Mac and cheese and pizza

March 22, 2025 10:43 PM

My focus has definitely been on my Teochew site lately, but I still make time to have some fun cooking sessions with my friends! My friend and I get together every other week and we alternate picking a dish to cook. This Friday, it was her turn and she chose pizza and a spicy mac and cheese, because she's really into spicy food and because she had a whole bunch of heavy cream she needed to use up.

For the most part, I was in charge of the pizza. I just wanted to do something with a simple tomato sauce and cheese, but I let my friend pick the toppings. We added mushrooms, onions, bacon, arugula, and sliced tomatoes, because tomatoes are my favorite pizza topping. My friend really wanted to put jalapeño on it as well, but Aldi was all out!

I think I'm getting a little better at spreading out this pizza dough into a nice circular shape! We cooked the pizza at 500°F for nine minutes, and I was actually really happy with how it came out. I feel like I almost always overcook my pizza and end up with a really hard crust, but this was still nice and soft! I might try to crank up to oven to 525 next time, but I have no idea what my pizza pan can withstand.

My friend did most of the cooking for the mac n cheese. She took out her cast iron pan for the first time ever, and we honestly didn't know whether it needed to be cleaned or seasoned before using it, and we also didn't know how to properly clean and season it after using it 😅 But it seemed to cook the mac and cheese well!

The mac and cheese was quite tasty, but man it was heavy. I took a small portion for myself and then I felt like I couldn't eat any more. But I thought it actually worked quite well with a bit of that pizza sauce on top.

And even though I don't care for spicy foods like my friend does, I'll admit that jalapeño would have been really nice in this. Maybe I'll try making another spicy mac and cheese again, but I think I'll just stick to using milk in my mac and cheese. The heavy cream and bacon was too much for me.

Overall, this was a successful meal! Next time it'll be my pick for what we're making. What should I choose? 🤔

Pizza lesson

March 4, 2025 2:21 PM

My friend had noticed that I kept having pizza fails, and they offered to give me a pizza lesson! Really, it was just me watching them make some pizza, but it was so good. They made a whole bunch of pizza dough a few days in advance, and my sister told me that that's really legit to make your own dough and make it days in advance.

They mentioned that a Detroit-style pizza would probably work best in a home oven, so we had a couple of these. I don't have the same special pan that they have, but I have a cast iron pan and I also have some metal baking pans, so I think I could try this on my own!

I don't know if I had ever actually had a Detroit-style pizza before, but this was really good! Definitely on the heavier side, but I don't care, it's pizza. And I love pizza with cheese on bottom and sauce on top.

Since they had so much dough, they also made a bunch of Neopolitan style pizzas, with a really fancy backyard pizza oven!

It was really cool to see the pizza cooking in the oven in real time. I know I can't replicate this at home (my friend said they tried to make this style of pizza in a home oven many times in the past, but you really need much high temps and home ovens just won't get that hot), but I guess one of the things I learned was that you should cook your pizza as hot as you possibly can.

But because I was scared of too many new variables at once, I did not take that advice when I made my own pizza yesterday 😅 But I did buy a new pizza pan! I wasn't really going to do that, but someone in the Aldi Aisle of Shame Facebook group mentioned that this pan was "too non-stick" and that their pizza fell right off the pan! And the pan was only $3 so I was sold! I walked the extra ten minutes to the slightly further away Aldi just to buy it.

My friend also told me that cornmeal works well to prevent the pizza from sticking, so I bought some of that too. And I ended up making some strawberry pizza! I had been wanting to make strawberry pizza for a while, but every time I mention it to other people they're like "Wait...strawberries on a pizza? I don't know about that 🤨" I don't understand the skepticism. When I first saw the idea of a strawberry pizza, I thought, that sounds amazing. Nothing weird about it at all.

So I went to Aldi a couple of days ago to buy my dough, but all they had was jalapeño dough, and I'll admit, now the pizza is sounding a little weird to me. But whatever, it's all they had, so I bought it.

I didn't quite follow the original recipe, but I ended up topping my pizza with ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, strawberries, bacon, basil, leftover marinated tomatoes from when I made some bruschetta, leftover diced (and sautéed with garlic) sweet onions from the taco night, and leftover balsamic vinaigrette from some salad last week.

And it ended up being delicious. (Of course it was, because strawberry pizza is always delicious) The dough definitely was jalapeño-y, but it wasn't spicy. I don't think I'd ever choose the flavored dough if the regular one was in stock, but it worked fine enough.

And to make things even better, my pizza didn't stick! Honestly, I think it would have been fine without the cornmeal and just a little bit of flour on the bottom. I really think the new pan did all the work to make it not stick.

I definitely want to keep making more pizza. Maybe I'll try Detroit-style next.

