3 recipes, 1 stone!

I decided I was in the mood for some WW pizza, so tonight, I made the Basic Cheese Pizza (pg 301). For my New York readers, I must remind you that while I grew up in New York,  home of the best pizza ever, I have been living in the South for almost 3 years. I am accustomed to eating sub-par pizza. So you either need to eat crappy pizza for a while before trying this recipe to lower your standards, or just accept the fact that this is NOT New York pizza. For those who don't know, New York pizza is characterized as wide, thin and foldable. Unlike the pizza I had at student teaching orientation, which cracked when I folded it, NY pizza would NEVER crack. There is also a thin amount of sauce and the crust is made from "high gluten" bread flour (thanks Wiki). The rumor is that the yummy flavor of the crust, which I have not found farther north in NY than Rockland County and anywhere outside of NY, is due to the minerals present in the water.  I am suspicious of this theory because Long Island draws its water from a different source than NYC and Rockland, although may have an equally high mineral content. Long Island gets its drinking water from groundwater aquifers, which was blamed for the breast cancer cluster that has appeared on Long Island. The salt used on the sidewalk and street ice gets into the groundwater......yea, I guess that would cause a high mineral content. FYI the investigation into the "environmental factors" and the rate of breast cancer was not conclusive. In case you were wondering.

But I digress. Basically, NYers and pizza snobs, lower your expectations if you are going to try this pizza. Moving on, in order to make this pizza I also made two other WW recipes, the Roasted Tomato Sauce (pg 7) and the Basic Pizza Dough (pg 300). The sauce was pretty good, although a little sweet on its own. If I am going to eat it with pasta it will need salt. Or, maybe a sprinkle of Parmesan or Romano to add some zing. It was easy to make too, just roast some tomatoes and onion with balsamic, garlic, salt and pepper and then throw it in the food processor. The crust was also pretty easy. The water needed to be a certain temperature, so I had to use a thermometer (like, the one I use when I'm sick). Don't worry, I cleaned it first. I am not a very good baker, so I get a special satisfaction when I am making something with yeast and it ACTUALLY rises. Instant gratification! I had issues with the stretching of the dough in the pizza pan though. Practice makes perfect I guess. I put the sauce on, and the amount seemed like a lot. Too much sauce, not enough cheese. But, I followed the recipe exactly. And you know what? It was pretty good! Sprinkle some chopped fresh oregano on top just before serving. The sauce and oregano make up for the lack of cheese because the flavor of the pizza is pretty good. The crust had a nice crunch even though I didn't bake it before putting the toppings on (which I wanted to, but NOT in the recipe) and the crust flavor was decent. I might like it better than the pizza around here. I wanted to drink Coke with it, but we have no soda so I mixed some lemonade with Firefly and peach schnapps, which was a decent replacement.

 I made a rectangle pizza since I don't have a round pan (or a stone) and divided the finished pizza into 6 pieces. 1 piece is 5 points, which is kind of a lot since you likely will eat more than 1 slice. However, restaurant pizza is probably a bazillion points so you will be ahead of the game. Ratings of these recipes- thumbs up! Except I now have a ton of roasted tomato sauce so I will be eating it for a while. Maybe I will make a lasagna or something. Oh, and the pizza dough recipe makes enough for two, so the other half is in my refrigerator. There are also multiple variations of the crust recipe, so there will be more home-made pizzas to come. AND the book suggests that you and I can use bread flour for a high-gluten pizza! Maybe we can see if the flour makes a difference in the flavor of the dough. And, I can bring in some water from NY. Who wants to come over for a taste test?

And lets not forget that, like I would any other pizza, I burned the top of my mouth on it.

First recipe- Honk if you love Hollandaise!

Honk honk!! I absolutely love hollandaise. Eggs benedict/eggs florentine are among my list of favorite foods- if this is on a brunch menu, I will definitely order it. Actually, anything with hollandaise on it, I'll order. Hollandaise is one of those things that I love to eat but have no desire to know what is in it. I always feared that if I tried to make it, the ingredients and process would ruin the taste for me. But there it was, Light Hollandaise on page 12. So I gave it a try, and made Eggs Benedict Nanette-style, meaning I used turkey bacon and a multigrain roll instead of canadian bacon and an english muffin (Nanette-style = using whatever is around instead of buying the real ingredients). I slightly overcooked the poached eggs, because apparently I suck at poaching eggs. Luckily, the Light Hollandaise was DELICIOUS and made up for the lack of runny egg yolk.

