Fab Pizza!

Last night my beautiful Italian friend Fabrizio & I made pizza. That is -- Fabrizio made pizza while I drank wine! I brought a white bordeaux for the occasion -- this one was dry and clean and gravelly, but not exceptionally flavorful. I think I prefer white burgundy.

The pizza, on the other hand, was mama-slappin' hot! I'm so impressed and inspired to rededicate myself to pizza making now.

We tried four different variations on two pans. On one side of the first pan he made a margherita pizza with an uncooked tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, salt, and fresh basil. The second side of the first pan had slices of fresh tomato, fresh mozzarella, salt and basil.


What I was particularly impressed with was the uncooked tomato sauce. What a revelation! I usually make my pizza by reducing canned whole tomatoes for about 5 hours over low heat. It results in a highly flavored and sweet sauce. It's thick, too - edging onto pasty. I've always been happy with it and gotten lots of compliments, but Fabrizio's uncooked sauce has converted me. He took a can of crushed tomatoes and added to it a bunch of quartered onion pieces. He didn't do anything with the onions other than let them infuse the tomatoes. And the flavor of the resulting sauce was wonderful - tangy and fresh and a perfect balance for the richness of the cheese. The crust was delicious, too -- who says you need a pizza stone? Fabrizio used two metal sheet pans slathered with olive oil.

In the second pan Fabrizio made one pizza with the uncooked tomato sauce, mozarella, red onion, and butter and another pizza with fresh mozzarella and mustard greens sautéed in red pepper and bacon.




Here's a surprise: I liked the red onion pizza the best! Who would have thought to drizzle butter on a pizza?! It was perfect. The richness of the butter brought out the cheese's milkiness and balanced the tang of the onion and tomato sauce. Cheers to Fabrizio! The mustard green pizza was very good, too - but Fabrizio was worried it was a little too salty. It was very hearty and the greens were perfect after cooking for about 30 minutes. So good! I had seconds rather than strawberry ice cream for dessert....

Fried chicken salad?

I think I may have gone a little overboard when I described Gus's Fried Chicken to my friend Nico. (Most amazing chicken in the world? Would it even be possible to defend that?) But no one had taken him! He's visiting from France and has been here for months, and not a single one of his friends has thought to take him to Gus's??? So, I took him today.

I know I've written about Gus's before, but it makes me happy to be able to say it's just as good as the the first time. The chicken was delicious, spicy, moist, etc. The beans and slaw were still standard.


I'd never tried the fried green tomatoes -- they were nice, but not amazing. They turned a little mushy inside their thick batter coat and were *very* greasy. Mostly what I tasted was the grease and mild vegetable-sweetness. I'll never understand why people don't just cut the tomato slices thicker.

One thing that changed for the better: the service was outstanding. Nico wanted mayonnaise with his fries but the first server I caught told us they didn't have any. But our waitress volunteered to look for some anyway. When she found it she brought it out in this little bowl and Nico was so happy! It was really sweet of her.

Protein & Fruit

Shawn is so amazing it makes me feel guilty. Look at what he made me for dinner:

arugula salad with strawberries, feta, and a honey-lemon vinaigrette.
This was my favorite part of the meal. The arugula's bitter peppery-ness played well with the sweetness of the strawberries. Straightforward salty feta and this *delicious* vinaigrette. Shawn tells me he makes it by infusing lemon into some oil then mixing it with the vinegar and honey. His version is so well balanced, and I guess that's the key to vinaigrette.


Seared sea bass with a baba ghanoush crust and little slivers of pepper.
Yum! This was a very generous piece of fish and Shawn seared it then baked it. The inside stayed so soft. You know how fish often flakes apart after you cook it? This one was so perfectly rare that the flaking was minimal. And the baba ghanoush was very tender and salty. I could taste the roasting as well as the earthiness of the eggplant. I wouldn't have thought to put it with sea bass, but it was nice. Shawn's restraint is evident in this dish: I would have been tempted to add citrus or something to offset the richness of the ghanoush. Shawn trusted the freshness of the fish to do this. He was right.

There was also a crème brûlée, but I forgot to take a picture of it. I wish I had, though, because I have a lot to say about this dessert. I'm a little exigent about desserts...only because I make them so often myself and don't usually prefer them to savory things. If I'm going to eat a dessert it had better be damn good. Shawn's crème brûlée is very good. I liked that the crust was nice and thin and crunchy (and didn't taste even the least metallic or butane-like). The flavor was nice, too -- though he claims there was lemongrass and ginger in it. I could only detect those flavors indistinctly and on the backend once it warmed up in my mouth. My only real complaint was the texture. Shawn added more egg yolk than a classic recipe would require. It made the color much richer and the crème thicker. -- Which was far from bad. It was lovely -- but less like a crème, which is distinct from gelatin-thickened desserts or flour-thickened puddings by it's delicateness. Like it's quivering between states. This one touched my tongue and got rolled around. My favorite crème brûlées melt there.

delta fair

I always have high expectations of fair food. And the Delta Fair totally delivered! Bryan and I had funnel cake, gyro, pronto-pup, and the most *outrageously* tasty cajun chicken-on-a-stick. Moist chicken, thick-cut onions, spicy salty seasoning, all fried in a crunchy brown oiled casing. And the best part? They gave us these little plastic packets of ranch dressing to squeeze onto our chicken while we walked! Whoa!