Prize-Winning S’mores Pizza, and Classic Chicken Bacon Ranch

I would just like to take a minute to let everyone pause, take a deep breath, and prepare for what I’m about to tell you…

Patrick and I won the Monaco Family S’mores contest!

Before we dive into that, let me show you a snapshot of my weekend:

Beautiful weather, family, donuts, swimming, and happiness back home in NY!

Patrick and I were also able to join my family this morning for a Borodino Pancake Breakfast, which I have been going to since my mom was pregnant with me. Now, my mom has her own group of pancake-eaters that continues to grow!

So, let’s back track. My family started the s’mores contest back in 2009 with some pretty simple rules: show up, make s’mores, have them judged, try to win. But it’s actually a little more complicated than that. We have judges. The judges have to take an oath of honesty, and sign a judge’s contract that they didn’t accept any bribes, etc. Each entry must have a cookie/cracker component, chocolate in some form, and contain a fireside roasted marshmallow. The s’more entries are created in secret, and are presented by a single person to preserve contestant anonymity. The judges have to score the s’mores based on a scoring rubric. I was the ORIGINAL s’mores contest winner!

Back in 2009 I used Fudge Shoppe striped cookies and marshmallows, was in a horrible grumpy mood, and someone managed to win anyways. The claim to fame is our s’mores trophy, and writing your name on the S’mores Cup.

Over the past few years our contest has grown, changed shape, and increased in competitiveness. We took a few years off due to many small children being born, busy summers, lakehouse construction, and a wedding. This was our first contest since 2013!

For our s’mores pizza, we made a graham cracker crust (hello, 1.5 sticks of butter!), covered it in hershey’s spread (found in the peanut butter aisle), and plunked the marshmallows on top (a combo of fireside roasted and broiled in the oven 😉 )

Here is the final, prize-winning product:

It wasn’t quite as beautiful as our Pinterest inspiration was, however, it was so delicious. Somehow (again, probably the 1.5 sticks of butter) that crust on the bottom tasted like a Mrs. Fields cookie! Major points to Patrick for suggesting we serve it in an actual pizza box!

The other contestants certainly tried their hardest. Katie, Jason and the girls made graham cracker rice krispie treat bowls and topped them with ice cream, chocolate sauce and a roasted ‘mallow. Chrissie, Pete and the kids but Dunkin Munchkins on the griddle to flatten them out and build a s’more using those and Lindt salter caramel chocolate. My apologies to my sisters, as I did NOT get pictures of their entries. My mom (who has been pining for the trophy ever since the initiation of this contest) came in second place and I am very proud of her creativity and presentation! She made a s’more using the traditional graham cracker and Hershey’s chocolate, but topped the marshmallow with bacon! She then added cute little cupcakes and a tail to make it look like a piggy!

Close, but no cigar mama! Maybe next year! (PS- check out her AWESOME s’mores hat!)

The judges (seen below, swearing in and taking their Judges’ Oath) obviously made the right call by choosing the Chambers as winners!!

And yes, that is in fact my Uncle Rob wearing both a referee shirt and a chef’s hat! He is a former competitor-turned-judge, so he took this competition VERY seriously!

So, as if there was any question, Patrick and I took the win. We signed the trophy cup and the s’mores shower curtain (yes…you read that right), and left NY with a victory in hand. We now have the trophy safe back home in Delaware with us. I’m busy trying to find the right place to display it.

After a long, fun filled weekend of family time, snuggling babies and children, walking dogs and swimming in the lake, I’m exhausted and as Vicky from RHOC would say, “my love tank is full”.

Patrick knew he would have to choose a pizza for this week to 1.) cheer me up from having to leave my family and 2.) live up to our prize winning s’mores pizza from yesterday.

He really did the trick with this chicken, bacon, ranch pizza!

It may seem simple, but this pizza is so delicious! Any time we use chicken on pizza we tend to use chicken thighs. They have a little more fat on them, so they don’t dry out when cooked, then placed on a pizza. We also discovered Bolthouse yogurt dressings last year. They are awesome and take a lot of the guilt out of slathering my pizza/chicken/salad/quesadilla/ANYTHING in ranch dressing. So it was a no-brainer to use it on a pizza.

As we eat the last crumbs of our pizza, I am happy. Happy to have spent the weekend with my family. Happy to have a husband who feeds me bacon. And happy that we are the National S’more Contest winners of 2016 (but seriously… next Food Network competition?!)

Happy Pizza Sunday, everyone!

