Menu ideas and recipes for pizza, linguiça, canned clams, tilefish, collards and kohlrabi
Birthday pizza!
My birthday fell on a Tuesday this year. Plain regular Tuesday. I was planning to work as usual but then thought, what the heck, this is the one day of the year that’s my day. I’ll take the day off.
But what about dinner? I’m always thinking about dinner. What do I want? I’d have to plan ahead and make it on Sunday—that’s what I usually do for Tuesday dinners so I can work and read late on Tuesdays. See, Tuesday is my dinner duty night—along with Thursday, Friday and Sunday, Jim has the other nights. I love dinner duty but don’t like being rushed through them, so I plan ahead.
I’ve been planning to use my sourdough starter discard to make pizza crust one day so that became my plan—and it was the highlight of the week. I made two sheet pan pizza crusts using this King Arthur sourdough recipe, an excellent recipe.
In one pan, I made my favorite: a linguiça, onion and garlic pizza modeled on the one from Union Villa in my hometown. First, I diced and sautéed the linguiça and onion, then I added garlic at the end and let it cook another minute. I spread tomato sauce—I cheated by buying a jar of Harris Teeter pizza sauce—over the crust, topped it with the linguiça mix and grated mozzarella. So happy.
The other was a white clam pizza. I spread the shallot-garlic herb sauce from my white pizza recipe over the crust, topped that with three cans of minced clams and then a mix of fresh and regular mozzarella along with parmesan cheese. When it came out of the oven, I sprinkled it with fresh basil. Very tasty.
Tilefish with citrus pesto
Another night, we had baked blueline tilefish for dinner. Before popping it in the oven, I topped the fillets with citrus pesto, made simply by adding some peel and juice from an orange and lemon to basil pesto.
Summer veggies
We had two vegetable sides this past week. First, collard greens sautéed with bacon, red onion, carrot, red bell, jalapeño and garlic. My bundle of collards was gigantic so I made a huge pan, more than we needed. The leftovers, after making an appearance at two dinners, turned into a humongous frittata.
The other vegetable side was a kohlrabi sauté with carrot, broccoli stems and florets, onion and garlic—sort of like this recipe. Take a chance on kohlrabi, it will pleasantly surprise you.
Until next week, stay awkward, brave and kind. (phrase from Brené Brown)
Grabbing the Gusto 
Looks delicious!
It was! I should never have looked at this when hungry. Now I’m thinking about making pizza this weekend — not a bad thing, of course. Thanks for visiting!