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Ingredients:

• 4 strips of bacon, thinly sliced
• 1 cup of tomato sauce — this time of year, it’s easy to find great heirloom tomatoes for a simple homemade sauce, but I use store bought sauce all the time as well
• 1 large bunch of hen of the woods mushrooms (see above) very roughly chopped (leaving some large chunks)
• 1 cup grated cheese — we found something slightly stinky at the farmer’s market which worked great with the earthy mushroom flavors (can’t recall the name unfortunately), but almost anything will work
• Pizza dough

Prep:

1. Saute the bacon over high heat until browned.  Remove, leaving the fat to cook the mushrooms.
2. Cook mushrooms in bacon fat over med-low heat for just a couple minutes.  They will continue to cook in the grill, so you really only need a little toast.
3. To assemble pizza, start with a very thin layer of tomato sauce, then add bacon and mushrooms, and finish with a light layer of cheese.
4. Grill pizza (instructions here) and serve with a salad and oaky red wine.

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• 2 links of Merguez lamb sausage, crumbled and sauteed in olive oil
• 2 baby leeks, cleaned, chopped and sauteed
• About 1.5-2 cups of grated fresh Asiago cheese (Asiago Pressato)
• 2 small ripe plumbs, sliced
• 1 cup pureed tomato sauce
• Pizza Dough

Prepare all ingredients and have ready near grill. (See below — this is crucial because you have to move fast in assembling the pizza after grilling one side)

Roll out pizza dough, brush one side lightly with olive oil and place that side down on grill over direct, high heat.  Once the dough has some nice color, slide it off the grill onto a plate or board, brush the uncooked side with olive oil and flip over.

Place ingredients on cooked size of dough and slide back on grill.  Cover and cook until bottom is nicely grilled and cheese is melted.

(Makes 2 large pizzas)

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The rich creaminess of green chili sauce makes it a great compliment to mac & cheese.  We added a good layer of green chili on bottom of the baking pan (about 2 cups) and made mac cheese as usual.

A few years ago, my mom started a tradition of doing three different quiches on Christmas morning.  She’s taught me most of what I know about cooking, so its fun to be able to go back home and assist her with this ambitious breakfast. We start with recipes from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon and deviate as we see fit.  This year we did a classic quiche lorraine, a wild mushroom quiche, and a spinach quiche.  I’ll post the recipes at some point, but we’ll start with the photos…

Chopped shallots, criminis, and chanterelles for the wild mushroom quiche:

Bacon and caramelized onion for the quiche lorraine:

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