Monday, November 24, 2008

Pizza: A fable (now with giant beans!)

Woohoo! I haven't had a pizza party in a while - I was starting to get sad, until my trusty friend Eiko reminded me how important a pizza party is for one's soul. She came over with her friend Ria and we fixed us up some pizzas (with dead dough! oops, I used hot water - but we used pie pans so it turned out fine). We each did a pizza up on our own -using the same ingredients...

Eiko was first:
Pizza 1

We've got some spinach pesto, eggplant, shiitake mushies, cashew ricotta, red onion, cherry tomato, roasted red peppers, with maitake-mushie-tomato sauce.

Ria did a great job for her first pizza party:

Pizza 2

I got all crazy with mine and added apple cause Eiko and Ria used ALL of the roasted red peppers.... success:

Pizza 3

We also had an awesome salad to go with it. Apples, spinach, lettuce, red onion, raw shiitake, cucumber, hanamame beans with a roasted-red pepper dressing:

Salad

So check out those beans! They are huge - each one is like an inch long! Also, they are purple! A ton of the farmers in the area grow them - I bought bags and bags of them. White, purple and black - all from this years crop. They are a little sweet and nutty - seriously, they require no seasoning at all! Check out some action shots:

GIANT BEANS!

It is really difficult to take a macro-shot with no flash of something you're holding with chopsticks after drinking a huge cup of coffee! This is Ria and Eiko (in that order) enjoying the (three person) party. Note the forkin' huge bean Ria is holding with her chopsticks:

Ria and Eiko

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Square Fruit

My new favorite fruit... Japanese Persimmon. They are so delicious! Also, they are square! Weird! How many exclamation points do you think I can use?!?! I bought a mini-crate of them. They will probably be gone by the end of the week... I hope to make some of them into ice-cream... kakis and cream! har har.

Also, I discovered that eggplant is really good fried. Wonderful!