Daily Dish - Chicken, asparagus pizza

Well, now that the kitchen is done, we're back to being able to cook in it regularly.  It's a joy!  I'm making a conscious effort to keep the excessive number of appliances we have off the counters as much as possible.  I'm also making an effort to use them more! 

My little brother is general manager of a very high end restaurant, so qualifies as a mega-foodie.  As it turns out, he has been known to sneak around our kitchen, when visiting, to evaluate what appliances we might be missing, and then fills in the blanks for holiday gifts.  That is how we ended up with our bread machine.  We weren't particularly happy with the pizza dough recipe that came in the instructions booklet, so gave this one a shot, which turned out nicely.  I made a double batch so that we could freeze half for later.  I definitely enjoyed the convenience of being able to attend to the little one while the machine worked it's dough magic - hands free!  Of course, you could make your own pizza using a store bought dough or base as well.

Chicken asparagus pizza

- 1 cooked chicken breast, cut into cubes
- 4oz skinny asparagus (cut into 2" pieces)
- 1/2 medium onion (thinly sliced)
- 1/2 red bell pepper (sliced)
- 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/2 cup grated mozarella cheese
- 4 tsp olive tepenade

Pre-heat the oven to 425.  If using raw dough, roll out the dough and put onto the pizza pan.  Once the oven is at temp, put the prepared dough in the oven for about 5 minutes to crisp the top.  This prevents it from becoming soggy once the toppings are added.  Remove from oven and add toppings - use the olive tepenade as your base, then top with mozarella cheese, chicken, veggies, and sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top.  Bake for an additional 15 minutes.  Enjoy! 

Daily Dish - A bread maker and some pizza

I was just searching through my posts and I'm perplexed as to how on earth I have not posted about my bread maker.  You may remember the "great Santa Barbara pizza experiment" from last year.  My brother loves his bread maker and decided he needed to get me one for my birthday.  I'm not sure if it's a sign of age or a sign of loving food that makes kitchen appliances such an appealing gift for me.  Next though, I might be needing new kitchen counters as a gift so I can store all my awesome appliances - will have to put that on my wish list.

Since getting the bread maker, one of our favorite things has become home-made pizza.  I've heard that pizza can be a somewhat healthy and balanced thing to eat - especially if you're using all fresh ingredients instead of the oily, salty, instant-bloat version that you might order from Dominoes.  I was never the biggest fan of pizza, although I do believe I'm being converted.

This version was chicken with portobello mushroom, onion and olives, on a home made pizza sauce, then topped with spinach and mozzarella.  2 slices and I'm full!  That's better than ordering a large pizza with a girlfriend and realizing there's only 2 slices left to finish off the entire pie, so daring each other to do it, and then having to live with the regret.....ask me how I know.

We've also been making some pretty tasty loaves of bread.  The only thing we haven't figured out is how to store them so that they don't go bad quite as quickly.  It's also nice to know that as a rather sucky baker, I can totally cheat make delicious sweets using this machine - banana bread from scratch?  Sure!  It's not cheating if I put all the ingredients in the machine myself...