Pizza!

Last night, we made a deep-dish pizza with an olive oil and cornmeal crust. 

A bit more than a year ago, Andrew started making bread at home using Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois' recipes in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. We loved how easy the recipes were; we could quickly make a batch of dough to keep on hand in the fridge and then pull off what we needed to have fresh bread ready in minutes. And few things make an apartment smell better and instantly more homey than crackling bread as it comes out of the oven. 

Then, last fall, Jeff and Zoe came out with Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day. While we had started to play with pizza dough recipes using the original AB in 5 instructions, we were excited to experiment using their new cookbook, particularly because of our love for deep-dish pizza (actually, we love all kinds of pizza). There wasn't really a great deep-dish place in Minneapolis, and we were craving the heartier, saucier, "Chicago-style" pizzas; at one point, Andrew even considered having the pizza shipped to us from Lou Malnati's! 

We decided, though, that our pizza would probably taste better if we made it in our own kitchen instead of having the frozen version delivered from Chicago. Many pizza pies (and plenty of smoke alarms, thanks to our old apartment's poor ventilation) later, we've become fanatics. The AB in 5 method works just as well for pizza dough as it does for baguettes and pita bread! 

In the past, we've made mini-deep dish pizzas using our little staub cocottes, but last night, we went all out and used the biggest cast-iron pan we have. We have found that the olive oil and cornmeal dough works the best for deep-dish, as it gives the pizza a thick and crumbly crust. 

We stuffed our pizza with eggplant, pepperoni, red pepper, garlic, and mozzarella, topped it with homemade tomato sauce (crushed tomatoes, onion, butter, fennel pollen, and red pepper flakes - so, so good!), and set it to bake for about 45 minutes. We tried letting it rest for the recommended amount of 10 minutes, but couldn't wait that long so we cut in after about 5. Topped with fresh basil and a sprinkling of pecorino cheese, this was one of our best pizzas to date. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it - thankfully we still have most of it for leftovers! 

Do you make pizza at home? If you don't, definitely check out AB in 5 for pizza - it's so easy, and actually quite inexpensive to make the dough in your own kitchen! 

Chicago Day Trip.

Happy Labor Day weekend! It's hard to believe that the unofficial end of summer is already here. We decided to take a short trip to Chicago yesterday - it's so close to Milwaukee! In order to spend as much time in Chicago as possible, we drove to Kenosha to make the 6:50 a.m. train and took that right into downtown. Metra's weekend pass is really reasonable, only $7.00 (and it only costs $2.50 per day to park in Kenosha); this is something we're definitely going to be taking advantage of!

The weather forecast was originally pretty bleak (I had been checking all week), but it turned out to be quite lovely; it sprinkled a bit when we first arrived, but otherwise it was just cloudy and breezy, so we were able to walk around without any trouble.

We went to breakfast at Xoco, one of Rick Bayless' restaurants. We've been to Frontera before, and absolutely loved it, so we were excited (and hungry, as we had been up since 4:30!) for Xoco. It was really good, but we both think it would have been better for lunch. The coffee drinks, though, were amazing. Andrew had a chocolate espresso, and I had a wonderful chocolate cafe con leche: thick, just the right amount of chocolate, and so smooth.

We walked around the city all day, visiting our favorite spots and discovering new ones. We've been to Chicago four times now since we've started dating, and it's the city where we got engaged last October. It's really a special place to us, and we're so excited about how close by it is.  

One of the reasons we love Chicago so much is the fact that there are so many incredible restaurants. On our last trip, we visited Cafe Spiaggia, Q, The Publican, and The Purple Pig, and all were amazing. We knew we only had one day for this trip, so there were certainly fewer meals to plan, but we still made sure we ate well. For lunch, we decided to try Bar Toma, Tony Mantuano's new restaurant. We had guanciale-wrapped sweetbreads with sage and shared the Calabrese pizza, topped with sausage, Calabrian chilies, and mozzarella. The crust on the pizza was the best I've ever had. You could taste the smokiness of the wood from the oven, and it was perfectly soft and crispy at the same time. Amazing. 

We also walked around the Fulton Market District, west of downtown and set in between the highways and the Chicago River. It smells like chocolate, but I'm not sure why. From the outside, it doesn't look like the posh and luxurious neighborhood that's home to some of the country's best restaurants, but famous names like The Publican, Next, Aviary, Blackbird, Avec, and others have found their place and are thriving in the warehouses and brick alleyways of Fulton. During our afternoon walk, we stopped in to Publican Quality Meats, which sells all sorts of local products, from smoked beef heart to artisanal honey (from MN!). Andrew was definitely in his happy place. 

We returned to Fulton for dinner, to a restaurant called g.e.b. The menu had smaller plates to share, which we really like because then we are able to order several dishes and and try more than one. We had calamari with green hummus, oxtail lasagna, a saffron risotto with clams, blueberry cake, and gianduja-filled beignets. Realizing we had some time before our train was to depart, we decided to try RM Champagne Salon, a new champagne lounge we had read about (and which happened to be next door to g.e.b.!). I can't wait to go back! I had a champagne cocktail and Andrew ordered a whiskey with cherry notes; it was the perfect way to end the night. 

We took the train back to Kenosha, and made it back to Shorewood by midnight. We're quite tired today, but already planning the next visit to one of our favorite cities!