sweet miscellany

Why is it that you don’t really want something until you can’t have it? I guess it’s in our nature to want what is forbidden. In order to curb the mind wandering, I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m talking about food here. More specifically, glutinous things. Since developing a gluten intolerance, it seems to have triggered cravings for everything I can’t have. Pizza! Baguette! Those not-so-good-for-me-pastries at Starbucks! It’s been a bit rough. Since I don’t really live in a gluten-free friendly town, I can cry about it, or, I can suck it up and make gluten free versions myself. (I chose the latter in case you were wondering…)

Pizza has been my main craving lately. I guess there’s just something really comforting about being about to top a warm crust with whatever strikes your fancy. I made a pizza several weeks ago (mentioned in this post and using this crust), and it was okay. The crust was a bit dense and bready, but it was pretty good for starters. Since then I’ve been looking around for dough inspiration and making little notes on post-its (as I tend to do with everything). Last week I happened to come across a recipe on edible perspective using cooked polenta as a pizza crust. I forgot to write it down so it got filed in the back of my brain until I saw this pin on pinterest yesterday. I figured it was worth a shot so I immediately sorted out my plan of attack.

I’m not the biggest fan of tomato sauce on my pizza, so I decided to use a cashew ricotta instead. To keep with a summery vibe, I added fresh herbs to the ricotta and topped everything off with some lovely veggies from the farmers market. To be honest, I half thought that the polenta crust would fail. But, I kind of didn’t care if it did because it only meant that I would eat the “polenta pizza” out of a bowl instead. Well, it didn’t fail. In fact it was a marvelous success that had me exercising restraint not to eat an extra piece. Oh, and in case you were like hey, but I thought you weren’t going to bake anything?! I made an exception because we had some cloudy weather and rain, meaning the high yesterday was only 80. Awesome.

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I have officially reached the point of not wanting to turn my oven on. This usually comes sooner in the summer, but Mother Nature decided to tease us with oddly pleasant July temperatures last week. It was so pleasant outside that I enjoyed a few meals alfresco and did not have to run my AC and fan full blast! In July nonetheless! I guess I naively thought it would last all summer, but I was sorely mistaken. At the market on Saturday I was already sticky with sweat at 9 AM. Yuck. At least the return of blueberry season helped a tiny bit. I’ll try not to bore you with rants about the extreme summer heat so this post will simply serve as a notice that there won’t be many baked goods on the blog until September (unless I cave earlier, which will most likely happen).

Moving on to tastier things, ever since Laura’s post, I’ve been dreaming about pie and ice cream. I was pretty close to making a blueberry and peach pie the other day after the farmers market until I realized that the heat wave had returned. This caused an internal struggle. Should I make the pie and sacrifice a comfortable temperature in my apartment, or not make it and be cool? I probably struggled with this for a good while before I realized I could satisfy my craving in ice cream form. My first instinct was to roast the fruit and bake up some crust in the oven. Then I realized that still required the oven. Maybe the heat has started to affect my brain. Anywho, I knew that I had to make adjustments so I did any necessary cooking on the stove. I cooked up the fruit into a sort of quick jam, mashing it as it cooked so I didn’t have to dirty my blender. Then, I made a maple sweetened crumble/crust in my cast iron skillet. It’s kind of like a quick and dirty granola, but oh so tasty!

I know this recipe may have a lot of steps, but they are relatively easy and can be spread out over a couple of days if you wish. None of the ingredients are too fancy, and I’ve provided notes on substitutions just in case. This is perhaps one of my favorite ice creams to date, and I don’t make proclamations like this often. I thought that this roasted strawberry ice cream was my favorite, but this pie-inspired version may have changed my mind. I think it’s the maple sweetened crumble that makes it for me because I probably ate half of it while waiting for the ice cream to churn. Oops. Oh, and sorry (but not sorry!) for the plethora pictures, but this was one photogenic beauty!

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Farm to Table: Polenta Pizza with Herbed Cashew Ricotta & Summer Veggies

Farm to Table: Blueberry Peach Crumble Ice Cream