Strawberry Chicken Pizza

We've got a long history of trying out non-traditional pizzas here at Six-Seven-Eight, like our fall favorite of the apple Gorgonzola pizza. In another attempt at working fruit into pizza we recently tried making a sweet-spicy strawberry chicken pizza thanks to a Facebook post shared by one of the many cooking pages we follow.

If you'd like to see some of our previous pizza adventures, take a look at the pizapalooza, which included such delicious varieties as pickle cheeseburger and rueben sandwich, or other blogs like grilling pizza or making pull-apart pizza bread.

The sauce here is going to be very different than the traditional tomato or alfredo. Instead, we are starting with balsamic vinegar, which will be reduced down in a pan over medium-low heat.

While the balsamic vinegar is reducing, we cook a few chicken tenderloins in the oven, topped with garlic and onion powder and pepper.

Next we start the pizza crust. As with most of our other pizza posts, we're using our standard amazing recipe that makes a perfect fluffy/crunchy crust, but this time Megan is using wheat flour for a change of pace.

Here's our dough after rising, just about ready to be rolled out and covered in awesome toppings.

Next up we continue putting together the sauce. In addition to the balsamic vinegar reduction, we're going to be using some strawberry jam!

The jam and balsamic vinegar covers the sweet, but where's the spicy? In some sriracha hot sauce! This stuff is super potent though, so start off with less than you think you need and add in small doses until you get where you want heat-wise.

Here it's all coming together when we've got the right balance of jam and hot sauce.

Here are our toppings for the pizza: sliced strawberries, the baked chicken, onion slices, and chopped cooked bacon.

After the sauce if reduced down a bit Megan spoons it over our rolled out wheat pizza dough.

Rather than just putting the chicken on top, we're going to first toss the meat in some excess sauce.

Looks good enough to eat on its own!

Now we get the cheese layer, which consists of shredded Mozzarella and some Parmesan.

Then we pile on the rest of the toppings and arrange to perfection!

About 20 minutes later we get this mouth watering pie...

The end result was pretty tasty, although I definitely like the apple pizza with butter/garlic sauce much better. I think if we try this one again we may add in pecans and Gorgonzola or swap out a few ingredients.

Have you tried any great pizzas outside the norm using fruit or other interesting ingredients? Let us know about it in the comments below!

Culinary World Tour England: Yorkshire Pudding

The culinary world tour finally continues! After our trek to Ireland for shepherd's pie we now move on to England, the heart of the U.K.

If you missed the previous entries in our world tour, check them out using these links:

Ireland: Shepherd's Pie
Iceland: Lamb Pie With Rye Crust
Greenland: Suaasat
Canada: Poutine
Mexico: Posole

Picking what to make for the English stop of the tour involved a bit of debate, as we've already made quite a few distinctly British meals in the past, like bangers and mash, wellington, and cottage pie, and we didn't want to re-tread that ground.

Instead we went with something that's actually fairly simple on it's own: Yorkshire Pudding. While the pudding itself isn't too tough to put together, it does require pan drippings, which gave us the opportunity to do something more fancy with the meat main dish.

To start our meal we've got a tender pork loin, which Megan is rubbing down with garlic and onion powder. You may be asking yourself though, just what is that bacon doing there?

If you couldn't tell from our previous blogs, we love to wrap just about anything in bacon! It adds another layer of texture, and it will make the drippings even more delicious. For some extra flavor, Megan is rubbing down each piece of bacon with a Jack Daniels bacon flavored mustard (yes, there is such a thing as bacon flavored mustard!). The strips are then lined up in a row to make it easier to wrap them around the meat.

Here's the pork loin fully wrapped up in bacon love:

While the pork loin is cooking, we start putting together the batter for the Yorkshire pudding. This is actually very simple: it's just eggs, milk, salt, and flour (although we're using wheat flour instead).

Whip it up until you've got a batter ready to pour into a muffin tin, but don't pour yet, because we've got to wait on the meat first.

Here's the tender pork loin wrapped in crispy awesome bacon. But where's all the pan drippings?

They've gone here, into the bottom of the muffin tin to flavor the Yorkshire pudding.

Next we fill up the rest of the tin with the pre-made batter.

And a few minutes later they come out like this! These are tricky though - they can easily develop air pockets and sink while cooking, so don't open the oven until you are sure they are done, and avoid moving around in the kitchen during the cooking time if possible.

Here's one straight out of the pan with a slight indentation in the center. Unfortunately it didn't come out quite as pretty or with much of a pronounced indentation as those we've seen elsewhere, so we'll have to try them again some time. For a complete look on how to put these together, check out this recipe.

While the meat and pudding were both cooking, we also had rice going in our rice cooker, which has a top attachment for steaming veggies. We steamed slices of squash and zuchinni along with baby carrots and asparagus.

Here's the cooked vegetables ready to hit a plate:

This is my plate, with a generous helping of rice and veggies, along with slices of the bacon wrapped pork loin.

And here's Megan's plate with a delicious looking pudding!

We're still deciding where to hit next in the culinary world tour, but check back soon for plenty of upcoming delicious entrees, including a spicy strawberry chicken pizza, asparagus grilled cheese sandwiches, and more!

Mint Lime Chicken with Dandelion Honey

On the recommendation of a Facebook friend, Megan and I met up with our buddy Cristal to pick a whopping 600 dandelions in a field. What for? Believe it or not: to make honey!

It sounds strange, but you can make something very similar to honey with no bees required, and while clearing out a huge patch of dandelions at the same time. Here we've got all 600 dandelion heads (washed first of course) in a large pot with several sliced lemons, four cups of water, and two cups of sugar. If you want, you can also cut a whole vanilla bean in half and toss it in as well. A few hours of simmering later and then some time to cool and you've got a delicious honey alternative.

Although this is great in tea or oatmeal or whatever else you'd normally put honey in, we wanted to try it out for a dinner recipe. For this baked chicken drumstick meal we've got the honey (in the tub at the right side of the picture below), plain yogurt, a lime, and a handful of fresh mint sprigs picked from our indoor herb garden.

First we'll put together a sauce for basting the chicken consisting of heated honey, squeezed lime juice, and roughly chopped mint. Mix it all together like so:

Then it gets spread over the chicken and marinates for about 20 minutes before hitting the oven.

Along with the marinade, we're also making a sauce to drizzle over the chicken after it finishes cooking. The sauce is made from lime zest (grate the skin off the lime), lime juice, and more of the chopped mint.

Here's our chicken fresh out of the oven ready to hit a plate:

Of course we're putting together a side salad to also go with our delicious mint chicken.

Here's Megan's plate, sauce on the side, with a salad covered in fresh strawberries, cucumber slices, and avocado.

And here's mine:

Grilled Lamb And Feta Sliders

Dodging random snowy (and now non-stop rainy!) days we've managed to get in a few more great grilling sessions lately. If you missed it, don't forget to check out our awesome grilled chicken sausage sandwiches right here.

One of our new favorites was grilled lamb sliders topped with feta cheese and served with marinated potatoes. To start this fantastic dinner, we cut red potatoes into wedges and coated with some homemade marinade - use your imagination and pick flavors you like, or skip the work and get a store bought packet.

Next we construct the burgers, which will be a mix of 2/3 of a pound ground lamb and 1/3 of a pound ground pork. We saved the extra meat and make a reverse mixture (2/3 pork and 1/3 lamb) for pineapple burgers later in the week (check out how we made those during last year's grilling season over here).

While mixing together the meat we added in cumin, dill, garlic and onion powder, pepper, and oregano. This time around we made the burgers slider size instead of full bun size for a fun change. You'll also see some slices of onion below that are going to be cooked on the grill along with the burgers.

Here's everything fresh off the grill and ready for constructing, including slider sized buns that have been lightly grilled for some extra texture and flavor.

To put these together, we top our buns with red pepper flavored feta cheese, grilled onions, and some hot mustard.

Here are my two sliders and a pile of delicious potatoes ready to be devoured:

If you wanted to go more crazy with it, use hummus instead of mustard or mayo and top with cucumber slices instead of tomato.

Bacon Wrapped Asparagus

Today we'll do something a little different from the norm at Six-Seven-Eight. This is a dinner that's quick, easy, doesn't require any special setup or ingredients, but is still really amazingly good. Today we make bacon wrapped asparagus!

This is great as a main course for a dinner or as a fast lunch if you happen to have the ingredients on hand. Putting this together is simplicity itself - bundle together two or three spears of asparagus (be sure to cut off the woody stems first) and wrap a piece of bacon around it.

You don't need any oil or butter (the bacon produces plenty of grease on its own), and for seasoning, just put on a dash of salt and pepper.

Toss these bundles of awesome in the oven and about a half hour later you get this pan of bacon wrapped love:

It looks great, it smells great, and it of course tastes great. There's a balance of crispy and soft from both the asparagus and the bacon.

Serve up two or three bundles with a side salad loaded with fruits and veggies for a fast meal that won't disappoint and is a fun change of pace from the usual dinner options.

Novel Noodles: Lemon Zest and Kale Spaghetti

Pasta was one of my early passions when I first started out cooking, and it served me very well during my vegetarian days as a young 'un.

As Megan and I have continued our kitchen adventures together as adults we've tried a huge range of pasta dishes, covering all the basics and on to more bizarre and interesting combinations like bean-based sauces. Some of our more interesting concoctions have included a sauceless pasta made with beans and sausage, penne pasta dressed up with watercress and gorgonzola, or spicy pesto chicken pasta. 

Today we'll share our latest pasta success: spaghetti with lemon zest and kale. We've been trying out kale quite a bit lately (you may recall our kale chips served with black bean burgers), and we have even more recipes utilizing this leafy green wonder in the future. But for today, we start our pasta by roughly chopping one large bunch of kale.

Drop the kale in a boiling pot of water and let it cook for a few minutes as you would with pasta.

Drain out the water and place the kale in a bowl - but be sure to reserve some of the kale infused water for use later on, as it adds some extra moisture to a pasta that doesn't use a traditional sauce.

Next get your pasta going - we're using standard sphagetti for this one, but you could easily switch to linguine, fettuccine, or even another shaped pasta like penne or farfalle.

Grate off the zest (the yellow "skin") of about three lemons using a small grater. It sounds odd, but the zest actually has quite a bit of the tart lemon flavor without having to actually use the whole lemon.

Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a pan and toss in a handful or two of chopped fresh garlic.

When the garlic becomes fragrant, toss in your kale and lemon zest to cook in the pan.

Drain the cooked pasta and throw it into the skillet along with the rest of the ingredients.

For some added texture and flavor, we're adding in some grated parmesan cheese as well.

Stir it all together until the cheese melts, and then add in a little of the reserved water if necessary to prevent dryness. If the lemon flavor isn't strong enough, juice one of the lemons and add it in a tablespoon or so at a time - be careful not to overdo it though, or you'll go from "mmmm...lemon" to "AUGH! LEMON!"

Serve immediately while the pasta is still hot, and if you want you can stop with some delicious cooked bacon bits (we sure did)!

Extra grated cheese wouldn't hurt either...