Stories

I grew up eating my fair share of great Chicago pizza. My family made the drive from St. Paul to Chicago a few times each year to visit all the relatives living there. Laden with spicy Italian sausage and creamy cheese that stretched in long strings as I pulled the slice away from my mouth, I thought Chicago pizza was the best food in the world.

With that in mind, I feel a little silly calling this concoction of mine a pizza. It’s nothing like the Chicago pizza I grew up on. But it is on a flat piece of dough with several ingredients piled on top along with mozzarella cheese.

Arugula on my pizza was only a thought after I’d prepared an Arugula Salad for this week’s newspaper column. I had a small amount of the green ingredients left from the salad — arugula, spinach and tiny fresh green peas. Along with a few other little odds and ends from my refrigerator, I decided to create a pizza.

Summer is my least favorite season. I am a ghostly pale person, I sweat easily, and I do not garden successfully. I am allergic to chlorine and can’t spend days by the pool without breaking out in hives, and I am not generally given to hiking, camping, kayaking or doing any of those other things that involve being outside, sweating, and getting burned. I complain a lot about the heat, which may explain why I often find myself alone in my air conditioned house drinking iced tea and reading.

Today, though, today it was 80 degrees after an interminable and bitterly cold winter. Stepping outside tentatively in my cotton skirt and flip flops, I was overwhelmed by sense memories, good ones, the kind that made me sit down on the peeling porch steps and savor them. As the hair at the back of my neck coiled inexorably into ringlets, and the warm air extended its seductive fingers to touch parts of me that have not been unwrapped in public for five months, it seemed that maybe I didn’t hate summer any more.

I remembered all of the Only Summer things, the Farmer’s Market on Sunday morning, bags full of vegetable love in the form of tiny Patty Pan squash, gritty zucchini, scallions with shining white bulbs, garlic scapes, baby eggplants, tiny and fiery Hmong peppers, and the tomatoes, oh Lord the tomatoes in their juicy, flashy glory.

“This will make you feel awake, and healthy.” The promise made to me as I ordered a 3 day Blueprint Cleanse online recently. The healthy part I believed, but awake? How could 3 straight days of just juice and no solids make me feel anything that I aspire to feel in my waking hours, especially if I’m not even allowed coffee, or as it was gently explained to me, ‘you can have coffee, but you’ll feel better if you don’t have it.’ Marketing disguised as self-motivation proved extremely effective, and sure enough, on Day 3 of the ‘Cleanse,’ I felt extremely awake and alert (albeit short-winded) on a run up Runyon Canyon, (truthfully more of a slow jog behind my brother whose college fraternity has apparently turned him into a drill sergeant.)

But I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t lethargic.

I am not somebody who can go without food for four hours, let alone three days. I have never been successful on a diet, if you don’t count when I was five years old and had to stop eating French Toast in order to lower my cholesterol. These days I have a genuine interest in being healthy, but not exactly a full-fledged allegiance. So the Blueprint Cleanse, a local New York company, seemed perfect for me.

Who doesn't love roast chicken? It's one of my favorite things to eat mostly because I can't get enough crispy skin. But getting the skin to crisp can be one of the hardest parts of roasting a whole chicken. That's why I prefer roasting the chicken in parts, particularly the breasts, which can dry out when roasted on the whole bird. Pan-roasting is one of the easiest and most rewarding methods for cooking chicken breasts.

First, they are seared skin side down in a pan on the stove-top to ensure the skin is golden brown and crisp. Then they are baked in the oven to cook the meat through. The result is exceptionally moist and succulent breasts with bronzed crispy skin. It's mouth-watering chicken even better than a steak. To make this dish complete, I roast carrots alongside the breasts in the same pan. This way an entire meal comes together very quickly.