It’s a cruel irony that heat of the late summer sun that produces perfect tomatoes and fragrant basil also makes our homes so hot that the thought of even turning on the oven — let alone cranking it up all the way for perfect pizzas margherita — is unbearable.  By the time I’m willing to endure the 500 degrees blasting away for over an hour necessary for decent pizza crust, the tomatoes are long rotten on the vine and the basil withered or brought indoors. Of course there are always canned tomatoes and greenhouse basil, but if you want to eat more in-season, you have to get a little more creative with your toppings (and loose with your definition of “pizza”).

Potato-Leek Pizza. This classic soup combination works reasonably well for pizza. The potatoes present a bit of a problem since the pizza only spends ten minutes in the oven; they need to be parcooked or sliced extremely thin. I opted for the latter and utilized a mandoline to make slices so thin that the skin of each slice could be seen through the flesh of the potato slice layered above it. A generous shower of olive oil combined with the blazing temperature of the oven slightly fries the potato slices. A sprinkling of leeks and a few cubes of feta completed a pizza of which Martha claimed, “tastes like soup.” In a good way, I think.

Butternut squash-gorgonzola-walnut Pizza. After a well deserved period of squash abstinence, I decided to get back into it by combining one of my least favorite foods — said squash — with one of my favorites: pizza. After sauteeing cubes of butternut squash until tender, I mashed them with butter and enough milk to make the mixture spread easily, then aggressively salted and peppered the mix. To offset the bland sweetness of squash, I used musty, tangy gorgonzola cheese. Both butternut squash and gorgonzola are well complemented by nuts, so I sprinkled on toasted walnuts after baking the pie.

A word of caution to anyone attempting squash pizza: that squash can retain a whole lot of oven heat for a long time. Give yourself extra cooling time before taking a bite! When the pizza did cool down to a reasonable tasting temperature, my taste buds that had not been burned away told me that this was a winning combination, at least as far as anything involving squash can be. Although the gorgonzola tended to overpower the squash, I had applied it with a light hand, so the cheese was well balanced by zones of pure squash. The walnuts were the pepperoni of this pizza, providing spots of excitement amongst the more uniform cheese and crust.

I enjoyed both of these pizzas. They’re not about to replace pizza margherita in my heart, but as a way to use those last late-season farmers’ market veggies — and enjoy a sustained heatwave issuing forth from your oven in the chilly fall — they were pretty good.

The worst part about living an apartment is that we can’t garden (the best part is never having to mow a lawn or shovel a driveway). Sure, we can put a box or pot in the window that will yield a pepper or a little bundle of herbs, but it’s nothing compared to what even the smallest yard will produce with modest effort. Luckily, at this time of year our home-owning friends are starting to get overwhelmed by the bounty of their gardens — a combination of guilt in wasting a single hard-won veggie and the feeling that if one eats another eggplant that’s it for them — and Tom and I can swoop in to reap the benefits save the day. And so it was that Friday after work Tom and I raided my friend Alan’s garden while Alan was away at work and his dogs safely locked up inside the house.

Alan grows long, thin Japanese cucumbers, a variety of tomatoes, and many other types of vegetables and herbs. Along the side of his house he’s created a system of trusses to support a high density of tomatoes and peppers, using strings and posts to support the plants. In the back, he has another garden along the fence where cucumbers share space with onions, celery, beets, greens, and more. Looking at it all we were amazed with what can be grown in a well-planned, small space.

Not wanting to take more than our share (though Alan would certainly have encouraged more on us had he been there), we gathered a bowlful of black cherry tomatoes, three cucumbers, and a sampling of tiny peppers and basil. Tom put together a Greek salad with the cucumbers and tomatoes — and mint and oregano from our own window box. Thanks Alan!

For the salad, combine the following in a large bowl:

• Cherry tomatoes, halved
• Cucumbers, peeled and sliced
• Greek Feta cheese, crumbled by hand
• 1 large shallot, sliced
• 2 sprigs fresh mint, finely chopped
• 2 sprigs fresh oregano, finely chopped

For the dressing:

• Juice of 1 lemon
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon sumac
• Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Whisk the dressing and taste for seasoning. Pour over the salad and toss.