A Birthday, A Wedding, and an Eggplant Pizza Redemption

What a crazy, busy, amazing week this has been! This week has been full of fun events and LOTS of pizza. I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even have time to post a tbt post this week, oops!

My friends Soozin and Brigit are legitimate foodies. I  didn’t think it was possible for anyone to love food more than me, and then I found these two. We met last fall, when I joined a kickball league to meet people, since uprooting to Delaware had me feelingpretty isolated and lonely. My hand-eye coordination was horrible, but at least I got lots of beer and some friends out of it! Soozin and Brigit have shown me some seriously amazing bars and restaurants in Delaware (they also have a dog Charli who I am pretty obsessed with).

But anyways, we went out to dinner on Wednesday night to Pizza by Elizabeths. I had been hearing awesome things about this place for a while, so I was pumped to check it out! They use a wood fired pizza oven, which in my humble opinion is the only way to go. Each pizza on their menu has a name, and they are all named after different Elizabeths. We tried three pizzas off their menu:

• Boop: (as in Betty) Fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, a touch of balsamic vinaigrette, and your choice of fresh tomatoes or chunky tomato sauce (we went with the fresh tomatoes…which I promptly scraped off my piece 😉 )

• Arden: Original tomato sauce, rosemary onions, broccoli, sun dried tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, mozzarella and Parmesan

• Saint: Creamy crab and artichoke mixture with Parmesan cheese, paprika, and chives

Overall I think the three of us pretty much agreed on our review of the place. Great toppings, everything was clearly very fresh. I thought that the thin crust definitely held up well to the heavy toppings, especially the crab and artichoke pizza! However the outer edge of the crust (which I affectionately call “the handle”) was very bland and dry, unfortunately resembling cardboard in more ways than I had hoped. This was pretty disappointing, because a good crust can make or break a pizza. Despite that, we loved there large menu and will certainly be going back to try more options.

Did I mention that I had a ton of pizza this week?

Thursday was Patrick’s birthday! The big 2-7 🙂 How did we celebrate, you ask? Pizza of course! Patrick chose the pizza for his birthday, and threw it wayyy back to one of our original pizzas: spinach and feta. When we were both starting grad school we would make this pizza once every week or two using Wegmans dough. This time around, it turned out practically perfect on the grill…probably thanks to our AWESOME aprons from Pat’s brother’s girlfriend Anne! Our pizza birthday celebration was short lived though, as Pat had to go into work that night.

This pizza is so simple! It’s literally pizza dough, frozen spinach, feta, and a sprinkle of pizza cheese. That’s it! It consistently turns out pretty awesome, and it’s so easy!

So, as if our week wasn’t awesome enough, my best friend from college, Nicole, got married yesterday! I was so excited to be a part of her special day as a bridesmaid. Nicole and Zak got married in Binghamton, NY, Nicole’s home town. On Friday mid-day, Pat and I packed up and headed north! Poor Patrick had worked midnight to 8 AM, so he was exhausted. Four hours of on-and-off sleep in the car certainly isn’t sufficient! But don’t worry, he caught up on sleep before the big day!

This wedding was AWESOME! The bridesmaids were a blast, and we had so much fun all day long. From getting our hair and makeup done, to André in plastic cups and Drake whisky stolen from the groomsmen (aka “Drisky”), these girls know how to have a good time! We smiled and laughed so much, my face hurts today!

Nicole was the most calm, cool and collected bride ever, and not to mention bombshell-gorgeous in her dress! It was such an amazing day of celebrating their love and happiness, and I haven’t had that much fun in a while! Nicole and Zak are perfect for each other, and their wedding day was perfect too!

At the end of the night (11 PM, exhausted, sweaty, still drunk, and definitely hungry again) they brought out pizza in the hotel reception area! So awesome, and such a great ending to a great night! I wish I’d taken a picture of that pizza, but instead I shoved it in my mouth as fast as possible, whoops!

Sadly, Patrick and I had to pack up again and head home this morning since he works at midnight. It’s always hard to say goodbye to friends or family after a visit and come back to Delaware where we still really don’t have roots set. At least since we got on the road fairly early, we thought it might be a good idea to come home and try a redemption pizza. We were so disappointed in our last eggplant pizza, that we needed to give it another try!

Conveniently, when I went out to dinner with Soozin and Brigit earlier this week, Brigit brought me some amazing fresh veggies from her garden at work, including eggplant!

So eggplant again, it was!

