Thai Pizza

1/2 Tom Yum & 1/2 Green Curry Shrimp pizza at a beach bar in Phuket, Thailand

I spent a little over two weeks in Thailand in December and experienced a unique Thai-inspired pizza in Phuket that had me looking on every subsequent pizza menu for something similar. Almost everywhere I have traveled (according to my Facebook map, I have been to 27 countries), you can find pizza. Each country’s version is always slightly different…in Brazil and Taiwan, corn seems to be a very popular pizza topping. In Croatia, all you can really find is pizza and pasta…but almost every pizza I tried was amazing!

Anyway, after a day of sipping coconuts on the beach, my friends and I stopped at a beach bar that advertised 2 for 1 drinks. We didn’t have any intentions of eating, but when we saw the two Thai-flavored pizzas on the menu AND the brick oven, we asked the waitress if we could try both the Tom Yum and the Green Curry Shrimp pizzas. Amazing flavor combinations! I’ve had CPK’s version of Thai pizza before and have always liked it, but theirs is a peanut-based sauce–it never occurred to me to put curry on pizza. Since we make a lot of pizzas at home, I knew I’d have to try this myself.

We bought a pizza stone last year after tasting the miracle of home-baked pizza at my friend Tom’s. Since then, we’ve baked up all sorts of pizzas at home:

Mushroom, chicken & pesto

Eggplant, olive & provolone

Oxtail, cauliflower & cilantro w/sweet BBQ sauce

Roast chicken, tomatoes, basil & BBQ sauce

The first time we tried making pizza, we made our own dough and I fried the motor of our $10 hand blender. We still don’t have a KitchenAid mixer or a large enough food processor, so we’ve since shied away from making our own doughs in favor of the 99-cent bags of wheat dough from Trader Joe’s. Yes, I know making your own dough is easy…but buying it is even easier! One small bag usually makes 4-5 pizzas for us.

A few weeks ago, we had leftovers from Sticky Rice, which I learned today is a favorite of the Thai students in my class (there are a lot of them)! We had purposely ordered two curries (red duck and green shrimp) to ensure that we’d have enough leftover to make Thai pizzas the following day. It was super easy…just rolled out the dough, spread the coconut curry on as the base, sprinkled cheese on top, and then threw on the meat & veggies from the respective curries (supplemented with sauteed mushrooms). We will definitely be making this pizza again! I also make my own red curry from time-to-time and this will be a great use of leftovers.

First, the green curry shrimp pizza:

The pizza got a little mangled before going in the oven…

And then the red duck curry pizza:

We also added some dollops of mascarpone cheese…

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/venguyen/3886017838/&#8221; title=”BBQ Chicken Pizza by venguyen, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2494/3886017838_1f026daa26_m.jpg&#8221; width=”240″ height=”160″ alt=”BBQ Chicken Pizza” /></a>

Snickerdoodles

I’ve been craving snickerdoodles on and off since last Easter. A summer in Manhattan and a busy Fall quarter at school distracted me and I forgot. A few weeks ago, Joel’s uncle hosted a potluck and someone brought the most delicious homemade snickerdoodles. I ate four that night…four more cookies than I’ve eaten in a while. Ask anyone and they will tell you I don’ t have much of a sweet tooth, but once in a while I do get an itch. The craving showed up again while watching those terribly one-sided playoff games on Saturday…and by Sunday, I was trolling the internet for suitable recipes (it is too cold in Chicago to go outside here and buy one).

For some reason, I always thought snickerdoodles required shortening, which I find kind of gross. However, most recipes don’t require shortening…just cream of tartar, which I don’t have on hand…and again, it is too cold to leave the house. I’m from California, and 14 is just unbearable. I’m going to take a hint from bears and just hibernate for the next few months. Turns out, you can do without the cream of tartar…so I had everything I needed on hand for some snickerdoodles. SCORE!

I forgot to add a 1/2 cup of butter initially and didn’t add it until after the flour was already in…not ideal but the cookies still turned out.

SNICKERDOODLES (adapted from All Recipes)

• 1 1/4 cups white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon cream of tartar (which I omitted)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons white sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine 1 1/4 cups white sugar, butter or margarine, vanilla and eggs. Mix well.
3. Stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt. Blend well.
4. Shape dough into 1 inch balls.
5. Combine 2 tablespoons sugar and 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon. Roll dough in sugar/cinnamon mixture and place 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets.
6. Bake 8.5 or until set. Immediately remove from cookie sheets.

NOTES

When I initially took the cookies out at 8.5 minutes, they were still kind of gooey inside…don’t worry! A few minutes later, they’d finished cooking while cooling. We only baked half the batch. The rest were balled and then thrown into the freezer for another time.