I just LOVE Valentine’s day! What better time to show your sweetie how much you care about them! I spent most of the day decorating the apartment with pink and red crepe paper and singing along to my favorite love songs, but I also took time to make dinner. Earlier in the week I planned to use some small heart-shaped cake pans that we never use to make cupcakes, but as usually happens with my plans to make sweets when the time came around I just didn’t have the heart. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the pans:

Butternut squash kibbeh, from Ana Sortun’s Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, is highly moldable for all your holiday novelty-dish needs. It’s also a great way to use butternut squash in the winter that is (Minneapolis restauranteurs take note) NOT butternut squash ravioli/pasta. For those not familiar, kibbeh is a Levantine/Middle Eastern dish of bulghur wheat mixed with meat (usually lamb) that is eaten raw, baked, or fried. I think it is best fried, but I have never eaten it raw. For this version, butternut squash takes the place of lamb as the principle binder of the bulghur. And while you can’t see it in the picture, this heart is stuffed with spiced feta. I am not a big fan of butternut squash because I think it is too sweet and too smooth-textured, but here the cracked wheat helps with both of those issues by giving the mixture a more grainy texture and diluting the sweetness of the squash.

Here’s the recipe:

Stuffed Butternut Squash Kibbeh

Kibbeh:

• 3# Squash
• 4 T beurre noisette
• 1 onion
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 2 t paprika
• 1 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1 1/2 c bulghur or cracked wheat

Filling:

• 1/2# Feta
• 1/2 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1/2 t sumac (or more – the more sumac the better!)
• 1/2 t Aleppo pepper
• 2 T chopped parsley

Roast the squash until it’s soft, then puree it in the food processor until it is smooth and creamy. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Cook the onion and pepper in olive oil until softened and starting to brown, then stir in the paprika and five spice. Cook for a minute. Add the squash puree and warm through. Stir in the bulghur, cover, and turn off the heat. Let sit 15 minutes while the bulghur softens up.

For the filling, mix the (crumbled) feta with all the other ingredients.

To assemble, pack the kibbeh mixture into your desired vessel (for example, a heart-shaped cake pan). Hollow out an indentation and fill it with the feta mixture, then cover with more kibbeh as needed. Bake in 375° oven for 15 minutes. Turn kibbeh out on to a plate (I hope you remembered to grease those vessels, because I sure didn’t remind you!). Garnish with a bit of the feta mixture and maybe some chopped parsley.

We had this with muhammara (it’s red like hearts GET IT?) and pita. Not bad for a Valentine’s day.

Since I make pizza regularly, I am always trying to come up with new ideas for toppings to keep things interesting. I also have been trying to buy food that is local and in season. Those two concepts intersected recently to result in: the beetza.

Beets are not, strictly speaking, in season since everything here is dead, but these beets were local and probably have been stored away somewhere since the fall—as seasonal as I’m going to get in January in Minnesota. To accompany the beets, I thought I’d aim for the classic combination with basil and goat cheese. I bought basil but since I already had feta so I decided to use that in place of goat cheese (I defy you to find a difference between sheep and goats). Almost all the beets I’ve ever eaten have been roasted, but I figured with 9 minutes in a 500 degree oven thin matchsticks of raw beets would be fine. As it turned out, the beets were still pretty crunchy, which I didn’t mind, but some probably would. This was a good pizza, although the beet flavor wasn’t especially strong. The color of the beet juice bleeding out from the beet pieces made it very visually striking; it was probably worth it just to see that.

I also made a couple of other pizzas which were somewhat less exciting. Here’s a marinara pie with capers and rosemary added:

And a pizza with mushrooms and brie (on a side note, I’m pretty sick of brie): 

I did not get the crust on these pizzas as dark as I usually do and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Same oven, same maximum heat, same crust (Peter Reinhart’s napoletana dough from American Pie). It was only the next day when I remembered that I had my pizza stone set up on a rack in the lowest position, rather than on the floor of the oven. Putting it on the floor gets the stone a lot hotter since the gas burns just below the floor. In fact, it gets too hot for bread, burning the crust before the inside is cooked, which is why the stone was on a rack in the first place. But for pizza, you want everything as hot as it can get, so I have to remember to move the stone. Those 2″ make a big difference!