This pizza has red sauce (Wegmans), fresh mozzarella, roasted garlic, and roasted eggplant. This is my new favorite way to prepare eggplant! Just slice it (this eggplant was pretty big so I cut the slices into quarters), drizzle with olive oil and garlic salt, and stick in the oven on “broil” for a few minutes! (note: keep a close eye on the eggplant when it’s broiling- it can go from slightly under-done to charred and ruined in no time, trust me… Half our eggplant was totally burnt!!)

I’d say we certainly redeemed ourselves with this pizza!

The toppings are definitely on point, however the crust was a little bit disappointing. We were originally planning on doing take-out pizza somewhere in Binghamton, so when we got home early we had to throw together our dough quickly! It only rose for 2-3 hours, so the crust was pretty flat and brittle. But no worries, this pizza is still beautiful!

And yes, it is equally as delicious as it is beautiful! I mean come on… do you see that cheese? So good. So, so good. Oh and I decided last minute to top it with fresh basil. That was an excellent choice, if I do say so myself.

What will next week be? Your guess is as good as ours!

Until next time… happy Pizza Sunday!

Palak Paneer Pizza FTW

I have been on a serious Indian food kick. Somehow I went 27 years of my life without ever experiencing it. I think my problem was that I was just overwhelmed about the concept of all the new flavors and food combinations that I didn’t know where to start.

Then we moved to Delaware, and this happened:

Zaikka is an Indian restaurant that Patrick and I heard about through the grapevine. One day we decided to try it out for ourselves based on all the reviews.

So we walk in, and it’s a “Chipotle-style” build-your own salad/bowl/naan. It was so cool! The  workers were so nice, as I stool there asking a thousand questions and mispronouncing everything.

I settled on this rice bowl combination:

• half tandoori chicken/half braised lamb
• saag
• coconut cashew korma
• scallions, cilantro, garbanzo beans and pesto

I wish I had a picture to commemorate how beautiful and delicious it was. Oh, and did I mention the naan on the side? It was the most fresh, fluffy naan I have ever had. Major bummer is that there are two Zaikka locations, both of which are dangerously close to our house. I have to exercise the utmost restraint when navigating through Wilmington(aka avoid driving on those streets so I don’t pull over, run in, and escape with a delicious rice bowl).

So once I discovered that Indian food is delicious, I became completely obsessed. I hit up Wegmans and Trader Joe’s and tried various pre-made sauces including tikka masala and butter sauce. Both, of course, were delicious. But then I found this gem at Trader Joe’s:

This, of course, is delicious. BEYOND delicious. And it saves hours of me trying to play around with expensive Indian food ingredients, to make a sub-par, less delicious version of saag. For anyone that does not know what this flavor combination is, this delicious, slightly spicy spinach with a pesto-like texture mixed with delicious, creamy cubes of cheese. It’s a killer combination.

So Patrick and I have been thinking about doing an Indian-themed pizza for a while but didn’t quite know how to go about doing it…. until the palak paneer discovery at Trader Joe’s. So we figured, if that is super delicious on naan bread, it has to be delicious on pizza too, right? Yup. We were right.

So we made our dough ( a much better batch this week!), created our pizza, and found a brand new high temperature on our grill.

I give myself all the credit for the temperature being >550°, because I was the one who preheated the grill today 😉

So about 6 minutes later, this beauty came out:

She’s beautiful! Our crust held up very well to the heavy load of pesto, which was something we were both very worried about. This pizza was very tasty. I think we would both definitely do this again!

Any other interesting, new flavor profiles for pizza suggestions are welcomed!

And on a completely unrelated note, I was finally gifted with the most perfect avocado this week. I just need to share the evidence!!

Everyone have a great week, see you Sunday!

In Honor of the Olympics!

This week’s #tbt is all about our Greek pizza! It seems fitting since Greece is the birthplace of the Olympics! Fun fact about me: I took Latin as my foreign language of choice from 7th grade through 11th grade. Then in 12th grade I got bored, was taking too many college level courses to consider adding in AP Latin, so I took intro Spanish instead! Latin was cool, and definitely helped later in life when learning medical terminology, but realistically I wish I had taken Spanish. One of these days I will follow through with my promise to learn Spanish…

Watching these amazing men and women athletes often gives me chills. The pure talent that I see is so remarkable. The hard work, dedication, time and financial commitments it must take to become successful at a national level are hard for me to grasp. I truly give each and every one of the Olympic so much credit. And then I sit here watching the intense athletes playing table tennis and think to myself… why did I go into medicine when I could have gone into professional table tennis and gone to the Olympics? But then I realize that Olympic athletes probably aren’t allowed to eat pizza every Sunday, so I guess my life is pretty good.

