"Your best dish yet!"

Or so said my husband about our dinner tonight. Sophia declared "this is divine!" and then did that fingertip kiss off gesture. What dish could have possibly prompted this rapture? Stuffed Zucchini! I've moved on from the Italian boot, around the Mediterrean to the Middle Eastern cuisines. Tonight we stuffed zucchini with couscous, chopped tomatoes and olives, and some pine nuts - then roasted it at 450 for about 20 minutes. On the side I made a fattoush, a lebanaese style bread salad - really just cucumber, tomato, red pepper, tons of parsley, all cut up and mixed with olive oil/lemon juice. Throw a little feta on top, crispy pita on the side and bada bing!

By the way, I've failed to blog every day... sigh, life just gets crazy and then all of a sudden I forget about monday's dinner because its already thursday. Anyway, last Friday we made homemade pizza. The girls and I had an awesome time making the pizza dough. Its nothing more than flour, yeast, water, and olive oil. I had never worked with yeast before. Sure, we all know it makes doughs rise... but do you know why or how?? I find this remarkable. It turns out that yeast are living fungi. As they do their happy little fungi thing in your dough, they release carbon dioxide. Those carbon dioxide bubbles are trapped by the molecular structure of the dough - thus making it rise! All this aha! science is making me want to reexamine my sixth grade science labs - perhaps there were other fascinating reactions going on that I failed to note because I was to busy admiring boy X.

The pizza turned out much like the pasta - delicious in its simplicity. Bittman again had cautioned against kneading by hand. But I loved it! Sure I was pounding my fists into the counter for 10 minutes - but who doesn't want that kind of release at the end of the day? I'm enjoying my cooking much more as a hobby now, rather than a chore. Sure, the household chores have fallen by the wayside a bit, and the children are generally neglected from 6-7pm each night but hey, we're all pretty happy at the end of the day.