Grilled Pizza: Bear Locker Surprise

Camping is all about the food.  Well, OK, and the relaxation and the decompression and the breathing fresh air and the listening to loons and the blah blah blah, but for me, all of that is accentuated by and/or includes eating and cooking.  I see no reason to sacrifice wine and cheese appetizers just because I’m in the woods.  If I’m inspired and have mental prep time, I try to branch out of the comfort zone of the usual potato pocket and pork loin staples and try something a little new.  This year I saw some flatbreads at Trader Joe’s:  inspiration for grilled pizzas.  Thought bubble:  what a great way to get rid of some leftovers at the end of the week….     I understand that these grilled pizzas are quite popular with the home grilling crowd – make your own dough, stick it on the grill, make delish pizzas - but I’ve never done it.  And to make your own dough out there was ridiculous and so I thought these little flatbreads could be perfect.  And let me tell you... they were even better than I had thought they could be.

All week long we made too much of everything - that is how I am - and so by Friday night, we had leftover grilled chicken, leftover grilled pork tenderloin, a salami we were eating all week with appetizers, enough onions to float a boat, and some leftover grilled pineapple we had hanging around from an earlier meal where we grilled the pineapple with a little oil and crushed thai hot pepper as a pork side.  It was all good stuff, but it had to go.  The bed of coals was laid, the fixin’s were pulled out from the bear locker, and the drinks were poured.  The sun was still up, but it was perfect weather finally and the Cedar Waxwings were buzzing their way into evening mode all around us.   Bring on the pizzas.

 

Grilled Pizza

THE STUFF:

Flatbreads (1 or 2 6” Trader Joe’s Flatbreads/person did the trick for us – tortilla and pita are not the same!)

Pizza sauce (we used pizza sauce and leftover salsa, but of course pasta sauce would be good, too)

Grated Mozzarella Cheese (or Manchego or whatever rocks your world)

Olive Oil for brushing on flatbreads

Fixin’s       (whatever you may have:    we had grilled chicken, grilled pork, onions, hot pepper, salsa, hard salami sliced thinly, grilled pineapple chunks, Pasta spices from Penzy’s, crushed dried Thai hot peppers from my garden, salt and pepper)

HOW TO:

-Arrange the grate over the coals so that you have a hot spot (lots of coals), a warm spot (on edge of coals), and a safe spot (no coals) – which means, in our case, we had a couple of rounds of making these as we could only fit about 3 on at a time safely.

-We pre-heated our toppings a bit in beds of tinfoil over the coals and cooked the onion a little bit in its tinfoil bed over high heat (we should buy tinfoil stock when we go camping)

-Brush the flatbreads on both sides with olive oil and place directly over coals on hot spot – it will very quickly start to inflate a bit creating a bubbly topography on the top and nice grill marks and toasting on the bottom.  Turn the flatbread over and move to the cool side of the grill

-Make your pizza like you normally would by topping flatbread with sauce and cheese and toppings to your liking and tent the pizzas with tin foil and move back to ‘warm’ spot on grill to toast the bottoms and melt the tops.  For us, that meant I rotated the little jobbers after a few minutes to make sure both sides of the flatbreads got toasty.  This should take maybe 5 minutes total to get a nice brown on the bottom and melty bubbly cheese on top.

Pull them off the grill and chow!   They were crunchy and tasty and man oh man a great use of leftovers from our bear locker.  Everyone made their own combinations and it was a grand success. This whole process would be just as easy if not easier on a home grill, so I plan to make my pizzas like this forever!  You may note that I still haven’t come up with a home-made pizza crust I really like so if you have any clues on that one, let me know….  For now, the flatbread over coals method rules.

Grill on!

Lake Camping ADK Style: Forked Lake, Owls Head, Rain

I’ve had a taste of fall over the last week, and while thunderstorms ring in the air and moisture gathers on the wide-open screens still here in Philly, change is in the air.   After 9 days in the Adirondack woods, I am almost ready to embrace that change.   My dismount from the mountains is never fully smooth.  By mid-camp, the mind opens, the brain declutters, the ears hear warblers and waxwings and leaves turning in the trees, the eyes relax with the views of lake sparkles and voluminous clouds.  Mountains cascade upon themselves under the brightest blue sky and the smell of campfires resets a switch in there somewhere.  I don’t want to lose that.  And while I know that relaxed feeling is already gone,  I hope to keep the perspective a bit longer.

I picked up a notebook to jot down some notes, but it was late in the week (I had forgotten mine at home) and so unlike my usual self, I didn’t do too much journaling this trip and for that I’m a little remiss.  Hoss’s General Store in Long Lake of course had a lovely little journal and we decided on the last night to write down a few things and then bring it back the next year to keep adding to it.  A communal journal in the making.

