New Year, new pizza

This pizza has to start the day before. By taking the baby bella mushrooms and hot Italian turkey sausage out of the freezer. Look at the internal shapes, like rock formations.

The crust can come out of the freezer the day of.  Misfits organic crust, not my own make, but very good anyway.

So today seemed like a good day, a snowstorm in the offing, to make a pizza.

First cooking the mushrooms in butter and olive oil, until the liquid is almost absorbed and they smell lovely. 

Then removing the mushrooms and putting the chunked up sausage meat to brown in the same pan, so mushroom flavor adds to the hot sausage spice.

I wouldn't call this cooking, so much as assembly. Two views of Mt. Stovetop.

The base is  spritzed olive oil, then basil tomato pesto, which was accidentally packed into my Misfits box recently and is working out well. Maybe it was a sideways form of marketing.

Then a quarter of a fresh beefsteak tomato, and the mushrooms and sausage, I could have made two pizzas with this amount of topping, and Parmesan and cheddar cheese strewn about. I don't like too much cheese on pizza. Just enough to know it's there.

If you want fresh herbs, you have to do it yourself. Here's the pot of curry leaves in the living room, a gift of neighbor Amitha.

And the Thai basil plant in the kitchen. 

I've been growing this from saved seed for several years, since a friend, Lakshmi,  moved away and gave me her plant.

Curry leaves, despite the name, are not spicy. They have a lovely pungent flavor depth, and I replaced bay leaves with them years ago. Indian vegetarian friends use them a lot for flavor. You can freeze them.

Thai basil has a licorice type of flavor. A bit like fennel.  So a few curry leaves and basil leaves torn and tossed on.

And this all worked out nicely. 

One slice was plenty for lunch. 

Three more for future meals.

And now for an afternoon of tea and Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House.

No snow yet. 

Rebuilding, comfort food, reading plans

Ready for the holiday, I've stocked up on reading and viewing.

New Year's Eve viewing is a Wallace and Gromit feature

which I haven't seen before. Aardman have produced some of the funniest animation videos ever, and this will be a nice finale to an iffy year.

Then peaceful reading, Angela Thirkell, a writer I used to have no patience with, thought she was snobbish and Not Funny. 

Now I get her better and really enjoy her sending up of snobbish people. I understand she's not poaching on Trollope's settings or characters, but respectfully extending them. So I'm set for a marathon

And I'm revisiting Watts Towers, the solo work of visionary folk artist, Simon Rodia, now a national landmark. 

Created from scrap materials, broken dishes, glass, shells, wire, over years, it was his dream to make something big.  

I like to go back and revisit his ideas now and then, and this book, intended for young readers and perfectly fine for all of us, is a great way to do it.

Talking of building, remember the fire I missed over Diwali, which wiped out the dumpster enclosure? 

Today is the rebuilding. Just a day's work.

Nice to watch a crew working flawlessly together, knowing what they're doing.

And comfort food is important to close out a stressful year. I've been vaguely thinking about milk puddings, as in childhood, and since I didn't have macaroni, my first thought, it having all gone into soup, I remembered my mom used to make vermicelli pudding. 

I sort of remembered how it went, looked up the time and temperature, and went from there.

So, I have some good Italian pasta, and next thing, this was happening. 

Cooked pasta, added into a milk, egg, sugar, golden raisin,  vanilla mixture, knob of butter, then all baked for an hour at 350°f.

I love food baked in glass dishes

Pretty good. The new napkins in action already.

That should round out the year. Laundry done, bed changed, next,  garbage out, and I'm set. I won't be too sorry to wave goodbye to the old year.