I loooooove food!

(i just want to make sure everyone knows that you can click on the picture --any picture--and it will open larger in another window, so you can acutally see it.)

I love food. I love talking about food. I love reading about food. I love trying "new" food. But, with all that love, I'm not that great of a cook. That's maybe being a little hard on myself. I cook. And, at times, I cook quite a bit. Some of the things I cook, I love. Other things, um, well, they won't get repeated anytime soon. In fact, many things I cook, I make up. So, there's no recipe, there's nothing for me to remember for the next time. When RK says, "wow, this is really good, you should make this again," I nod my head, but know in my heart, it'll never be the same.

Last night C. and K. dropped in for an impromptu visit, which was awesome. K. is the head pastry chef at a very nice restaurant here in SF (and C. is no slack when it comes to cooking either!). We've eaten at their house a thousand times and not once, not once, have we had something we didn't rave about for days afterwards. The great thing is, K. will always go into the analyzation of the meal after we've all eaten. It can sound like she's dissing her cooking abilities, but I understand it. She sees it in her mind, she "tastes" it in her mouth, she feels it in her soul--all before the ingredients are even put together. So, she knows what she's going for. If it doesn't turn out exactly like that, it's tough to let that go. It's hard not to explain to everyone what you were really trying for was for the onions to be slightly crunchy and the blue cheese to be slightly more melted and you should have been able to taste more pistachio. I totally get it. Now, I'm not as articulate when describing food (I could do it to high heaven with any of my art pieces, though), but I do love talkin' food with K. So, when they stopped by last night, naturally, we got talking about food. Specifically, her menu-making. She gets to come up with new desserts every two weeks. Most of us are used to cookies, or a slice of cake or maybe a scoop of ice cream for dessert, well, this is a much bigger feat, trust me. She works with the freshest seasonal fruit and comes up with the most inventive of items to please hundreds and hundreds of customers. It's an intense gig. And, I don't really have any creative things to add to that (though, at one point, after a few glasses of wine, I thought I'd offer up my own cookbooks!), but I looooove hearing about each and every element of these future desserts. I also LOVE dessert.
So, all that convo got me thinking and got me grocery shopping and though I'm not totally sure what I'm making tonight...I thought I'd show off what I made last week. That counts, right?

On cornmeal crusts, one pizza has apple slices, sweet potatoes, pine nuts, blue cheese, and sage. The other one has thinly sliced lamb, cherry tomatoes, garlic, sliced onions and mozzarella.
Oh, Yuuuuuuum.