The Lazy Gourmet

[thedarkestcolors]

leak + shrooms + cream (lots) + garlic +  minced meat (makes it better, but isn't nec.) on pasta (the wide and long)

or

white part of mangold + [poop] tons of garlic + lots of cream --> on 1/2 of the rice
green part of mangold in olive oil & salt--> on the other 1/2 of the rice
sometimes I also mix, but usually I prefer them seperated

are usually my lazy dishes.

If I get super lazy its df spinache + some df fish + potatoes/ pasta, but that hardly qualifies as cooking I suppose.

[Buster's Uncle]

Interesting.

Sorry about the edit; language.

[Buster's Uncle]

I dunno; it's simple, and there's a lot of details, but the simple I already gave is all you really need.

One day in 1988, I was making a pizza from a grocery store pizza kit -box with the crust mix, a can of very good sauce, and an parmesan/romano powdery cheese mix, also pretty good if you grew up on those kit pizzas.  I hadn't done this a million times and as I was pulling bacon, hamburger, sausage and cheddar cheese out to prepare and add -those kit pizzas are more than a little scant with only what's in the kit, but a decent starting point- and I was thinking out loud to myself about how much of everything to add.  My roommate's girlfriend (who was shacked up with us in a one bedroom apartment and not kicking in on rent, and why I swore to never again share a sleeping room with anyone I wasn't intimate with so long as I live) said "Why not more?"

And so I was very generous with adding everything, and it was win, and things ballooned from there, and my social circle ended up acclaiming me the Pizza God a few months later.

It got so I was keeping 11 kinds of cheese in my fridge in my next (much roomier, I had my own bedroom and no 'extra' roommates) apartment, and going through it faster than any of it could get moldy.  The more kinds of cheese, the better the end result tastes - I really don't know why that is.  For two 12" pizzas, or one 16", it cost about 20 1988-89 dollars in ingredients and several hours cooking up the hamburger (five-six patties' worth) sausage (a whole tube) and bacon (1 pound).  And I can give no amounts on the cheese, save that I grated a little each of 11 kinds and got a high-peaking pile that filled a dinner plate.  All that meat cost, but it was the cheese that was dearest.

At those kinds of prices -things like peperoni and green peppers were negligible-  I wanted to get the most food/filling value I could, and couldn't add THAT much sauce, so I went for more, thicker crust, the flour and water being practically free by comparison.  I'd melt a stuck of margarine, and set it aside while I stirred yeast and self-rising flour (I know they're not supposed to play well together, but I got good results) and water together in a big bowl, adding the margarine somewhere in the middle, adding flour and water until I deemed I had enough batter at the right thickness experimentation had taught me worked.  I never had any sort of recipe for that part, and just winged it - and people told me the buttery thick fluffy crust was what really set it apart.  I'd set aside the batter to rise while I worked on the other ingredients.

I liked to set the sauce on simmering low early - canned tomato paste to which I added oregano and the usual pizza suspects (I hadn't discovered sage back then) (I liked to put a little parmesan directly in the sauce).  And the rest was a couple hours of frying pan work and cutting things up.

The assembly and baking of the pizza was almost an anticlimax (pile ingredients away from the center on a really thick pizza, or you'll have trouble removing slices intact before it's cooled) after all the work preparing, and I don't actually remember the baking temperature, except that it was slightly higher than the recommended on the kits I started out with - and it was done when the cheese just began to scorch a little.  Slightly scorched hurts nothing and helps the thick slices stay intact hot out of the oven.  (A trick I worked out was to cook all the meat toppings just a little less than I'd want to eat them at, so's they didn't dry out too much during the baking to cook the crust and melt the cheese - especially the bacon, the last thing to go on top and most exposed/most delicious ingredient you didn't want to cook all the flavor out of in advance, so not quite crispy until the baking.)

Mysteriously, it tastes even better the next day re-warmed in the microwave.  I swear, and why is a complete mystery.  -Why there's leftovers is NOT, provided I didn't have a bunch of people over.  One slice is a lot of food.

My parties -no music, no drinking, no dancing- were VERY popular...

---

Honestly, I'm out of practice and have lost my touch with all the technique I claim isn't important, and the few pizzas I've made in the last decade, not near so divine as I was managing well into the 90s while I stayed in practice.  Doing renfairs on the road, living in a tent, touched the hem of my garment and stole my virtue.  But boy, if you could help me in the kitchen for two or three hours 20 years ago, I could have TAUGHT you something useful.  SHOWN you the bacon-and-cheese-covered light.  Sadly, the student I've worked with most, Momma, has an opposite approach to cooking -and anything she has to do over and over too many times- that she's a corner-cutter, exactly the wrong attitude.  -So, she got the techniques -to the extent she didn't cut THOSE corners over the years- and denies the philosophy.

She is my Peter, crying "I don't know him!" (Her pizza, however, IS generously supplied with mushrooms, Rusty - and mope than middlin' good.)

[Buster's Uncle]

And since someone will ask - cheddar, mozzarella, monterey jack, gouda, provolone, muenster, romano and parmesan are what I remember off the top of my head.

They're all white or orange, and it's not a bad idea at all to segregate colors and do something decorative when applying toppings.  If you have bell peppers gone green yellow and red, likewise for those - I improvised a very pretty one with peppers a roommate chipped in a few years after college.  Also, really delicious with a lot of bell peppers that time...

[Rusty Edge]

I think the reason it tastes better as a leftover has to do with the number and type of cheeses. Your recipe is sort of lasagna-esque.

[Buster's Uncle]

I hate  lasagna, and Mom only uses cheddar, mozzarella and parmesan (if she remembers we keep parmesan) and her pizza gets the same effect.

[Buster's Uncle]

Edam.  I left out edam cheese.

---

One hopes when I give utter non-recipes, the stories that go with them at least make the ride worth it...

[Unorthodox]

My bet is it's the sausage.  A lot of my sausage dishes taste better a day later.  To the point I like to make my sausage gravy a day early and reheat it.

[Buster's Uncle]

I've frequently suggested making pizza the day before, or at least finishing an hour or two in advance and microwaving - but cursory experimentation tended to indicate the latter didn't help.  I'd wondered if it was the microwave doing it but it seems it's time and/or the fridge.

The former has the problem of a lot of work and it smells so good NOW...

[Buster's Uncle]

In an utter coincidence -last time Mom started spaghetti a week or two ago, I mentioned being tired of it and why not pizza- I'm eating some Disciple Peter Pizza at the keyboard.  Momma thinks the second day effect is something to do with being a tomato sauce dish...

Mine in the old days was a lot better, but this is still pretty darn good.

(She forgot she had parmesan on the counter again.  I could make stuff this good up, but don't have to.)

[Rusty Edge]

Resolved: The next pizza in this house is getting more kinds of cheese added.

[Unorthodox]

Lazy yesterday, so going to be trying a new means of cooking curry tonight.  (normally I make a day ahead)  It's an idea in my head, not much more than that right now.  Should land somewhere between Korma and Masala. 

Trying to feed the fam tonight and have enough for hEt to eat at work for the rest of the week. 

[Buster's Uncle]

This is how a good cook learns - taking the risk of trying things.

[Rusty Edge]

I had plans for dinner tonight, to use up some odds and ends. Been a week or so since our last trip to the grocery. I guess I should consider it a complement that the in-laws like my cooking, but it results in a dynamic head count, which tends to go up during the planning and prep phases, the go down by dinner time. Well, I guess there's a family history of shopping around for dinner, because they used to live in a duplex. I hate wasting food. I hate eating all of the leftovers myself. I had to change my plans and go to the store.

Well, it turned out being lazy, I got a shepherd's pie. Someday when my wife is making pie crusts, maybe I can talk her into making one from scratch, so that I can make a shepherd's pie from scratch.
I'm not a fan of the Birdseye frozen mixed vegetables the store  deli uses.

[Unorthodox]

Should land somewhere between Korma and Masala. 

Decent Korma, actually. 

Same trouble I keep having in the not being able to get the consistency where I like it, though.  I think the new method is promising in that respect, though, just need to refine it a bit.