Whole Wheat Pizza Dough (Bufalina Pizza), Tomato Basil Soup, Field Green Salad

Today was day 13 of cooking from THE BEST OF COOKING LIGHT. My parents are here visiting so I got to cook for them as well as my daughter and son in law. I had planned a 4-course dinner with dessert, but by the time we got back from picking them up from the airport and stopping at the grocery store we didn't get home until after 5:00 so I ended up skipping dessert for tonight. We'll save that for tomorrow.

Today I made a Field Salad with Roasted Leeks, Mushrooms, and Feta; Tomato Basil Soup; and Whole Wheat Pizza (Bufalina Pizza, more about that later on).

FIELD SALAD WITH ROASTED LEEKS, MUSHROOMS, AND FETA, a good salad...

This salad was easy to make. You actually roasted the sliced leeks in a tiny amount of olive oil in the oven to brown them. I had a problem with some of them burning and others not browning. Stirring them halfway through the roasting process would have been a good idea. However, they really added a good flavor to the salad. And my Dad, who is not a spinach fan, liked this salad, and didn't realize there was spinach in the salad until I told him. The salad has spinach and arugula in it, as well as mushrooms, leeks, and feta cheese (the picture shown here does not include the feta, I forgot to add it to the salad bowl, so we added it to our plates after we dished it up). I did have a problem finding the dressing the recipe called for. It called for light dill-mustard dressing, which I could not find anywhere. I ended up using a honey-mustard dressing and adding some dill weed to it. It more more heavy on the honey mustard and less of the dill. Wish I could have found the appropriate dressing so I could have tasted it how it was meant, but it was a good salad, and my daughter's favorite of the 3 dishes I served.

TOMATO-BASIL SOUP, a good homemade tomato soup with good flavors...

Almost everyone liked this soup. My daughter is not much of a tomato soup fan so this wasn't her favorite dish. My Dad, who says tomato soup is his favorite soup, liked it a lot. The recipe calls for low sodium tomato juice. I could find tomato juice butn ot low sodium tomato juice. The only thing I could find that was low sodium was V-8 juice. Since V-8 juice is more tomato than any over vegetable, that's what I ended up using. The flavor of the basil isn't overpowering. There is cream cheese in this, and try as I might, I could not get all the tiny little pieces to melt, so my picture is not as pretty as the picture in the cookbook. But this is a good tomato basil soup recipe.

WHOLE WHEAT PIZZA DOUGH (Bufalina Pizza, as I made), a hit with everyone!

The recipe in the cookbook is for Whole Wheat Pizza Dough, just the dough. You can make whatever you want for the pizza itself. There are not instructions in the cookbook on what to do with the dough, how to cook it, what to top it with, etc. There is another recipe in the cookbook for Caramelized Onion Pizza with Gorgonzola and Arugula, which uses this dough, and I'll make that another day in the future.

I made the Bufalina pizza for my husband. We went to Italy this past summer and when we were in Venice we ordered Bufalina pizza (Buffalo pizza). It was the best pizza and best mozzarella cheese we'd ever had. We liked it so much we went back the next day to get it again for lunch. It didn't turn out so well the 2nd time. Long story short... different cook, different pizza. Same ingredients, but you're going to get it however that particular cook decides it should be served, and it was not the same as the previous day. It was good, but not nearly as good since it was prepared completely different.

A little information on what Buffalo mozzarella is... it is mozzarella cheese made from water buffalo milk rather than cow milk, and is officially called Mozzarella di Bufala. It is pictured here, and is softer than regular mozzarella that we've had here in America. When the pizza was cooking the mozzarella was oozing a bit of juices and making the top seem watery, but it ended up evaporating through the cooking process.

Anyway, when my hubby was at Costco the other day he found the Buffalo Mozzarella cheese, imported from Italy, and bought it. I tried to replicate the pizza like we had it in Venice. It had the crust, tomato sauce, whole basil leaves, sliced tomato and the buffalo mozzarella. It was good. We really liked the flavor of the mozzarella, and it is by far the best mozzarella you can ever get. Everyone liked it, and it was a big hit with everyone.

As for the whole wheat pizza dough recipe in the cookbook, it was good. I have another pizza dough recipe that I usually make that we really like (not whole wheat, however), so I was interested to try this one. The crust is more of a medium crust, not thin, but not really thick either. I think I'd make it a little more on the thin side next time. But it was good, definitely worth the little effort it took to make it.

Overall, it was a good dinner, with great company!

26 recipes down, 521 more to go.