Pizza, pizza: Non-pizza in the pizza oven!

Posted in Food by mszerwo

Our pizza oven is awesome. It’s especially awesome for pizzas, breads and skillet cookies and a couple of weekends ago we tried our hand at some more standard dinner fare.

Brandon’s dad was in town, so we heated up the oven TWICE. Joe helped us build the oven and hadn’t seen it in action yet.

We started with a trip to the Pike Place Market and QFC to pick up our supplies: Uli’s sausages (French Onion, heavy garlic chicken, and mild Italian), a sweet onion, zucchini, tomatoes, asparagus, a pork chop, and a seasoned flat iron steak. Dicing here, chopping there and voila! We had our veggies ready to roast and our skewers skewered!

We paired oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and herbs from the garden for the marinade.

Meat, meat, meat! Don’t get the meat sweats!

Veggies ready to be roasted!

We heated the oven floor to approximately 800 degrees.

Sizzling dinner

Veggies: roasted

Final product: DELICIOUS!

My compliments to the chefs! A wonderful Father-Son team!

13Oct2014

Happy birthday to me!

Posted in Adventures, Parties! by mszerwo

I’ve been celebrating my birthday month and over the weekend celebrated the actual day of my birth. We had friends over for a pizza party on Saturday to watch the Huskies win (yeah!), spent some quality time relaxing on Sunday, along with brunch at Roux (I wasn’t as impressed as I had hoped to be) and my annual family birthday dinner at Voila.

Here are some photos of my (first) weekend of birthday fun. I’m looking forward to continuing the celebrations this week and into next weekend!

Beer ping for the Husky game

My personal pizza chef hard at work

Cupcakes from Stephanie & Parker: Delicious!

Birthday cupcakes!

Homemade focaccia

Our first skillet cookie: so good!

Scallops and beet risotto from Voila! Seattle

More desserts for this happy 32 year old!

7Aug2014

Pizza, Pizza: We made pizza!!

Posted in 2014 Themed eating, DIY, Food by mszerwo

WE DID IT! We made pizza in our backyard wood-fired oven!

Up to temp!

After weeks of curing the oven and focusing on things other than delicious, delicious pizza, Brandon’s brother, James, and sister-in-law-to-be, Jessica, joined us for our inaugural pizza cooking event last weekend. We got the oven up to temp, approximately 800 degrees, in about 45 minutes.

Feelin’ hot-hot-hot!!

A wonderful shot of the flames leaping toward the pizza

James brought homemade dough up from his house that he made the night before; it was chewy and fluffy and turned out so well. I’ll share the recipe when he sends it up. Until then, this is our favorite dough recipe.

Our first wood-fired pizza!

We made four pizzas total, topped with different combinations of tomato sauce, mozzarella, prosciutto, salami, minced garlic, onions, black olives and fresh herbs (basil, sage, and rosemary from the garden). We devoured them while pairing them with my favorite kale salad and a bottle of the 2011 La Previa from Robert Ramsay Cellars.

My favorite meal: Pizza and kale salad

In addition to James’ pizza experience (he used to work at a pizzaria), we’ve been using “The Art of Wood Fired Cooking” to help us understand how the oven works and for some great recipes.

Robert Ramsay La Previa + Pizza oven!

We let the fire die down to just the embers and popped in a sage focaccia (from the aforementioned book). We left the oven a little too hot, and it cooked in half the called-for duration, but it turned out great!

The proud chef with his focaccia (before…)

Focaccia: after

This is only the beginning. We need to order a few more tools (a smaller peel for tuning the pizzas, an ember bucket, a fire poker, etc.). Our theme for dinners for the week is “wood-fired” and we have some great ideas pinned in my “Pizza! Pizza” board.

We (James) also learned the hard way that you shouldn’t stand too close to the fire. I’m sure his hair will grow back…

Crispy hair: Don’t get too close to the oven!

19Apr2014

{Gone Pinning} Backyard bench

Posted in DIY, Garden, Gone Pinning by mszerwo

Happy weekend! Last weekend we spent many hours cleaning and staining the deck, planting and re-planting new plants, rearranging the yard and plotting future projects.

Here was the main focus of my plotting: the lower deck in the backyard:

Lower deck, in need of a bench

Then it was off to Pinterest to find some good ideas to fill in that gap in the laurel that looks right at the neighbor’s house, provide some extra seating for all the parties we’re planning for this summer, and finish off the lower deck. Beyond finishing the pizza oven, this is the only thing we really have left in the back, which is AWESOME!

So, here are some of my ideas. Let me know your thoughts. We’ll have our Megan’s Island contractor/supervisor (my Dad) over here soon and I look forward to sharing the finished product with you shortly.

Standard bench with backrest

Another basic bench, this one without a back. This could double as a storage location.

Maybe something in between? I do like adding a planter into the bench design.

A more modern look, with a concrete planter as part of the base

Or a bench that matches our front fence?

So many great ideas. I’m looking forward to talking it out and making a design decision this weekend. Have a great Easter and rest of the weekend!

20Mar2014

Spring! Spring! Spring!

Posted in Garden by mszerwo

It seems as though February showers brought March showers and March showers will likely bring more April showers and then possibly we’ll get some May flowers. In between all of those Seattle showers, spring has sprung on Megan’s Island.

Little buds are here! It’s SPRING!

The plants are still alive! Yay!

I took advantage of a break in the rain last weekend (seriously, it’s been so rainy here; halfway through the month we had already received more than three times the amount of rain we usually get in the entire month of March!) and planted some bulbs that I found at Costco.

Shade garden bulbs from Costco

I like to focus most of my gardening time on the backyard and this project was no exception. Our garden gets very little sun, so I’ve learned to limit myself to shade-specific plants. I finally learned how to ‘plant right for my site‘ and have killed way fewer plants since.

I bought the perennial shade lovers bulb mix and scoped out where I was going to plant my new plants. Thankfully, I was able to navigate the garden very well because of some forward thinking I did last November and my well-placed golf tees.

I planted Ostrich Fern bulbs in our fern garden and “the nothing” / “grotto” (more on that later) and Bressingham Blue Hosta bulbs in the hosta garden (are you sensing a garden grouping theme yet?) and pink Federsee Astilbe bulbs throughout the garden, mainly in the pots.

I guess the rain is a good thing, since its helping the bulbs grow roots and grow into tall, beautiful plants. More on that once I see some actual growth.

Megan’s Island fern and hosta gardens. Can you see the white golf tees?

Happy spring!

Megan's Island

Welcome to my island!

Tag Archives: backyard

Pizza, pizza: Non-pizza in the pizza oven!

Pizza, Pizza: We made pizza!!

{Gone Pinning} Backyard bench

Spring! Spring! Spring!