cook: pizza and poke

I came home on a Friday afternoon after gassing up my car and Costco shopping to a huge harvest that included this ginormous tomato that I photographed next to the tea kettle for scale.

 

I have to admit that it was kind of nice to have the work weeknights off from cooking and just eat leftovers and augment with a tomato salad for supper like my pork chop and mac 'n cheese below. 

 

Taco, Asian rice bowl, quiche and my Thistle delivery of salads for lunch pretty much cleaned out my fridge. 

I hadn’t wanted to grill a week later again so soon on a Friday night because Patrick was grilling us a steak for dinner, but I also knew Cecilia does not have an oven and had started a huge batch of pizza dough on Thursday. She’s on a spree for cooking and wanted pizza again, and for a friend, I’ll accede. Once again, she brought over the prepared doughs and we parbaked them on the grill for a few minutes before bringing them back to my dining table to top with ingredients and then popping them back on to the charcoal grill to melt the cheese.

 

And it turned out to be pizza delivery for our neighbors as well.

We made our pizzas last after giving 3 of our neighbors each a pie. Cecilia wanted margheritas made with fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden along with mozzarella and parmesan. I wanted one pie though that was white with just garlic oil, the cheeses, prosciutto and arugula dressed with lemon juice.

  

We ate our respective pies in front our dinner plates with a chilled bottle of a buttery Chardonnay.

 

And I was tired after the first week of school, but very happy that I had exercised at the end of each work day with no excuses excepting the Friday for cooking. For the weekend, I had sushi grade ahi tuna that I wanted to turn into poke.   

I had bought a sweet onion to make the poke from a Serious Eats recipe. My homemade poke was not as satisfying as the supermarket or warehouse poke because I had low sodium soy sauce, I think. But scratch cooking at home is healthier than restaurant fare, so that's okay.

Tonight, I'll just cook leftover steak by making them into carne asada tacos Sunday supper. And it was a productive clay day at Central Park today because I made two planters and two dinner plates with Speckled Buff. And it's Sunday! I need to run to the supermarket for cilantro and for sure, practice ukulele. Patrick said my strumming is sounding better and my chords are sharper, so I may not feel like I'm improving, but I guess I am. And ugh, I just remembered the bags of laundry. Sunday is WASH DAY. But maybe I'll get in some sewing and preserving a couple jars of heritage marinara too today.