Our family loves grilled pizza. Probably because of our long-standing tradition of grilling pizza before going out to Trick-or-Treat on Halloween. When the kids were growing up, all of their friends came to our house/neighborhood to go out for candy. Back then, purchasing pizza dough wasn’t even on my radar. Now, I’m lazy and simply pick up a package of pizza dough at Trader Joe’s and call it a day. But making fresh dough is fun and easy. The link for my dough can be found here.

In the recipe, I instruct you to place your stretched dough onto a pizza peel that is sprinkled with cornmeal. This makes it easy to slide the dough from the peel to the grill, preventing the dough from sticking. I made this pizza while in Chicago with Marissa. She did not have a pizza peel or cornmeal. So I made do with the back of a round baking sheet and crumbled saltines. By no means perfect or all easy but when you have to make do with what you have…

The parade of peaches continues. Yesterday the peach salsa had the extra benefit of mango and strawberry.

Today’s salad gets an extra fruity punch from apricot.

Dave is the salad lover in our family. I love soup. But I will admit, I do love this salad.

Oh, and I used the sliced honey roasted almonds from Trader Joe’s but plain sliced or slivered almonds, or any nut of your choice for that matter, would work perfectly fine. I would just toast them in a dry skillet or in the oven first. Enjoy!

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The main course for the Fall Picnic was two types of sandwiches, the first, a pressed sandwich, the recipe is here today. The second, a chicken sandwich … I’ll post tomorrow.

Pressed Italian Sandwiches

• 4 ciabatta rolls, cut in half horizontally
• 1/2 cup black or green olive tapenade
• 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8 thin slices Genoa salami
• 4 thin slices prosciutto
• 8 slices fresh mozzarella cheese
• 2 roasted red, yellow, or orange bell peppers, sliced
• 8 large fresh basil leaves

Then spread the bottom half of each ciabatta roll with tapenade.

In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, oil and mustard and season with salt and pepper Drizzle the cut side of top half of each roll with the dressing.

Arrange salami on top of the tapenade, followed by the prosciutto.

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This is the fifth and final post of “Stone Fruit” Week.

How cute are those cookie letters!?! I found them at Trader Joe’s and could not resist.

This is the perfect recipe to finish the week on. It is colorful, fruity, a little decadent, and so wonderfully summery!

I strolled through Trader Joe’s for inspiration. I had the fruit and prosciutto at home and knew those would be part of whatever dish I came up with. Then I spotted the burrata and the rest of it quickly fell into place.

Burrata is a fresh Italian cheese, made from mozzarella and fresh cream. The outer shell is solid mozzarella while the inside contains both mozzarella and cream, giving it a luscious glorious creamy texture. The name “burrata” means “buttered” in Italian.

One component that is not essential, but really puts this salad over the top is Vanilla Bean Olive Oil from the Queen Creek Olive Mill. The Mill is having a summer special right now, buy 2 – get 1 free. I don’t know how long it lasts, so if you’re interested – act quickly. If not, high-quality fruity olive oil will work just fine for this recipe.

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On Wednesday night, Peggy, Anne, and I made a 6 PM date for an impromptu happy hour at my house.

I had planned to go to Trader Joe’s and pick up some nibbles and wine, but the day slipped away from me (hijacked actually) when something unexpected came up.

Sometimes, a girl’s gotta do what a girl has gotta do … with what she has on hand.

I raced through the door at 5:15; pulled a loaf of bread and a package of prosciutto from the freezer, chilled a couple of bottles of wine I had on hand, jumped in the shower, then threw together this quick appetizer… all before Anne rang the bell at 6:00.

Victory is Mine!

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The idea for this pizza came from the Corkscrew Cafe in Carmel Valley, California.

I’ve never been there. I have never had their pizza, but as you well know, I have Meyer lemons… so it is this pizza that I made!

I read the description on the menu, and the plethora of raves about it on Yelp, and I came up with my own Meyer Lemon Pizza.

Are you worried that you may not like this pizza because of the full lemon slices on there? Peel and all! Please don’t be. Meyer lemon peel is thinner and sweeter and it is delicious!