Toast

February 6, 2025 1:22 PM

Some time last week, I bought a sour dough round from Aldi. I don't eat a lot of bread, but I figured it's good to switch up my grains. So here are three different dishes that I made with this bread.

First, a breakfast. There's this really expensive cafe that makes a delicious smoked salmon toast, but it costs over $16 and I'm not about that life anymore. So I'm making my own for an eighth of the price.

I actually really like toast, and I should make more of it. Smoked salmon is a bit bougie, but I also like hummus or an avocado spread on toast!

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Next I have a chicken salad. I really just wanted to use up some relish because I bought some to make a hamburger sauce a while back, and now I kind of regret it. The hamburger sauce was just okay, and now I have a jar of relish that I don't know what to do with.

I've put relish in tuna salad a bunch of times in the past, but I had never actually tried making chicken salad before. I tend to like tuna salad better, but for the sake of variety I decided to try to make a chicken salad. What I probably should have done was follow a recipe, but I decided to just wing it and throw stuff together! I added mayonnaise, sweet onions, green onions, dijon mustard, relish, cranberries, poppyseeds, and even some honey roasted peanuts.

The end result was...eh. It wasn't awful, but I didn't really have a desire to keep eating it. I'm really not good at the whole "throwing things together" thing. But I did finish all of it over the course of a few more breakfasts because I am not wasting food.

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And finally, I was able to use up the rest of my jar of pizza sauce by making some pizza melts! When I was younger, my dad would sometimes toast some sliced bread with pizza sauce and cheese and give that to me as an after school snack. I liked it at the time, though it didn't really sound quite as appealing to me now. Honestly, a pizza sandwich is the type of thing that barely sounds like a recipe to me.

But oh my god, this sandwich I made last week was SO GOOD. The herb parmesan butter really takes it over the top. The first one I made had mozzarella since that's your typical cheese for a pizza, but I ran out of that and tried taco cheese and pepperjack as well and they both still tasted great. Now I'm never going to have trouble finishing leftover pizza sauce.

My pizza keeps sticking

January 17, 2025 11:20 AM

I really want to get better at making pizza. I love pizza. I extra love leftover pizza. But I'm not very good at making it, and by making it, I mean I'm still buying pizza dough from the store.

So what I've started trying recently is to let the pizza dough sit out on the counter for a bit, until it's about room temperature. After I've done that, then I start pulling it into pizza shape. It seems to be working out well! I'm getting lots of nice bubbles in my pizza, and I love the bubbles.

Unfortunately, it looks like my pizza pan is becoming less and less non-stick. I could not get this pizza off the pan. I was trying to use my spatula to scrape it, but that pizza dough just would not budge, and I ended up with this mess at the end:

Okay, I probably need a new pan. So I ate whatever I could scrape up from two slices of pizza, and then I just let the rest of the pizza sit there on the counter while I started playing video games with my sister. About an hour later, I started hearing noises. It had a crackling quality to it, and it sounded like pieces of the wall were coming apart and falling down. It honestly kind of freaked me out a little bit.

I walked over to where the noise was coming from, and it turns out that it was from my pizza! The stuck bits of pizza crust were popping right off the pan! After a few more minutes, almost all of the pizza crust was loose! I don't really understand the science behind any of this, but it made me think, "maybe I can still use this pizza pan."

So, against my better judgment, I tried to make another pizza a few weeks later. Maybe I just needed to use way more flour. So I dumped a huge pile of flour on the pan and the dough and my hands. I did the same thing where I let my dough sit out for a bit, and this time, a huge bubble formed before it even started cooking.

I poked at the bubble a little bit, but I didn't want to pop it, so I just worked around it and added the toppings right on top of it. I threw it in the oven and once it started cooking, that bubble just got bigger and it was crazy looking. I wish I could have gotten a photo while it was still in the oven, but you're just going to have to settle for this:

It deflated pretty fast once I pulled it out of the oven. And even though it was kind of weird looking, I actually thought the giant bubble was pretty tasty. But I know what you're thinking, did it stick???

Yeah, it did. Not as badly as the first time, but enough for me to conclude that I need a new pizza pan. (Okay, I know I determined this a few weeks ago) The pieces that didn't stick were completely covered in flour, and I was standing over a trash can trying to remove as much excess flour as I could before I ate it.

That pizza pan has now been thrown out, and I think I'm going to take a little break from making more pizzas. (There was another pizza attempt in the past month that is not represented in this post) But I do still have a lot of pizza sauce left 🤔

A third attempt at pizza

February 28, 2023 10:15 PM

Hey! I did it! I made pizza and it didn't stick! In fact I had waaaay too much flour on the bottom. I also made this pizza on "Cook a Sweet Potato Day" (Feb 22) so I threw some sweet potatoes on it. I think sweet potato on pizza can be very good, but I don't think it really added much this time.

Anyway, I'm all pizza'ed out now.