Channeling My Inner Julia Child

 Hello Everyone,

I've been so busy lately that I haven't been spending much time in the kitchen.  That all changed this weekend.  When I was back in the Chicago area, I fell in love with deep dish pizza.  Lisa, one of the participants at the Pieceful Gathering retreat shared her recipe for deep dish pizza with me from this cookbook.

This is my version of the recipe.  I wish this computer could project smell-o-vision.  The pizza was heavenly.

The homemade crust is stuffed with mozzarella cheese, spinach, Italian sausage, mushrooms, and onions on the bottom crust.

Another thin crust covers all of the goodness inside, and a slit is made in the crust for the steam to escape.

Then this fabulous tomato sauce covers the top of the pizza.  There's fresh basil and oregano in the sauce.  I sprinkled a bit of Parmesan cheese on the top before it went into the 475-degree oven. 

Here's the pizza when it came out of the oven piping hot. When I make this again, I will decrease the backing time and probably lower the temperature a bit.  My son accuses me of using our fire alarm as my kitchen timer.  This has happened on more than one occasion, and my son is always here when the fire alarm starts blaring.

 

This was a very filling and delicious dinner.

On Sunday, I decided to make heart-shaped waffles outside on the Blackstone flat top using our Griswold waffle maker which we bought for our anniversary several years ago.  I've only used it a couple of times because when I use it indoors, our First Alert fire alarm goes off!  We decided to try it outside so the fire department wouldn't have a chance to stop by for breakfast.  I hear they like to eat a lot.

We had the flat-top on high, and got the waffle iron really, really hot.

This is the result of our outdoor cooking experiment.  No matter how hot it was, the batter didn't cook.

Pancakes were a good substitute.

So, while I was channeling my inner Julia Child, Mazey was channeling her inner coyote the other night.  We can always tell when the coyotes are circling because Mazey starts to howl.  She howls like a banshee!  It is just plain eerie! We don't want the coyotes to know there's a cute little girl in the cabin.  No matter how hard we try, Mazey is not going to be deterred from talking back to them.  Last month we saw three coyotes traveling through the neighborhood which is quite unusual.  They scare me more than the bears.

Speaking of bears.......since the weather has been so nice, we are spending more time outside on the deck.  Mazey alerted us to a bear that was traveling through the yard next door.  She definitely gets agitated when there's a bear around and we take her warnings very seriously.  She is a great early warning system.

Today I'm going to start making more project bag kits for my August retreat.  The kits were a hot item at the April retreat.

What are you going to channel today?

Soon,

Lynn