Colorado Pizza

I know my blog entries tend to be heavily weighed toward food, but what can I say? For most people throughout almost the entirety of history, life revolved around food. Modern stone age people still living deep in the rainforests of South America still spend a huge amount of time acquiring and preparing food. All the great food cultures of the world evolved from this. We Americans are the first people, probably in all of history, to spend such a tiny proportion of our income on food and spend so little time making a big to-do of it. It's no secret that this plays a huge part in why we're the fattest people ever and yet are suffering malnutrition. I don't want to get into it too much here, but you should check out Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It's about her journey deep into food life and building a culture of food for her family and with her community. She's not a heavy writer and I often find myself chuckling or outright laughing when I read this book. Though it definitely has a serious undercurrent about the enormous tragedy that is the American food system. But enough of that.

Tonight I made Colorado Pizza! I'd never made a pizza purely from scratch until tonight, but boy you'd never know it. And it couldn't be easier! A quick dough from Colorado flour, covered with olive oil (the only non-Colorado ingredient), sauteed onions and peppers, the last of summer's fresh tomatoes, some truly free-range chicken, goat cheese from Haystack Mountain, and dried basil from our garden. Boom! In less than an hour you've got two large, exceptionally fantastic pizzas!

I also churned a fresh batch of butter tonight while the pizza was cooking. It is, by far, my best yet. In fact I don't think it could get any better. My technique is nearly perfected after a year and a half of practice. I got every last drop of buttermilk out of it, and it is the densest, creamiest, most buttery butter ever. I also ended up with a quart of buttermilk leftover which will make an awesome addition to my pancakes in the morning. I can't wait for breakfast!