Pav Bhaji

No, I did not forget. There's no garlic here, no ginger.  Just this once.

If you are going to prepare a home-made Indian Ultrafeast for forty people, you are insane. If some of those people don't even like Indian food, then you are twice as insane. And you are definitely going to need some Midwest-meets-Mumbai dishes. You know, like sliders. Vegetarian sliders.

Pav bhaji is Mumbai street food: a plain dinner roll (pav) split and filled with spicy curried vegetables (bhaji). The dinner rolls can be white or wheat, your call. Or, serve the bhaji as a vegetable side dish with other Indian fare. You can adjust the vegetable combinations, you can ramp the seasoning up or down.

Fastest. Pizza. Ever.

The Canadian Chemist and his lovely wife, the Razor-Sharp Mathematician, bought me a lovely birthday present: pizza stone and peel. The new Physics Kitchen had been without a pizza stone for nine months, and they were pretty tired of hearing my neverending but utterly empty threats to steal a wooden pizza peel from our local.

Simply sausage and cheese.

But my birthday was six weeks ago, and I still have not made a pizza. I know, weird, right? Well, I guess I was just too busy making Pirate Cakes and Emergency Birthday Brownies and Pumpkin Scones and forgot entirely to cook anything which was not dessert in nature. What finally got me in gear was a recipe for crispy, thin, cracker-style crust. I know when I say "Chicago-style," you are going to visualize deep dish from Gino's or Giordano's. But the "Chicago-style" pizza I grew up with (from neighborhood joints like Romeo's, Palermo's, Phil's) was a thin pie, on a crackly-crisp crust made without yeast. For years, I tried repeatedly and failed to duplicate it, until I finally just got on with making pizza on a yeasty, bready crust (delicious enough, but not like home).