Comfort Foods and Indulgences

True confession…I’m not a huge red sauce fan, but I do love pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, etc…just with downplayed marinara and jazzed up cream sauce or cheese. A quick meal for two, this pizza can be doubled for a group or shared easily betwixt a couple folks. Paired with a good wine, this made a fine little supper. With a white pizza, I chose a white wine, Macon-Villages Chardonnay, which paired wonderfully with the pizza (said wine has been reviewed well with cheeses and cream dishes…this pizza vouched for that!).

Simple yet rustically elegant, this little meal came together in a flash. Good ingredients, fresh herbs, and an infused olive layered upon a crispy crust hit the spot. Since I always have rosemary and parsley on hand, they were the top candidates for this pizza. The latter herb is highly underrated – parsley has a wonderfully unsullied flavor and tastes somewhat like it looks… green, crisp, and fresh.

The bakery section of my grocery store has pizza dough for sale and it’s delicious. This dough is one I say to cheat with, since they’ve already made it and it’s just waiting for you to bake it. The canned versions aren’t bad either.

My mom says I have expensive taste. You wouldn’t know it by the stores I go to, such as Marshall’s and Loehmann's. Yet, when it comes to eating, I like high quality foods and am more than willing to splurge.

That’s why I didn’t hesitate to buy saffron. Well, that’s not really true. I did hesitate. Not because of the price; because I have an uneasy relationship with saffron. It’s sort of like kissing someone, and the "wow" factor just isn’t there. You know, he’s a nice guy, but there aren’t any fireworks. So, you give him another try, and it’s great. Then the next time it's only so-so. You know what I mean? That’s been my experience with saffron. (Not with guys; Jeff has always been a great kisser).

I’m unequivocal when it comes to food – when I don't like something, I don't usually try it again. Which is why I’m surprised about my willingness to give saffron another chance. When I first tasted it in a great Indian restaurant, I found its floral overtones unpalatable. I thought I would be put off saffron forever after that. However, another delicious Indian restaurant redeemed saffron for me by serving it in a lovely rice and pea dish. Since then, I've had it in Spanish and Middle Eastern dishes and have begun cooking with it (to mixed results). Yet, the recipe I share today is a keeper. And coming from me, that is high praise.

We made these for a crowd and watched them vanish in five minutes…My husband and I do not need brownies; we’ve eaten enough of them already to meet our lifetime quota and to account for certain body changes that I will not describe here. But Tom is a hopeless chocoholic, so on the occasions when I make brownies to curry favor with my kids’ friends, I have to keep an eye on them.

For a long time, when brownies disappeared from the cooling rack and my husband seemed the obvious perpetrator, he would issue a denial and look meaningfully in the direction of Oliver, our dog. So I thought the golden retriever was both amazingly athletic (how did he reach the brownies I placed behind the kitchen sink?) and had a remarkable tolerance for chocolate, a substance that is notorious for making dogs ill.

But then, on a recent occasion, I left a hot brownie batch on the counter to cool and took Oliver for a walk. When I returned and noticed that the baking pan was half empty, I did a breathalizer test on napping Tom. Sure enough: chocolate breath. (And a messy crime scene: brown crumbs on the sofa.)

I’ve steered clear of biscuit-making ever since I mixed up a crumbly mess of dry ingredients with butter and buttermilk years ago. The end result, inedible hockey pucks, came after a very frustrating baking experience. The wanna-be biscuits wound up in the garbage. That was when I decided I just didn’t need to ever, ever be making biscuits. And that’s why, when Katie Novotny, owner of St. Paul Classic Cookie Co. said that scones are simply a biscuit, I got nervous.

Katie Novotny offered to show members of my Bemidji Cookbook Club how to make the perfect scone. We gathered in her bitty bakery with an enormous menu of sweet treats in the south St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul on a recent Friday morning.

She sliced small chunks of butter into a bowl holding her measured dry ingredients, emphasizing the fact the butter must be well-chilled. I use the same technique when I make my favorite recipe for scones — the ones I plop onto a baking sheet using a measuring cup. That technique keeps my hands off the dough, convincing me that I am making scones, not biscuits.