Mediterranean White Pizza

Brandon has fallen in love with the Alexander the Greek pizza from Chanello's, a local pizza chain here in Virginia.  It's a Mediterranean style white pizza with, among other things, calamata olives and feta cheese.  It's delicious.  This time, instead of ordering out, I decided to make my own.

You will need: 

fresh pizza dough (1 ball = 1 pizza)

olive oil

minced garlic (I got a jar of it, rather than mincing my own)

fresh basil

 fresh spinach

shredded mozzarella

chopped roma tomatoes (1 per pizza)

chopped calamata olives

chopped white onion

feta cheese, crumbled

I didn't measure anything out, I just kind of gauged by what looked right. If any of these ingredients don't sound good to you, don't put it on the pizza!  I skipped the onion, though it was more by accident than by design.  Just remember, the more ingredients you have to put on it, the less of each you will need.

Preheat oven to 375°F and get your pizza dough thinned out and spread on your pan.  (I wasn't sure whether to oil my pan or not, so I did one with and one with out.  The pizza came easily off of the un-oiled pan, but stuck to the oiled one.)  Mix olive oil, basil, and garlic in a small dish and use your fingers to spread it out on the prepared pizza dough as the "sauce".  Grab a handful of the spinach, break it up a bit, and sprinkle it on.  Add the mozzarella, tomatoes, olives, onion and feta.  (Brandon had me add more mozzarella on top, after that photo was taken.)  Bake at 375°F for 25 or 30 minutes, or until cheese just begins to brown and the crust is golden.  (I let my first one over-brown, and then I took the second one out a bit too soon.)

Let it cool a bit after you take it out, and enjoy!

Sirloin Steak Dianne

I've been going to allrecipes.com for a lot of recipes lately.  Most recently, we tried the sirloin steak Dianne and easy delicious asparagus.

Now, the asparagus recipe was just as delicious as the title promised, but Dianne must really fancy complex recipes.  It was delicious, but it was definitely not easy.

See?  We had to set it on fire.  To make matters worse, I made the triple mistakes of not reading the whole recipe thoroughly, not ensuring that I had all the necessary ingredients, and not doing any prep work.  If Brandon hadn't been there to help me pull it together, it would have been a disaster.  But he was there, he did help me, and we were able toput together a darn good dinner.  One day, we would like to do it again, but with all the right ingredients, and with all the prep work done ahead of time.