I think the Michael Phelps’ “death stare” memes floating around are HILARIOUS. If my mom and dad are reading this, I think they will feel betrayed that they didn’t copyright that look when it appeared on my face for a few years straight when I was younger! I thought I’d share a “death stare” meme of my own.

My feels every single day, but especially the morning after Pizza Sunday:

To be completely honest, it probably starts a few minutes after our last bite of pizza. We get sad, depressed and hopeless (SIGECAPS, anyone?) when we realize there are no more slices left. We then channel those inner feelings of sadness to create our ideas for our next pizza.

I was pretty disappointed in last week’s pizza. It was ugly, and way too salty. I woke up Monday morning with puffy bags under my eyes and I couldn’t get my rings off my hand! So to make up for that, I figured Greek pizza would be a perfect share. Plus it was delicious. Plus its the Rio Olympics.

Look at this beauty!

Base: homemade tzatziki sauce (the super easy and super delicious recipe we used is here)

Toppings: caramelized onions, gyro meat (bought this frozen, we don’t own a spit 😉 ), our favorite 4 cheese blend, and fresh dill sprinkled on top after coming out of the oven

I get it – some people probably think that tzatziki sauce on pizza sounds disgusting… but it’s NOT! This pizza was so amazing. Added bonus was that I got to bring Greek salads for lunch to work for the rest of the week with the leftover tzatziki sauce. Unfortunately I learned the hard way that there are not enough Listerine strips in the world to mask tzatziki garlic breath from your patients!

Patrick is already brewing some great ideas for another very unique pizza for this week. So stay tuned for Pizza Sunday, only three days away!

Eggplant and Roasted Red Pepper

This week has been very long! Patrick is on overnights, and I had something going on almost every single day after work. We have been really looking forward to having this time together to enjoy some delicious pizza.

Unfortunately this pizza fell a pretty flat. I had this grand idea of a beautifully artistic pizza topped with sliced eggplant and roasted red pepper. Sounds delicious and all probably gorgeous, right? WRONG. No such luck for us this week 😦

Patrick has been trying to stay up late to maintain his sleep schedule to continue overnights (starting back up tonight), so he made the dough late last night. This morning the first thing he said to me that for some reason the dough just “didn’t feel right” after it completed mixing. Bummer. It was like the pizza gods knew that it wouldn’t be a good week for us. Cooking is a science, however sometimes errors occur.

In addition to a faulty batch of dough, our grill wouldn’t get hot enough this afternoon! So we had to use the oven. Which is fine… but grilled pizzas are better.

The good news is that we went to Wegmans today to pick up our pizza toppings supplies: red pepper, eggplant, and pizza sauce. Wegmans is truly my “happy place”, so I jump at any excuse to head up there. We have made our own pizza sauce before, but it is pretty labor intensive, and Wegmans’ pizza sauce is pretty darn good.

Making the eggplant was easy. I sliced it very thin, placed them in a single layer on a baking sheet and drizzled with olive oil then sprinkled with salt. I set the oven to broil, and the slices were golden brown and ready to rumble in about 7-8 minutes. I made sure to turn them over about halfway through. I tested on slice, and it was so delicious that I had to physically walk away to stop from eating them all! We will definitely be having more eggplant pizzas in the future.

Roasting my own pepper has been something I’ve wanted to do ever since we’ve moved to our new house that has a great gas stove. After a quick Youtube consultation, I cranked up the gas flame to high, and rotated the pepper until all sides of the skin were blackened. I removed it from the flame, placed it in a bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. After I let it cool for a few minutes I peeled off all the skin, removed the top with the seeds, and chopped it up. It was really easy!

The pizza was easy to craft:

1. Layer of pizza cheese blend
2. Layer of eggplant
3. Layer of roasted red pepper
4. Top with a sprinkle of cheese

The final product was pretty disappointing. The crust didn’t rise very much, and I think it probably would have been much prettier if we used fresh mozzarella instead of our pizza blend. The good news is that the pizza was still pretty tasty!

The truth is that even though we have been making pizzas for a few years, we are far from experts. Every week we learn something that we can improve on, and hopefully one day we will perfect our skills! I’m sure winning the lottery and being able to own a wood-fired pizza oven would certainly help though…

So for now we will start planning for next week’s pizza, which will hopefully be very delicious, and much more beautiful.

Happy Pizza Sunday!

Carrie

 

 

Pizza for President!

