Saturday, September 11, 2010

Artichoke, roasted bell peppers, and goat cheese pizza

It's so nice that I can call home from work and ask Mark to make pizza! By the time I get home, the dough is rising. But we don't have tomato sauce, so he can't make his regular tomatoey-cheesy pizza, so I have to come up with one of my gross pizza toppings. We had goat cheese, so I image-googled "goat cheese pizza", and one of the more appealing pizza was topped with artichokes (we just got a couple!) and roasted bell pepper (we just had one in the garden that was of a reasonable size [=not ridiculously small])! The only problem was, these veggies were completely raw, and I had no idea how to prepare them. Thank god to web instructions! I successfully roasted the red bell pepper on our gas stove, and learned how to prepare the artichoke hearts following these useful videos.
Next I sliced the roasted pepper to strips, and cooked the artichoke hearts in water. I drizzled some olive and balsamic vinegar on the cooked artichoke hearts after thinly slicing them, spread some salt, and let them sit for a while and absorb the flavors.
I also also reduced some balsamic vinegar and drizzled it on top of the topped pizza, just to make it perfect. And perfect it was!

Monday, September 6, 2010

Falafel in Pita

Because that's the right way to eat it!


I didn't make the falafel from scratch, but used the excellent Tarazi falafel mix. The great thing about it, is that you can easily bake the falafel instead of frying them - it says so on the box! What it doesn't say is how long to bake and at what temperature, which I had to look for online. I found that 375 degrees F and 15 minutes work.

Besides the falafel, there's a simple cucumber-tomato salad (all from our garden!) dressed with some olive oil and lemon juice, homemade hummus*, and tahini.

The pitas were of course made from scratch! They are nothing like the store bought pitas. I'm always amazed at how bad pitas here are. Even when you buy them from middle eastern stores. Pitas in Israel (mostly those made by Palestinians) are so much better!! Well, by baking them yourself**, you can have a taste of real pitas.


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*If you follow the hummus recipe, it's worthwhile reading the first comment, which is actually an update by the recipe author.

**There are a lot of pita recipes online, and they all look pretty much the same. Give one of them a try! Mark just mixed and matched recipes to the point he was comfortable with it. I like the directions in this recipe.