Blog Archives
Pizza Lab #18: Tikka Pizza
Believe it or not, Meg A. and I plan our Pizza Lab choices pretty well ahead of the time, for the most part. Sometimes we throw it together last minute, but most of them come from a laundry list of ideas and experiments. This month’s Pizza Lab actually has been on the drawing board for quite sometime, originally being formulated almost a year ago! The two of us love Indian food and a trip to the local curry house wouldn’t be complete without some Chicken Tikka. Yes, I realize it’s heavily Americanized (or technically Englandized since they’ve erroneously claimed it to be “a true British national dish” years ago, despite originating in Punjab) however its flavor and background undeniably lies in Indian cuisine. As such we tossed around the idea for a pizza featuring curry spices and soon the idea for a Tikka Pizza was born.
Also, it’s just really fun to say ‘tikka pizza’.
Food 101: How To Grill Roast Corn On The Cob
It pains me to say this, but I will be the first to admit there’s not a lot of foods America can call claim to which aren’t disgusting amalgamations of street trash and bacon. Many of our biggest, most popular foodstuffs here are derived from other countries, brought over by immigrants and modified to match our own culture. It’s all yummy, but it does make me shed a patriotic tear of sadness once in a while to think about. Fortunately, there are still a few foods here and there which we can proudly take credit for here in ‘Murrica, one of the most notable ones being corn.
Pizza Lab #9: Three-Cheese Pesto Grilled Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
I’m a big fan of Autumn, most of my friends know this. I recently went on about this in my pumpkin spice article. Despite this, September always was a bittersweet month, since Summer is still my favorite time of year no matter what. Halloween and pumpkins are nice, but IMO it’s not quite worth the loss of wearing nothing but t-shirts and driving with the windows down. So before the end of Summer, Meg and I wanted to do one last grilled pizza before temperatures dropped back into the 50s and 60s, making grilling your foods inappropriate and silly (unless of course you live in the south where it’s probably state-law to never go more than a month without igniting your barbecue). We grow lots of basil every summer, and thus make a lot of pesto each year. This combined with the fact that our last grilled pizza almost resembled a panino sandwich in texture made us realize we absolutely needed to make some sort of Tuscan pesto chicken panini inspired pizza. And while this was one of the more tame ideas for a Pizza Lab, it ended up being delicious to the point of borderline sexy.
Three-Cheese Pesto Grilled Pizza
Erik S. So this pizza was pretty okay I guess.
Meg A. Just okay?
Erik S. Sorry, that was a typo… So this pizza was OH MY GOD IT WAS SO OH MY GOD.
Meg A. Haha, that’s better. This pizza was indeed pretty magical. But we knew it was gonna be awesome from the beginning.
Erik S. Magical is a good way to describe it. Only pure magic could have produced such euphoria.
Meg A. Yeah, in our heads (and our noses) we had a pretty good inkling it was gonna be a sheer delight. It’s also probably the most decadent pizza we’ve made yet
Erik S. It’s interesting too considering it’s one of the least outlandish ones we’ve made too.
Meg A. True. It’s the most traditional-ish.
Erik S. Hm. Looking back at the photos is taking me back. Oh man… We need to relive that pizza some day. I’m feeling feelings.
Meg A. Do you need a minute? Don’t forget to lock your door…
Pizza Lab #7: Grilled Summer Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
So plants are blooming, the sun is shining, and old people are complaining about the weather. Ah, Summer in New York. With our entry into the month of July, we start that march onward into the hot part of season. Personally I’m a fan of seasons, so even when it’s hot during the Summer, I don’t have too much of a problem, as long as I have air conditioning to retreat to. With the beautiful weather comes an array of awesome outdoorsy activities that can only be enjoyed at this time of year, such as going in the pool, playing tennis, barbecuing, and many others. So to usher in the Fourth of July, and the official, unofficial-official start of Summer, we wanted to be timely for once, and go barbecue a pizza outside. We did not want to stay inside and go quietly into the night. We’re going to survive. We’re going to live on. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.
(Incidentally, Erik once delivered that speech verbatim to a crowd of drunken party guests as his whiskey toast to the end of the world.)
Grilled Summer Pizza
Meg A. So it seems like we just did a Pizza Lab…
Erik S. You say it like it’s a problem.
Meg A. Well, no, I’m not complaining about eating delicious pizza obviously, haha.
Erik S. Good. That would be just plain silly.
Meg A. Well we decided to try and do them a bit more frequently during the summer when I don’t have soul crushing school work taking up all my time.
Erik S. Yeah, it’s for the best. And this pizza fits that theme perfectly since it’s a Summer pizza.
Meg A. That’s true, we did set out this time to make an obligatory Summer-themed pizza. This was another pizza that involved some brainstorming, since we started with just the broad concept of “a grilled pizza.”
Erik S. Fortunately that discussion went a little shorter than the Pretzel Pizza.
Meg A. Yeah. Since it’s us we knew there’d probably be chicken on it. And I wanted to put watermelon on it since watermelon is one of the classic summer foods. Oh and grilled watermelon is also a thing.
Erik S. It is indeed a thing haha.
Meg A. A thing we will probably never try again. Haha.
Erik S. Yeahhh… but hey, Pizza Lab is all about learning and science, and at the end of the day we learned that grilled watermelon tastes a lot like grilled zucchini. Which was pretty fuckin’ weird…
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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