I was all ready to make this when I got up this morning. I hit a snag, however, when I realized that the Chicken Broth I had was 99% fat free, but NOT low sodium, which is what the recipe calls for. It was actually very HIGH sodium. Grumbling to myself, I walked over to the supermarket in my pajamas to get the correct broth; luckily, it is only a stone's throw from our apartment. FYI College Inn brand has less sodium than Swanson's and it was exactly what I needed. The recipe called for either the Basic Chicken stock recipe from page 3, which I hadn't gotten around to making yet, or fat free low sodium chicken broth. The College Inn fat free low sodium was only 4 mg off in sodium than the homemade stuff. So, it worked. And it was yummy! It was thick and rich, and unless I had the real stuff to do a comparative taste-test, I wouldn't know the difference.  Will I make this again? Absolutely!  I have some left-overs, which I will probably eat with a piece of tilapia tomorrow. For you WW dieters, a 1/4 cup is 1 point, and you wouldn't need more than that in a serving anyway.

Now I have two open containers of Chicken broth in my fridge. I hate that

Top Chef quote:
"Next time I'm gonna do a piece of toast, a bacon, and some bullshit eggs on it....and I'll probably be one of the top 3" - Fabio

Welcome

Hey everybody, welcome to my blog. I love good food and I really love to cook. I watched the movie Julie and Julia, thinking I would enjoy the movie because of this, and I was not disappointed. It inspired me to try to cook all of the recipes in one of my cookbooks. In the movie, Julie mentioned that she had gained weight (not surprisingly, if you cook mostly French food drenched in butter for the better part of a year). This was a concern, so I chose my Weight Watchers cookbook to complete this challenge. I have had this Weight Watchers book for a few years and over the years have cooked less than 10 of the recipes. I actually really liked all of them. Why I haven't tried more? Because I have TONS of recipes. I am a recipe hoarder. I cut them out of magazines, and will even save the entire magazine if there are enough recipes in it. I buy cookbooks. I stalk allrecipes.com like it's my job and then save the recipes I like. I have more recipes than I know what to do with and have not even tried most of them. Until now. I am going to make every single recipe in this book, even the ones that look unappealing or have weird ingredients, even the things that I like to eat but have NO desire to know what is in them (mayonnaise and hollandaise, this means you).

As far as diets go, Weight Watchers is the best, in my opinion. They give you so many tools to succeed that all you need is a little willpower. They provide many ways for you to stay on the diet while being lazy because they sell frozen meals, snacks, yogurt, desserts, anything you need. And unlike other diets, it doesn't try to make things like mashed cauliflower pretend to be mashed potatoes (GROSS!!)After two of my friends lost weight on it a few years ago, and my cousins, I tried it myself and lost the weight I wanted to lose. While cooking these recipes, I SHOULD try to do the diet again. Maybe I will. We'll see.

Here are the rules:
1. There are no rules
2. I will eventually make all of the "over 500" recipes from this book, but I am not going to try to do it in a year. I'm busy, and I don't always feel like cooking. Also, I may not ONLY cook these recipes. If I am trying a WW side dish, and want to eat it with a piece of seasoned tilapia, I will do so. If I want to go out to dinner with my fiancee, I will. If I don't do the diet and eat a donut, sue me. The diet is not the point, the point is actually trying recipes that are currently creating dust on my breakfast bar. Don't judge me.
3. This is a blog, not a piece of American literature. I am not trying to win a Pulitzer. If I forget to capitalize something, leave out a semi-colon, or misspell something, I don't want to hear about it. If you comment on that, I will likely delete it.
4. So as to not be sued for copyright infringement, I will not post any of these recipes on here, but will give you the name and page number when I try it, and what the experience was. I plan on marking the recipes I have tried with a smiley face :-) if it is good and worthy of repeating and a sad face :-( if it isn't.
5. I will try every single recipe and follow it exactly.This is another problem of mine, I change a recipe because of convenience and have no idea how it would have tasted if I had followed the recipe. We should always follow a recipe exactly before changing it. In an instance where I absolutely cannot get an ingredient (I am already wondering where I am going to find buffalo meat in South-eastern Virginia) after trying multiple stores, I may have to change the recipe. That will only be in the most extreme circumstances.

Since my fiancee is out to sea and I am only feeding myself, I will be trying some of the smaller recipes, like sauces and sides, until he gets back. This is a blog about cooking and Top Chef is one of my favorite shows, so I may throw in a random and arbitrary quote in each post. "Please enjoy!"