How About Some More Food…

….I know that’s what all 4 of you were desperately hoping to hear about….was more food, right?

Well, I’m gonna share about it anyway.

I’ve been working on making a sourdough bread starter with only flour and water….the first one I made didn’t work out too well….or something, BUT….

The second one I tried is going along FABULOUSLY…if I do say so myself.

I should probably take a picture, and I will tonight…of the 6 loaves of bread that I made this afternoon from 3 ingredients. FLOUR, WATER, and a pinch of SALT.

That is it. I’m thrilled. Seeing as natural sourdough bread is about $4 per loaf from the store, I have the means now to have delicious spelt or spelt/kamut bread whenever I want for next to nothing. The mix will always be a bit of spelt because I made the starter from spelt and so that is the base of it.

I currently have a swimming pool of starter sitting on my counter because I goofed up and read the recipe wrong and thought that I’d need 8 cups of starter for this one recipe that I have, and that I’d get 4 one pound loaves from that recipe, but no….it was 1 cup of starter and 8 cups of flour for 4 one pound loaves, and I doubled it and wsa able to make 6 one and a half pound loaves, but I have a TON of starter that I’m going to make into pizza shells to freeze so that we can make pizzas whever we want.

Pizza was actually the focus of this post, can’t you tell?

I actually made some pizza shells yesterday and we had pizza for dinner last night. It was SOOOO much fun and tasted SOOOOOOO good.

The recipe for the pizza shells called for the throw away starter oil, and flour. You basically mix 1.5 cups of the starter that you are not feeding (the throw away stuff) 1 Tablespoon of Oil and 1.5 cups of flour. I increased the starter and the flour to 2 cups and use a overflowing Tbsl of Oil, and made 8 personal small pizzas. I partially baked the shells and set them aside until dinner time (but you could totally freeze them, which is what I will be doing).

We cut up and prepared all the toppings. I made some chicken pinchos morunos (a spicy tapas Moorish dish), some farmer’s sausage, and some ham. Cut up some Yellow, Orange and Green peppers. Split some Kalamata Olives, and grated some cheese. I used a small can of tomatoe paste and filled it with herbs, and then with our pizza shells we were good to go.

We painted on some Olive Oil so that the shells wouldn’t get soggy.

Next came the tomatoe sauce….mmmmmmmm it’s looking good.

Then we put the toppings on. I used the chicken with the pinchos spices and the kalamata olives, and I couldn’t wait to find out if it would taste as good in real life as it did in my head.

Can you see the little pile of cheese under my hand? We don’t eat Cow’s Milk, and so this is Sheep Cheese and it is DELICIOUS! WAY milder than goat cheese….it doesn’t taste so…so….well, it doens’t taste like you’re eating a goats tail – which in my opinion is NASTY!

Here is the gratuitous Family Smile shot…..don’t you just LOVE it….don’t we look like such a happy little group?

Once we got all the ingredients on, into the oven they went. Here is Jeremy’s Pizza before the oven….He only threw on the two veggie pieces because we mae him and he grumbled about it the whole time….I guess in his mind pizza is meant to be ALL meat.

Here we have Xani, completely enjoying her bite of pizza…eyes closed in the sheer rapture of the moment……

Even ‘Siah got in on the pizza action, although without the toppings, its more like a cracker or piece of bread than pizza.

Here is a shot of THE MOST DELICIOUS PIZZA IN THE WORLD. Yup, it’s the one I made, and it was even better in real life than it was in my head. So, So SO good!

I’ll definately be making this again. I think that the nicest part of this was that we could all have pizza. It didn’t cost us a fortune. There was nothing in the ingredients…in any of the ingredients that we couldn’t eat (no dairy, no sugar, no wheat…etc) and we had as much fun making the dinner (as a family) as we had eating it.

And, seeing as I have an overload of the starter, I’m going to be making up a bunch of the pizza shells and freezing them so we can use them whenever. YAH for quick, cheap meals.

I might talk a bit more about the whole Sourdough Starter tomorrow and why I’m even doing it, and show you if my 6 loaves of bread worked (or not) and then I think I’ll talk about some other stuff…not food related. (but i won’t forget about the spicy peanut noodle salad…I promise)

Alrighty, well. Siah is screaming his head off and as fun as that is to listen to, I guess that means that my computer time is finished for now.

ps. you can click on the pictures to taje you through to see the whole pizza set…if you want?