Pizza, with a Mediterranean Flair…

This pizza was created and cooked by Mr. Food Groove, and we both very much enjoyed it! It’s light, very tasty and flavorful. The goat cheese is definitely the star in this one, which is just how we wanted it. He used a Boboli pizza crust as the base and drizzled some olive oil on top. Next, he added crumbled goat cheese. In a saute pan with some more olive oil, he cooked up some minced garlic and red onion. Added to that mix were artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes. Once that was all cooked through, the mixture went on top of the goat cheesed crust. Finally, a small bit of shredded cheese was sprinkled on top. Cook in the oven for about 12 minutes and yum!! Here’s the list of ingredients:

• Boboli Pizza Crust
• Olive Oil
• Crumbled Goat Cheese
• Garlic, minced
• Red Onion, chopped
• Artichoke Hearts
• Sun-Dried Tomatoes
• Shredded Cheese

We enjoyed it because it was a lighter style of pizza, without a traditional sauce as the base. The olive oil and goat cheese were the stars of the show, only enhanced by the other toppings. Definitely two forks up!

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The Egg Poaching Pan…

So, D. recently picked up this egg poaching pan, because we’d been talking about eggs benedict and poaching eggs. I had one previously, a hand-me-down from my parents… I remember eating poached eggs on toast, cooked in that very pan. Actually (I just remembered), my dad made a metal plate to cover one of the openings where the egg cup had been lost. Dad is always good with stuff like that. 😉 Anyway, that pan got purged in the move out here… I think we figured if we really wanted an egg poaching pan later, we could always find another one, and besides, another egg cup had been lost since. Which made using that one particularly steamy and potentially hazardous. Anyway, two years later, it was time for another pan.

We’re going to try Eggs Benedict this evening… We shall see how it goes. I think this is one of those dishes that is a bit more tricky than it looks. All the same, we have a dozen eggs, so there’s backup if we need ’em. Worst case scenario = scrambled eggs and ham. 🙂

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New Toaster Oven Time, soon…

D. saw a toaster oven that he really liked recently. He said it had something like a 12″ x 12″ opening, which does sound nice. Not too long ago I hit the top of my finger on the heating element in our current one, so I got a slight burn. We’ve also had food items go aflame in there, too. One was stuffed mushrooms that were a bit too tall for the oven apparently, and the other was some turkey bacon that turned into a light show. Not a bad lil oven, really, but more and more it seems a bit small for our needs. Plus, we tend not to use the big oven particularly in the summer, so it’d be nice to have a smaller yet better-functional version available.

This is the one that caught our attention when we were out and about today. It’s sizable, both in width and in height. It’s also a convection oven, which I don’t know much about, other than I think it’s a very even way of cooking/heating. There is also a ‘Dehydrate’ feature that piqued my interest. I wonder if I can make oven-dried tomatoes in it? 🙂 If we end up getting up (probably more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’), I think I’ll test the dehydrating feature on banana slices first. For some reason, they seem like they would be an easier food to try it on. If you take a look, don’t let the online price fool you… we found it for much less. Granted, it was at the big sucky store that I hate, but unfortunately, sometimes we really have no other option. I’m not even gonna get started on that one… 😉

UPDATE: Ooh, I just noticed that this toaster oven has a ‘variable broil’, along with an interior light. We really can’t broil in our current big oven, because it’s just too damn hot too fast. Literally, one minute in there and say, a cheese topping, is burnt. Not our stove so we can’t do anything about that. This variable option sounds just lovely. I’m such a kitchen geek sometimes… 🙂

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