Blog Archives
Pizza Lab #13: Pesto Green 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.
With the holidays finally over, everyone is finally back in gear, with it being the third week of January. Here at Poor Couple’s Food Guide, we’re back at work in our secret laboratory churning out awesome recipes for everyone to enjoy. That’s not to say we took an entire break over Christmas! It wouldn’t be a month without Pizza Lab, and as such we made one for both experimentation of using green-colored cheese, as well as to give us something edible in the Italian-American seafood onslaught known as Christmas Eve. Winter can be tough, and January is a relatively crummy month since it’s host to blizzards, long periods of days below freezing, and post-Christmas bouts of depression. If you fall into the latter category, then we have a month-late surprise to cheer you up!
Disclaimer: I swear to God this isn’t lettuce, it’s cheese.
Pizza Lab #12: Pumpkin Pie 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.
Poor, poor Thanksgiving. It gets the shaft compared to many of the big holidays. While once a celebration of being humble and grateful for what you have in your life, regardless of any lifestyle or belief or faction, it has instead devolved into a tradition of cramming as much food down your throat as physically possible and then complaining about it later. It’s a shame considering it’s one of my favorite holidays due to the rustic nature and themes going on in its season. But unfortunately consumerism and merchandising companies have decided to rename Thanksgiving Day to Get Great Black Friday Deals With Doorbusters Savings Starting 5PM Thursday Day. For the rest of us who still love the message of the holiday, there’s still much joy to be had in all the various traditional, yummy foods that we partake in. As mentioned from time to time, Meg and I already did a Thanksgiving pizza earlier this year (in May for some reason), so if we wanted to do a timely Pizza Lab, we had to be creative. The product was another dessert pizza that fit well into the Thanksgiving season.
Erik: Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and Thanksgiving Pizza was definitely one of my favorites that we made. But why on Earth did we have to go and make it in May? Haha.
Meg: Yeah, that was kind of a bad call on our part. But we were young and excited about fun pizza choices. We weren’t thinking ahead.
Erik: Ah well. In the very least, it led to our latest experiment, Pumpkin Pie Pizza.
Meg: Yup! While we never originally intended our pizza labs to correspond to the occasions surrounding their creation, it kind of just happened naturally. In the summer we were in the mood for grilled pizza, in November we wanted pumpkin pie.
Erik: That doesn’t sound unintentional to me… Heh.
Meg: Well you know what I mean. When we started pizza lab it wasn’t like, “We must make a pizza that corresponds to its proper month.” Though if we had the original Thanksgiving pizza probably wouldn’t have been in April.
Erik: What a sad thought! To have been deprived of it until just now…
Meg: True. It’s for the best we made it when we did.
Pizza Lab #11: Limburger 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 it’s November already, huh? What a shame Meg and I already created a Thanksgiving Pizza for Pizza Lab months ago. Hindsight may be 20/20, but now that I’m trying to look back, I can’t exactly remember the rationale in making a Thanksgiving-themed pizza back in the springtime… No matter. Time marches on, and so does Meg and I’s experimenting on all things food. If you recall, Meg recently gave her positive thoughts on everybody’s favorite stinky cheese, limburger. Being unabashedly weird and having a fondness for various weird things, the two of us knew we couldn’t settle with just the one review and call it a day. Instead, we surmised the possibility of a Pizza Lab involving the limburger and give it a send off worthy of our new favorite cheese.
Meg A. Once we realized there’d be leftover Limburger from our cheese adventure, we knew we had to use it on a pizza. We are us after all.
Erik S. Haha yeah, just trying limburger wasn’t enough, heh.
Meg A. Yet despite knowing for about a month we wanted to make this pizza, we kinda put the plans for it together rather slapdash. I fear we let the limburger down a bit.
Erik S. Yeah, we had a loose idea of a pizza, but it was literally the night before we made it, that we actually made a solid plan. Despite how some of our pizzas may look, we do generally put a lot of thought into them.
Meg A. Yeah, this one… we sorta dropped the ball on. We’ve been busy! Bah. Stupid lives and responsibilities we have. It should all just be baking pizza.
Erik S. Oh God I wish… It really should.
Meg A. But even with the relative lack of planning, the pizza still turned out pretty darn good! It has the potential to be my 5th favorite savory pizza we made. Pretty much the only thing keeping it from that was the unfortunate use of maple bacon.
Erik S. Yeah, once again bacon screwed us over in a Pizza Lab. We put too much faith in it for the Disco Fries pizza, and now this time it messed up our Limburger pizza.
Meg A. What makes it even worse is that in retrospect we probably didn’t even really need it. The few strips of regular we had would likely have been enough.
Erik S. Yeah… lesson learned for next time.
Pizza Lab #10: Apple Crisp 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.
It’s interesting to think there’s been ten Pizza Labs already. One a month, and we’ve got plenty more in the pipeline, trust me. That brings me to our first Fall-themed Pizza Lab! One of my favorite Fall foods/crops is apples. And actually not just Fall-wise, apples are some of my favorite food period, since they’re a delight to eat. A good apple is crisp, sweet, refreshing and juicy. Eating one is so frigging good that it’s basically like eating and drinking at the same time, considering how juicy and pleasant they are compared to some of your less juice-filled fruits (I’m looking at you, mangosteen). One perennial apple dish we all enjoy this time of year is none other than apple crisp, a delicious baked amalgamation of oats, sugar, spices, and apple slices. Which incidentally sounds way too much like some sort of stupid autumnal nursery rhyme adage, but I digress. This was the perfect opportunity to try and bring apples and pizza together in some holy-ass food matrimony.
Erik S. So we have been pretty much drowning in apples lately.
Meg A. That we have. Though I think “crushed by” is the more appropriate term since we didn’t make enough cider to drown in. But I’m pretty sure a sink full of apples would do some damage.
Erik S.This is true. And all being said, I’m not complaining either. Apples are my favorite fruit afterall.
Meg A. They are really yummy. Though actually, we had the idea for this pizza way before the onslaught of apples occurred.
Erik S. Yeah it’s going way back actually. This pizza was conceived in thought back when we were discussing our pretzel pizza.
Meg A. Yup! I’m really glad we saved it for its own pizza though.
Erik S. Yeah, it was a long time coming since apple season was months away at that point, but it was worth it. I am definitely spoiled, having an apple tree in the yard.
Meg A. You are very spoiled. Some of us actually have to leave our driveways to go get apples.
Erik S. Well I also don’t eat apples the rest of the year, so it balances out.
Meg A. I suppose.
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…
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