In addition, just yesterday, my friend, Amy (Amy’s Famous Taco Soup) sent me an email with all kinds of amazing information about lemon peels.

Did you know that lemon peels contain as much as 10 times more vitamins than the lemon juice itself? Lemon peels eradicate toxic elements in the body. The peel is an antimicrobial agent that fights against bacterial infections and fungi, effective against internal parasites and worms, it regulates blood pressure, and is an antidepressant, that combats stress and nervous disorders. And according to the email Amy sent me, lemon kills cancer cells and is 10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy.

Now, I haven’t done an ounce of research to back up any of the information in that email, it could be “internet truth.” But if even 1/10th of that is true… well get out there and eat your lemons, peels and all… and start with this pizza! If you still are not convinced, you can always look to have pizza delivered to you through a simple online order.

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Maybe I should feel guilty about putting this up as a “recipe” – but honestly, I don’t.

I saw a photo of this on Pinterest several months ago and finally made it this past Saturday for our Christmas Crafts Class.

The tasty little picks disappeared right before my eyes. So yeah, I’m gonna write it up as a real recipe.

The original Pinterest post I saw used Serrano ham. I used prosciutto, salami, and other thinly sliced cured and smoked meats I had leftover from my Thanksgiving appetizer tray.

Any thinly sliced smoked or cured meat will work. Let’s see – Capocollo, Pancetta, Mortadella, Sopressata, Iberico Ham, Speck, or Calabrese … any and all would all be perfectly lovey.

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If you read yesterday’s post, then you probably could have guessed that today I would be making something with peaches. You are correct – I aim to please.  If you use purchased pizza dough, then this recipe certainly qualifies as “easy-breezy”.

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I mentioned the other day that I’m in the middle of my three-week cooking series at Les Gourmettes. The first week was a Mother’s Day brunch menu and I needed kiwifruit for a fruit salad. Yes, I said “kiwifruit”, not just “kiwi”.  That is because kiwi is a bird and kiwifruit is … well, it’s a fruit!

Kiwifruit grows on vines and is named after the flightless kiwi bird, native to New Zealand, with hair-like brown feathers. They lay greenish-white eggs. Kiwi fruits are native to China, where they were originally called “macaque peach”.

Nutrition-wise, kiwifruits contain about as much potassium as bananas, are packed with more vitamin C than an equivalent amount of orange, and are also rich in Vitamins A and E. Plus the black seeds can be crushed to produce kiwi fruit oil, which is very rich in important Omega-3 essential fatty acid.

Since this is a cooking blog and not a blog about birds, it is safe to say that when you see “kiwi” in a recipe here, you can be 100% certain I’m talking about the fruit and not the bird.

So anyhow… back to the kiwi, I needed for my class.  I went to the grocery store and the price of kiwi was 2 for $1. I needed 10 kiwis and I wasn’t about to pay $5 for them. I remembered that I’d seen kiwi at Costco. Sure enough, there was a big carton for $5.59. When I say a big carton, I mean 30 kiwis!  That’s more than I needed, of course, but that’s not the point.  The point is, I wasn’t going to pay 50 cents each at one store when I could just as easily pay 19 cents each elsewhere.

Um, yeah, so now I have 20 kiwis sitting here that I have to try and find something to do with. So, it’s gonna be a kiwi weekend.

First up, how about a lesson on how to properly and easily peel a kiwi?

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These cute little crispy prosciutto cups make for an impressive and compact breakfast presentation.

Underneath the egg, you can place any filling you would like, or none at all. I’ve given you several examples of things you might like to add to your cups; such as roasted veggies, pesto, salsa, purchased or homemade giardiniera, or simple tomato slices.

You’ll need two muffin tins of the exact same size. The reason you need two tins is so that one can sit directly on top of the other once it is lined with the prosciutto. Doing so prevents the prosciutto from curling up and shrinking while it is baking in the oven.

The cup in the photo above was done correctly, the cups in the photo below were not. See the difference?  Since the curled-up prosciutto cups were too small to hold an egg, I piled one scrambled egg into two cups that I had lined with tomato slices.

This recipe makes six, but can easily be doubled if you have a crowd to feed and happen to have two matching 12-cup muffin tins.

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