be home for an hour. I happen to be staying home this summer and not working, so I had all day. But if it had been during the school year, I may have roasted them the night before while our family was eating dinner. It’s a convenience thing.
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| Before |
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| Finished |
After roasting the tomatoes, I threw them in the food processor with dashes of salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, a Tbsp. EVOO, 3 garlic cloves, and some herbs from the garden.
I grabbed a whole handful of basil, some chives(random) and some oregano from my little front-porch herb garden. They added a kick of flavor to the tomatoes, making it a real sauce instead of mere cooked tomatoes. Watching the tomatoes and spices blend together was such a beautiful kaleidoscope of colors and flavors. It was definitely the best tomato sauce I’ve made. The thickness of the sauce could be thinned with more olive oil or some lemon juice if I wanted a spaghetti sauce instead of a pizza sauce.
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| Drying it Out |
Next on the list: Tofu. One of my great friends, Mrs. Faith, encourages me to try new things. We constantly share recipes or ideas when we chat. She has a blog you can check out here. Granted, she hasn’t updated it in a while, but maybe this is the motivation she needs to get back to it. A while ago she shared her favorite way to make tofu with me (I think you can find it on her blog).
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| Cooked up |
The key to yummy tofu is drying it out. Faith uses a pan to do this. I have done that but also like using the oven because it’s less time consuming. I slice and cut up the tofu, placing it on a towel that won’t stick to the tofu. There is nothing worse than towel fiber all over your uncooked tofu. I dry it out while the oven preheats to 350. Then I cook the tofu about 10 minutes on each side. You can see when the tofu starts turning golden. Cooking the tofu brings out the actual flavor of it.
Believe it or not, tofu has it’s own flavor when cooked, folks. It’s a miracle.
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| Soy Cheese |
After it’s cooked, I sometimes marinade it, sometimes not. For the pita pizzas, I did not marinade it. If I make the same tofu for a asian rice bowl, I always marinade it in soy, garlic, saki, some pineapple, sesame seeds, etc. You could use the same marinade and make an asian-style pizza.
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| Salad |
Next I put the pizzas together, using the sauce, tofu, some flax seed for added nutrients, green onion, Trader Joe’s Roasted peppers and Kalamata Olives, and Soy Cheese. Soy Cheese is really important to this recipe because cheese is the dairy product I need to avoid. Ethan sometimes has trouble digesting lactose, so we often find ourselves eating dairy-free meals. This is problematic when your 7-year-old’s favorite food is pizza. This particular soy cheese, bought at Trader Joe’s, was great and tasted identical to cheese. Fake cheese can be a disappointment if you just eat it plain, but baked on the pita pizzas, I really couldn’t tell a difference. I cooked them at 350 for 8-10 minutes. The cheese melted but didn’t really turn brown.
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| Chill Ethan |
I threw a salad together with spinach, tomatoes, and cucumber from my mother’s garden. We used leftover Moe’s dressing from Tuesday night, when kids eat free at Moe’s, and our dinner was ready.
I think I went over well.
