Comfort Foods and Indulgences

We had overnight guests last weekend. Two couples arrived on Saturday afternoon about an hour before it got dark. The guys immediately strapped on their snowshoes and hit the trail. The “girls” stayed back, with the intention of preparing toppings for the pizzas the group would be making together for our evening meal.

It’s nice to have friends who are totally comfortable with a laid-back, casual interactive couple of hours of meal preparation. Last spring I was introduced to the recipe for homemade pizza crust in the April 2011 edition of Food & Wine magazine. The dough is great for beginners who haven’t had a lot of experience with yeast dough and who whimper at the thought of kneading dough. A stand mixer with a dough hook does all the work for you. Then, the dough raises for about 1 1/2 hours. The recipe yields 8 balls of dough that can be easily patted and rolled into 8-inch rounds. The thin pizza crusts can be topped with any of your favorite ingredients. I asked everyone to bring toppings of their choice. We wound up with a couple of mean taco pizzas. And, several “green” pizzas.

Did you know transporting leafy greens to your mouth on thin, crisp and hot pizza crust is a blissful experience? If you’ve been digging in your heels and resisting fresh leafy greens — spinach, arugula, kale, Swiss chard, collards — even though you know very well they are loaded with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and flavonoids that nourish bodies and help maintain good health, I’m here to tell you they are not as bad as you think. Especially when they are piled onto pizza just out of the oven.

We love chili. Enough said, really.

The weather has finally turned and Fall is in the air. While the rain and gloomy weather is not good for the wine grapes, it is chili weather.

There are so many versions of chili out there. At our house, we prefer chili without beans, the real way to make chili, he-he. However, I love Cincinnati chili with all of its 3-way and 4-way styles. Yum.

I have to admit, my chili changes a little bit each time, based on the amount of meat I have or what chili powders I have. However, the overall style does not change. This chili is great by itself or poured over things like hot dogs and burgers or even chili fries. Okay, chili fries sound good right about now.

I’m a firm believer in the adage that a tiny plot can feed a whole lot! Granddaddy’s tomatoes keep rolling in and BLT’s, pies, sauce, and simply sliced dishes of tomatoes are abounding on our tables.

Mimi, as is her custom, has toast and tea every morning for breakfast..... as her grandmother did. Sourdough buttered and toasted and glazed with a seasonal spread is de rigueur. Taking the tone from the toast in the iron skillet and the tomatoes on the windowsill (Mimi and Granddaddy always have tomatoes on their windowsills May through October), the cultures of Italy and Deep Down Dixie merge for a delicious starter, meal or snack that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed this summer. The addition of an over easy egg gives a huevos rancheros nod to the dish and a dose of protein too. ¡Olé!'!

As a fan of breakfast for supper, this dish is at home to kick off the day or cap the day or really anytime in between. Taking literally a few minutes to prepare, you’ll love the way the egg yolk nods along with the tomato and basil sing-a-long. The crusty sourdough toast soaks up all it can and give you an excuse to use your hands to scrape the last bit with the crust. Leave off the egg for a traditional bruschetta that is nothing shy of divine.

From the L.A. Times

In Italy's Piedmont region, where polenta may be better loved than anywhere else on Earth, the cornmeal mush is a food of the fall. When the air turns crisp with the first frost and people await the arrival of snow, housewives labor over their cooking pots, stirring, stirring as coarse meal slurried in water gradually thickens and becomes sticky and delicious. To serve, it's poured out onto a wooden board in a rich golden puddle like a harvest moon.

Cesare Pavese wrote about it in "The Moon and the Bonfires," a nostalgic novel about a Piedmontese expatriate's return home: "These are the best days of the year. Picking grapes, stripping vines, squeezing the fruit, are no kind of work; the heat has gone and it's not cold yet; under a few light clouds you eat rabbit with your polenta and go after mushrooms."

We do things differently in Southern California. In the first place, fall can be even hotter than summer. Here polenta belongs to these damp chilly days of winter.

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