 

This year we had old and new players, folks coming and going, new foods, new music, new fun.  A particularly challenging new thing for me was a hike up Owl’s Head mountain to the fire tower.  It overlooked everything and the 360 view was worth the hike up the scary tower.  It turns out, I don’t dig heights so much and man that tower was moving in the cold wet wind, I swear.  The rains began in earnest as we made the treacherous decent.  We thought the hike up was difficult scrambling up nearly vertical rock faces and stream beds and slick rooty rocky scrabbles.  All of that in reverse now with pouring pounding rain made for rather technical 3.2 mile hike out.   Really, it was only the part near the summit that was rough, and anything you read about Owls Head generally indicates that it is an easy to moderate hike, but I would beg to differ.  If you go, buck up and hope for non-deluge situations.

After signing out at the trail head and ringing out the pants, we stopped for a coffee on the way through town and discovered we had about an hour window before the heavy stuff came down.  We headed back to Forked Lake, kayaked out to our site, prepped all the fixins for dinner and snacks and settled in for a rainy night under the food tent.  Dinner that night was leftover pasta and what we lovingly refer to as Bear Locker Pasta Sauce (leftovers and veggies that need to be cooked – all thrown in with a few herbs and spices).  It turned out to be a great evening and dinner and lovely day under the clouds.  One of many great days all strung together with good people and good fun. 

 

I hope this new bloggy journal will hold me to next summer when new memories will be made with the call of the loons.  Music, games, stars, and of course, more food to come.  It is good to share the memories.

Best's Ever

Ithaca called.  Heat wave #5 was in full swing (#6 is on the horizon) and so getting out of town seemed like the best thing ever this past weekend.  Long story short:  air conditioning in my place is pretty much non-existent.   I should work on that.  Add it to the list.

I headed up to my Mom’s place just north of Ithaca, NY where temps were forecasted to be a lovely 10 degrees cooler than here… and to boot, gorges and lakes offer chill zones you just can’t get around here so much.  I had a lovely time – probably spent too much money down on The Commons and at the farmer’s market (to give you an idea, one of my purchases was a bench for goodness’ sake…) but that is all part of the fun.

I also put some money down on blueberries.  Money well spent…  Mom and I picked over 11 lbs of blueberries at Glenhaven Farm just outside of Trumansburg (http://www.glenhavenfarm.com/).  Mom’s bucket was heavier by not quite a pound... it turns out that I was fairly busy stuffing my face while she was definitely more focused on the bucket.  We’ve picked there for years (me a little more sporadically) and the blueberries are outstanding.  We picked a lot. It was decidedly hot (low 90’s, but keep in mind that was still 10 degrees cooler than eastern PA where the asphalt was melting) and we worked up a sweat, but really the bushes were so loaded that it didn’t take all that long and a quick trip to Lodi Point State Park after - where we floated our toes to the sky in Seneca Lake - cooled us right off. 

 

Now, as you may remember from previous posts, my baking skills are on the skimped on side of the gene pool coin.  I can bake a cookie and I'm working on the bread, but pie crusts are something I typically get out of a box.  Mom just whips them up like nothing and in doing so this trip, has inspired me to try it again.  I’m not sure why I’ve had so much trouble because oh my gosh, she abused that dough… it was a warm day and she just threw ingredients into the bowl, stirred it all up, overworked the dough, didn’t chill it, rolled it out, and voila:  it came out beautifully.  She did nearly everything you aren’t supposed to do to the dough and it still came out great.   I decided that I could do that.  Gimme the recipe for that magical pie crust.   And so I give to you:  Blueberry Peach Pie with the Pie Crust that can’t be stopped.

Best Ever Pie Crust    Now, here for years and years I’ve seen this recipe and Mom has given it to me a few times in an effort to spread the wealth, but I really don’t think I’ve used it up to now…  I always thought she just called it the Best Ever pie crust because it was good – and it is – but the reality is that it is adapted from a recipe from Best’s Fruit Farm in Hackettstown NJ.  Ah ha!  Gotta’ love the play on words.     Here it is:

4 C Flour

1 Tsp. salt

1 Tbls. sugar

1 ¾ C Crisco

½ C Water

1 Tbs. Vinegar/or Lime Juice/or Lemon Juice (my aversion to vinegar inspired the fruit juices and they work just as well)

1 Egg

Mix all dry ingredients and cut in Crisco until it is all pretty homogenized and with the Crisco in little bits.  Per Mom….  “You can work this part to death” and she is right.  Little bits the size of peas?  No way.  Just work the crap out of it. Then add wet ingredients that have all been mixed together so that the egg is completely beaten into the water.   Bring this all together and it will still probably be a little soft but not sticking to things.  At this point, I believe the original recipe says to chill it, but Mom sure didn’t and when I got home and tried it in the confines of my own kitchen, I didn’t either.  It came out great both times.  I had to add a little more flour to mine as it was pretty humid out and the Crisco may have been melting in the heat, but again…  I feel like you can abuse this dough pretty hard and you’ll still be just fine.

