how to make ambient sad-cake, and other songs of cooking

“You've got some charm I must admit."

The East Coast is generally dreary, punctuated by a few key moments of sun.

Pizza with prosciutto, basil, ricotta, garlic, caramelized onions, and tomato on a homemade cornmeal crust.

This recipe is easy to compose, but I learned a new thing while putting it together. Mid-caramelization of the onions, soak them in red wine vinegar, dust them with black pepper, and add a dash of cinnamon. Trust me, it is the right thing to do! The onions will infuse the crust with a rich, heady flavor...the perfect base to make the other tastes really pop.

And when the pizza is pulled from the oven, still smoking hot and odorous with cheese and salty pork, drizzle fresh lemon juice on the top. Really, just put lemon in everything!

Irrelevant Grandeur

Do you ever have that feeling like you just want to plunge both hands deep into your chest cavity and fall backwards off a high cliff as the only possible means of successfully counteracting the catastrophic forward momentum in your life?! Me either. Summer is over; it's fall. Among the things winding down aside from seasons and friendships are my first year in New York City and the Roaring Camp song on my computer from the original AGCS Summer Mixtape. Perfectly Appropriate.

I made this dish weeks ago, when summer corn was still all the rage at the Farmer's Market and a large batch of garden-fresh tomatoes had just been brought to me by a co-worker from his parents home in Virginia. It was a spectacular conclusion to the sweetness of summertime, so fresh that I didn't even cook the corn all the way down before rolling it out of the pan and onto the plate. If you're looking for an easy way to clean out the vegetables in your pantry (in order to make room for things like spice jars full of cinnamon, canned pumpkin and fleshy halves of acorn squash, of course) I really think you should go for this recipe!

You Will Need:
Corn
Tomatoes
Fresh Basil
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
Mushrooms

To Make:
As usual, so easy it's painful. Heat a tablespoon or so of olive oil over low heat, add a few sliced mushrooms. Let them cook down for about three minutes. Dice up your tomatoes (as many as you please!) and drop them in with the mushrooms. Add your spices and let them meditate over the warmth for awhile, soaking up the flavors. Everything should be awfully juicy and smelling pretty nicely at this point. Then toss in some handfuls of freshly shucked corn. Stir everything together, cover, and let simmer down for five to seven minutes. At the end-point, the corn should be cooked down but still have retained a little bit of its crunch. Serve immediately! Enjoy.

The Tom Tom Club

I've spent my life eating. When I am not eating, I am thinking about what and when I will be eating next. There is no middle-ground, and this is the truth. Summer is my favorite season because there is the shortest distance between thinking about the food that I want and obtaining it; it seems that every other corner I turn offers up a bouquet of fresh vegetables and thick, dark breads for sale . It's the season of the farmers market... and all my favorite foods are there, begging to be eaten raw, ripe, and juicy.

I say this because I want you to be sympathetic to my plight, the one in which I have begun to eat too many tomatoes. I ingest them constantly and without regard to personal pride or recipe. On many a workday I have been known to casually saunter into the Union Square greenmarket, spend an hour or so fervently selecting the ripest and reddest of all the tomatoes--the ones whose splitting flesh yields softly to the applied pressure of my palm--and then return, triumphant with my prizes, to the office to eat them completely raw (and a little noisily, if my coworkers don't say so themselves). It's disgusting, childish, frivolous. These things I know, but I am powerless to stop it.







The only thing to be done (the only thing that could conceal the nature of the beast) was to find recipes that allowed me to consume as many delicious tomatoes as my gourd could possibly hope to handle in as respectable a fashion as possible. Respectable being the key word here, but one also having a broad and highly elastic definition.

Since pizza in the summertime is an all time favorite of mine, I thought I might as well up and toss 'em on some 'za. This is one of those recipes that I can hardly wait to make again, both because it was so delicious and also because there about a million things I want to tweak about in order to make it better. Any suggestions are warmly accepted and appreciated!

Thus: Lemon-Avocado and Tomato Pizza

You Will Need:
1 tomato, ripe
1 avocado, ripe
a few slices of Fontina (or your favorite) kind of cheese
1 bunch fresh basil
pizza dough (i picked up a big bucket of mine from my favorite pizza place)
2-3 tbls. of olive oil
2-3 tbls. of fresh lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

To Make:

Pre-heat your over to 350°. Slice the avocado open, then use a butter knife to slice it while it remains in the shell. Each slice should be relatively narrow, but not so much as to disintegrate into mush upon removal from the shell; they should have some individual integrity. Scoop out the slices using a spoon, and place them in a bowl. Cover them heartily in lemon juice and black pepper, then set them aside (they'll come in handy later.)

Next, prepare the dough by abusing it a little. You'll have to roll and beat it on a well floured surface. Using a rolling pin works best, but I found that a sturdy glass can suffice just fine in the absence of one. Once the dough is nice and pliable, stretch and roll it out as thinly as possible, and mold it into as round a shape as you can manage. Rub the finished piece with fresh olive oil. Now you're ready to start laying down the actual pizza.

Slice the tomato thinly, clean and chop a little basil, slice a little of the cheese. Lay down the tomato slices, making sure to leave a little space between each round. Now, arrange the slices of lemon-soaked avocado to fill in any blank spaces. Sprinkle generously with the fresh basil. Tear your cheese slices into bits, and scatter them across everything. Eventually, they will melt into brown, attractive little spots.

Pop your pizza into the oven and let it bake until the cheese bubbles and the crust smolders into a lovely, golden shade of tan. Let cool and then eat it all in one sitting!




For the sake of historical record, I must also note that this recipe was made and consumed in honor of my close, personal friend Ben's birthday. He is the man, obviously: