Salad, Pasta and Pizza

I am always looking for new recipes to try, and have been eyeing a few from Orangette for a while.  I keep finding myself attracted to recipes from mostly vegetarian sites, even though I am far from a vegetarian, and have an Anthony Bourdain-like disdain for vegetarians.  Weird, but true.  (Maybe my veggie obsession is why my brother has taken to calling Sean and I “dirty hippies who stink?”  First of all, we don’t even smoke pot, and second of all, I do stink sometimes, but never of patchouli or anything vaguely hippie.  Mostly I stink of sweat (it’s hot here!) and/or onions, but I digress…)

This Orangette recipe has been calling my name for a while.  I love onions, and I love cheese.  I pulled out my trusty copy of Mario Batali’s Babbo cookbook though, and found that Miss Molly of Orangette had substituted water for the chicken stock (which Batali said you could do, but still!  Do you see what I mean about vegetarians?  They are not to be trusted.)  Nonetheless, it took me a while to find the ricotta salata, but once it was in hand all I could think about was making this onion and cheese pasta.

But, then I got side-tracked again and noticed this salad. I decided I would make that too, but substitute ricotta salata for the feta because ricotta salata is so good.  It’s my new favorite cheese.

So I sliced up all these onions:

And we cooked them for a lot longer than the recipe(s) called for, but it still wasn’t long enough.  Everything turned out kinda blah.  I didn’t even take a picture of the finished product.

Surprisingly, (because it was more of an afterthought, and to be honest I was a bit skeptical of all the ingredients but the cheese and the avocado) the salad was fucking delicious.  I could eat it every day.  Really.  It was crunchy, and bitter, and salty, and so satisfying in texture and taste.

So, after the disappointment of the vegetarian pasta ( I should have known better,) and the surprising yumminess of the salad, I decided we should make something we knew we would like last night.

Oh baby!  This pizza was good.

This pizza dough + this sauce + thinly sliced red onions + thinly sliced brown mushrooms + hot italian sausage crumbled and cooked = pizza that’s better than anything you can buy around here.

And we didn’t even have to leave the house.

And my brother can stop calling me a fucking hippie.