BBQ Chicken Pizza

More food!  In addition to the crockpot, I also received a pizza stone and peel for Christmas.  I was pretty excited about this – I hate how pizza tends to be soggy in the middle and burnt around the edges, so I was pretty sure that the pizza stone would solve all of my problems.

The inaugural pizza was BBQ chicken.  I bought the dough fresh at the grocery store and topped it with barbeque sauce, a ton of red onion, bacon, chicken and mozzarella cheese.  In reading the instructions for the peel, they noted that you should dust it with cornmeal before putting the dough down.  I would like to know their definition of the word dust, because my pizza got horribly stuck!  I had to lift up the edges and keep throwing more and more cornmeal underneath the pizza to make it slide off the peel and onto the stone.  I did manage it eventually, and a major dinner crisis was averted.  So, in all – a liberal coating of the peel would be a good idea!

Verdict?  The pizza stone rocks!  The bottom of the crust was crispy, but the inside wasn’t overdone.  It was probably the best pizza I have ever made!

New Year’s Resolutions

I don’t usually make new year’s resolutions, but this year I’ve made a few.  A major one is to get back to posting regularly!  Secondary to that, I’ve decided that I need to entertain more at home, so that might benefit the blog as well, since there is usually food involved in entertaining!

Speaking of food, I got a crockpot for Christmas!  For its inagural run, I decided to make a recipe from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which I also received for Christmas.  There is an entire chapter devoted to slow cooker and pressure cooker recipes.  Eventually I settled on Lamb Vindaloo.

I was a little concerned about my ability to find a boneless leg of lamb, but it was right there in the Star market by my work.  It was a little over five pounds – huge!

After trimming off most of the fat (and skin?) I cut the lamb up into big chunks, about 1½ inch cubes.  After seasoning with salt and pepper they were seared in some oil.  It smelled so good!

While this was going on, Tim played sous-chef and chopped onions and garlic.

I cooked down the onions, then added spices and then the garlic.  This also smelled wonderful!

The meat and the onions were refrigerated separately overnight and then in the morning I dumped them all into the crock pot with some broth and let it cook all day.  Once I got home I thickened the sauce with some flour, added some fresh cilantro and made some basmati rice.

It was a wonderful meal!  And it made so much that we had leftovers for days – which is an amazing thing considering the voracious appetite of my sous-chef!

I have a feeling that the crock pot will be making many appearances on our dinner table for the next few months!