Cooking With Passion...May Cause You To Loose Your Mind

I really do love cooking and most of the time I cook with my sense of smell, taste, mood and Passssion! Often I will start with an idea of what sounds good and mix it with what do I have in the fridge. I've tried really hard these past few years of not cooking the same old thing unless it was such a smash that I could not bare to never eat it again. Taking pizza for an example, tonight I wanted pizza with my zucchini I picked from the garden. So the only thing I knew I had was fresh mozzarella, basil, garlic and whole canned tomatoes. Sounds pretty good right? So I open the fridge and see my little sweet onions, I forgot I had just picked up baby heirloom tomatoes in different colors...yummy. In the back I see a few leftover marinated artichokes I've wanted to use up, now this looks like another wonderful veggie pizza. Of course one of my staples in the kitchen "dried gourmet mushrooms." break a few of those up add some hot water, make a quick sauce and start dicing! How I made my sauce:

Quick Tomato Sauce
For Pizza and Pasta

3 whole tomatoes with some juice from a can
5 Basil leaves torn
1/2 head of roasted garlic**

Take a little sauce pan and dump in the tomatoes with juice, tear basil leaves and bring to a boil.
When it starts to bubble, stir so it does not scorch.
Squeeze your head of garlic until you pull out 4-6 roasted cloves drop them in when the tomato sauce starts to look thicker.
Cook down until all the runny liquid is evaporated and you have a sauce that holds it's form on a spoon.
Let the sauce rest and cool down a little bit while you get your ingredients finished.


Now I start chopping my onion, fish out the artichokes, save the marinade for tomorrows salad. Chop the artichokes, squeeze the water out of the mushrooms, save and freeze that juice for another sauce. Slice in half about 6 yellow grape heirlooms and cut up a few of the bigger tomatoes. Get the mozzarella, squeeze out the extra water/whey and run the knife through it so I have different sizes. The oven beep's at 550 so I grab the olive oil, drizzle really fast on my pizza stone apx size of my piece of lavash. Oil running off a hot pizza stone dripping in your oven is not only messy but a smoky, hard to breath environment I do not recommend!

Lavash is down, sauce is spread with the speed of light, sprinkle onions, scatter artichokes, throw mushrooms all around and toss on mozzarella. Shut the oven door and in apx 10 min the pizza will be crisp and perfectly melted...ready to devour. I usually do this with my guy so that you can shut the oven door faster, we alternate who does what, it's crazy and fun.

It is not even 10 min yet but the pizza looks yummy and smells amazing! We pull it fast with a metal spatula from the pizza stone onto a cutting board, slice it up, go sit down with little pizza plates and ice cold champagne, just like that. I take a huge bite and savor that moment, take a sip of champagne and oooppps I FORGOT THE ZUCCHINI!!!!! We both started laughing because the zucchini was the whole reason I started cooking this pizza in the first place.

I realize I get sidetracked but even more so I realize that when I'm in my zone, doing what I love and passion takes over.....I'm out of my mind, I'm out of my head, I'm in the food zone and I LOVE IT!

Hope you enjoyed,
Ms. Foodie