A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Succotash Pizza and a New Knife

It had to be done, right? Right?

I love okra. I love pizza. We have many fresh tomatoes. Tomatoes, okra, and corn go together brilliantly. It was natural that I would want to put all these things together. But I couldn't shake the memory of the pizzas served from carts on the street in London: soggy and unbrowned, cluttered with greasy cheese and all the wrong vegetables. One of those pizzas had corn on it. It seemed to have been dumped right out of the can onto the pizza.

To avoid the yucky canned corn effect, I roasted loose kernels of frozen corn ahead of time. After 10 minutes at 425 degrees, they were nutty and gently browned, and much more appealing. I roasted the okra a bit, too, but I needn't have. Fresh tomatoes, a little mozzarella, one sliced poblano chile, and grated Asiago and Parmesan pulled all the flavors together quite well.

I also made a classic pizza Margherita to balance things out.

Our friend Mark is visiting from Kyoto and gave us this amazing knife, shown here with the poblano:

It's made by a company called Aritsugu, which I'd never heard of but have enjoyed reading about. Lawson's and my names are carved in the blade (on the other side -- this side says Aritsugu). It's beautiful.

1 comment:

Kris said...

Beautiful! I'd like to try it.

Here is that Victorinox knife that Lawson was wondering about for the mountain house: http://www.cutleryandmore.com/details.asp?SKU=3754

That's definitely the first okra pizza I've seen.