Goat cheese, arugula, and chorizo
This post on a Goat Cheese, Arugula, Chorizo pizza has pretty much determined the course of my day.
This morning I went to the store because I was going to try making it, substituting the flatbread recipe with a dough I saw in a recipe for lahmejune (Armenian pizza) which requires shortening. Then I got home, and I decided I was hungry right then, so I tried to make a goat cheese, arugula, chorizo quesadilla. In principle, this was a good idea, but I got lazy and decided to tempt the fates by not cooking the chorizo first; it turns out that, no, chorizo will not cook in the same time that it takes the rest of the quesadilla to come together. In the end, I split the time difference between how much it probably would take for the chorizo to be completely done, and how long before the tortillas started to get too crunchy. The result was delicious, even if the meat was perhaps undercooked.
The quesadilla experiment took me off on a tangent; I marinated three chicken thighs for a while in a Mexican-inspired mix of cumin, lemon pepper salt, black pepper, and olive oil, and soaked some dried mushrooms in a white wine/water mix, then cooked them together, and chopped it all up. Tomorrow morning I’ll make myself some quesadillas for lunch.
For dinner, I tried the original pizza recipe, following all the directions exactly, except I rolled the dough much thinner than the recommended 1/2″; I think that was a misstatement, anyhow, because in the picture of the pizza before cooking, the dough looks more like 1/8″ thick. Honestly, the result wasn’t awe-inspiring. The crust was too biscuity and distracting; on its own, rolled thin, I suspect it’d make a nice flatbread/cracker, but it doesn’t do a good job as a base for a pizza. I have two balls of the flatbread dough left: one of which will be made into a flatbread, the other I’ll use to make the pizza again, with an ultra-thin crust.
Something I learned today: chorizo, or beef chorizo at least, is made from lymph nodes, salivary glands, and cheeks and tongues. Yum! Another example of why you should be suspicious of the provenance of any highly spiced meat product.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Successful culinary experiments (9/30/2008)
- Bajan Food Part I: Sweets (11/3/2008)
- Indian cooking (9/14/2006)