Roll it out and plunk it in your pie pan (this will make 4 nicely thin crusts for the experts of you out there or 3 if you’d like to not worry about getting holes in your dough for the boxed crust ilk out there like me).  Either way, it makes plenty for 2 pies with crusty tops, too.

My Favorite:  Blueberry-Peach Pie

Assemble the crust as above (or, you know…  keep the Crisco clumps and chill and don’t handle much, blah blah blah)…  Into this crust add the following filling:

Mix together well (preferably in the pie crust bowl so you have one less dish to do):

4 C blueberries

2-3 nice sized peaches all pealed and chunked up

4 T (or slightly less) flour

3 T brown sugar

½ tsp. cinnamon

Juice of half a lemon

Dab a few dollops of butter on top if you are feeling it…  if you don’t, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, but it does add a nice added level of flavor complexity.  Top it with more crust however you may see fit:  cookie cut out shapes, or lattice, or if you are like me, just fold over the excess bottom crust dough or take the lattice strips and just strew them over the pie.  My Mom enjoys the lattice, and I do as well, but I’m not quite that patient with it. I find the more rustic versions just as tasty.  Brush the top crust with milk or water and sprinkle with sanding sugar or regular sugar to add to the festiveness.

Cook pie mid oven for 15 minutes at 425° F and then 350° F for 45 minutes or until the fruit is all bubbly and the top crust is lightly browned.

Voila. Best Ever.

Silver Linings

I don’t know how many heat waves we’ve already had here in Philly this year, but I will say that it is flat out too many.  Since my arrival from the great white north, I have been sitting here on my couch - or more likely camp chair propped low on my wood floor - sweating my ass off.  If my ass were really disappearing I might find some benefit to the heat, but alas, it is just a metaphor and I’m just sweaty.  Last night around 10:30 I huffed a big sigh, got my tent out, and set it up in the back yard.  Sleeping with the crickets and J-sweeping fireflies was a whole lot more appealing than sleeping in my stuffy bedroom.  By morning, I needed a blanket.  Brilliant!  (I’m still patting myself on the back for that one).  Nothing like a change of scenery to breeze out the cobwebs because, I must say, the re-entry into Philly weather was quite harsh this time around.  I went from needing 2 wool blankets to sweating to death.  Not good.  Praise to the tent.

The heat, happy me, is breaking, and for some reason, I’ve been in the mood for celery.  Tonight was the night for both.   In the case of celery, it was the power of suggestion… I was listening to Molly Wizenberg’s (with Matthew Amster-Burton – sorry Matthew – Molly gets first cred with me) podcast Spilled Milk during one of my last trips and she was talking about braising (admittedly, it was an old one…  my podcast world revolves around plane-trips or road-trips as a rule).  The idea of braised celery stuck in my brain.  I stopped by the grocery store this evening after work and got fixin’s for both braised celery and home-made ice cream.  An interesting combination, I know, but rest assured, I did not eat them both at the same time.  To get things rolling, I started my kitchen time with a blueberry mojito in hand - fresh with Jersey blueberries and mint from my garden.  My chicken-grilling ushered in a blast of wind and about 5 big drops of rain.  Clouds parted, dinner was eaten, fresh strawberry ice cream was made (makes for a much nicer picture than the braised celery) and the gibbous moon plays hide and seek illuminating the silver lining of the bank of clouds.  All told, a damn fine evening.

Here is my version of

Braised Celery

I highly recommend a revisit to this veg. – something really great about rediscovering an ingredient you hardly ever think about.  Celery for me means stuffing, and stir fries, and the holy trinity, and mirepoix.  A side dish on its own?  Anathema no more.  Zip zip comfort food on the plate in minutes.

7 stalks of celery cut into 1 inch lengths

½ Vidalia onion (or other sweet onion) rough chopped

1 Tbsp. butter

½ C chicken stock

Sauté celery and onions for about 5 minutes in the butter (medium heat so the butter doesn’t burn – you can use olive oil, but it changes everything…  even the chemistry of the veggies… so you may have to cook longer and add a bit of salt if you go with oil).  Add the chicken stock and cover, simmering veggies for about 10 minutes.  The liquid will most likely be mostly gone by the end of 10 minutes, but if not, pull off the lid and reduce until the liquid becomes a glaze and maybe take it a little further so as to caramelize the celery onion combo just a smidge.  Tonight, I didn’t even have to add any salt, but give it a taste and salt if needed.

I served it on a bed of mixed greens with herb-marinated grilled chicken and it was great.  I found myself really wishing I had a grilled peach with the whole meal, though.  Can be a great side-dish for all kinds of bold tasting mains.  I have not done it yet, but imagine some chopped fennel would be a great addition to the celery and onions.  Yum.  Go crazy.