utenzi

Carrie and I did a lot of eating today. We got off to a late start but finished well. No, this isn't something that we ate. Rather it was one of two deer remains that we came across while cutting through some woods while hiking off trail south of Mebane. The day started with Carrie and I hitting Trader Joe's when they opened. And I'll tell you, it was darn nippy out this morning---hell, all day long. I managed to spend $90 on fixings for bruchetta (2 containers of grape tomatoes, garlic, butter, some baguettes, and basil) and pizza (sauce, dough, and lots of cheese) plus several bottles of wine and a lot of small portions of cheese. After that we went to Occoneechee Mountain to burn off some calories to make room for the food we were preparing to consume. The 3 mile hike was bracing 'cause it was damn cold out still. I think it was still below freezing when we finished around 11am. Then we picked up a few more items at Wal-mart since I needed to stop at a gas station ne...

When I got home from work today I made a pizza. It wasn't quite from scratch, I used some dough I bought at Trader Joe's the other day. This is what it looked like when it was done. There's just something about a lot of melted cheese on top of red sauce that looks so damn inviting. The pictures below kinda show what I did to make dinner. I started out by rolling out the dough on a lightly floured board with a small glass bottle. Sounds odd but it works pretty well. Then I tossed the dough in a rectangular baking pan and baked at 350f for 8 minutes to get the crust a little crusty. After that I pulled out the pan---the dough had a lot of bubbles in it but I don't know if that's obvious in the picture below---and added pizza sauce plus a bunch of Italian seasoning herbs. Then the cheese. Mozzarella on the bottom, a mix of provolone, asiago, fontina and Parmesan above that and then some feta on top. Yum. I baked the pizza at 350 again for another 8 minutes and then ate...

Actually the wine was bought on Monday but I was rather slow to upload the pictures. As you can see, I went to Trader Joe's to pick up the wine. I like them for their wine and cheese. I also bought a LOT of cheese. The total bill was over $60 and the majority of that was cheese, not wine---as you can tell by the prices of the wine, seen below. Back a year ago, when I was dating Julie, she bought me 6 bottles of wine for my birthday. Now that I've managed to drink 4 of them I decided it was time to renew my store of wine. So I bought these 4 bottles. Two of them are types I've not had before so I'll just have to see if I like them. Since I'm not going through them very fast---back when Julie and I were dating we'd go through 2 bottles with almost every meal, now I'm drinking a bottle every 3 or 4 months---these 4 bottles will probably last me a while. PS Julie would be very disappointed in my buying frozen basil

These are the ingredients. I'm giving the premade pizza dough from Trader Joe's a try here. It's 99 cents a pound. Not bad. Lots of yummy cheese on this lovely baby. As you can see in the close-up below.