But seriously… ^^ not a bad idea right? I think I’m going to write in “Pizza for President” on my ballot this November 😉

I’m trying to keep my mind off politics, so I’ve been reminiscing about pizza (what…you don’t do that too??). For this week’s #tbt post I will share with you one past pizza fail, and one past pizza win. Let’s start with the fail and just get it over with!

This sad excuse for a pizza is supposed to be a cheeseburger pizza:

A few things to note here:

1. We fully cooked the hamburger before putting on the pizza and then baked it some more in the oven, when really we should have just browned the ground beef… it became way too over cooked
2. We got very lean ground beef, which is fine for all things OTHER than pizza… it really got dried out
3. The addition of Velveeta on this pizza was key (okay this is a good part of the pizza)
4. We should have added more toppings! Truthfully it’s kind of a boring pizza!

This pizza was made in my apartment in Syracuse before we moved here, and my oven was pretty crappy. We never really got a great crust, yet somehow regularly burnt the toppings. This past pizza fail was put to shame even further after we tried a professional’s creation…

On a trip up to Philadelphia last summer we went to Pizza Brain after some hefty research about it. It was awesome! We tried a few different slices. I would say that I was most pleasantly surprised with their cheeseburger, which they have titled the “Whur Herbert”.

Description (from website): spicy mustard sauce, ground sirloin, mozzarella, white cheddar, pickled onions, fancy sauce

The guy working there affectionately described it as a “Big Mac on a pizza”. I was pretty worried that it would be gross because “special sauce” usually = ketchup + mayo (sounds like grounds for a soggy pizza), but the worker assured me it was delicious.I decided to take a risk and try it out. Patrick tried it too. It was great! Somehow the combination of flavors on their crispy crust was anything but gross- and it really did taste like I was eating a pizza-version of a loaded cheeseburger! (see below: the slices on the right side of the plate, the pink things are the pickled onions)

If anyone lives or visits Fishtown in Philly, check Pizza Brain out! They have some seriously unique pizzas and are very tasty. Fun fact: Their claim to fame (besides great pizza) is that they are the “first pizza museum”; they really do have such a cool collection of pizza memorabilia, old and new.

So anyways: our cheeseburger pizza is an epic fail when compared to Pizza Brain’s version! We definitely have it on our list to revamp and repeat our recipe soon.

Our past pizza win for this week is all courtesy of Patrick. I’m pretty sure that if you think any of the pizzas we post sound good, Patrick was probably the brain behind it.

Patrick was really so good to me last summer. With a move down to Delaware last July, and our wedding up in Syracuse in September, I had a seriously busy few months making the 5 hour drive each way from DE to NY. Patrick would almost always have a pizza coming out of the oven, ready to be eaten when I would come home on Sunday evenings. I am a seriously luck lady.

Patrick dug deep into his New England roots to pull off this bacon and clam pizza! One time while up in New Haven, Connecticut with family, they visited Frank Pepe’s and had this white clam pizza. It looks amazing, but not as amazing as Pat’s version! Everything is better with bacon…amiright?!

The drive from NY back to DE is always pretty stressful, especially in the summer when there is significant beach traffic. So when I came home to THIS^^ I was the happiest wife (well… then I was a fiancé) in the world.

Pizza Sunday is only 3 days away, and we haven’t decided what our plans are yet. Guess we’ll all find out what the end result will be on Sunday!!

 

Everyone have a great Thursday, and remember:

PIZZA FOR PRESIDENT!

Our Perfect Dough

Patrick and I have had quite a few  requests for our pizza dough recipe. We are happy to provide! Even if it means I need to tear myself away from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to write this post (it was really, really difficult). We have finally perfected a dough recipe and cooking method that is as close to perfect as we’re going to get without purchasing an outdoor pizza oven (someday…).

Our original dough recipe was based on the thickness and richness of Pizzeria Uno’s deep dish crust. The problem with that dough recipe is that we like a thin and crispy crust, so we were never happy with the consistency. We could never seem to perfect it. The dough had oil in it too, so it was pretty heavy. We finally realized that we needed to try a Neoplitian pizza dough after going on a New York City pizza bus tour through Scott’s Pizza Tours (another post for another day- it was awesome). So we gave it a whirl, and now we now stick with a Neapolitan pizza dough. We’ve been really happy!

There are two important requirements for this dough recipe. First, you need a food scale. It should have multi-function measuring (e.g., oz, grams, kg, etc.). You will also need a standing mixer. We have had nothing but great results with our Kitchen Aid, which is a hand-me-down from Patrick’s grandmother. I’m not sure quite how old it is (Patrick would know but he’s sleeping, he’s on night shifts), but it works perfectly and just like new for us.

Ingredients: