Pizza Pull-Apart Bread

Happy Fall everyone!  I’m so happy that October is finally here and I get to experience it in my new city.  Back home, October is my favorite month of the year.  All of the best things happen during this month: leaves change color, the air gets crisp, it’s finally scarf season, and who can forget Halloween?! 

I was just talking to a co-worker this morning about how much I love this time of year, but truth be told: I’m sort of nervous about how I’ll like fall in Seattle.  I’ve been told that Seattle stays green all year round, which I’ll love… but I think I’ll miss the orange leaves.  Regardless, I woke up this morning and loved the familiar chill in the air that lets me know summer is gone.  I threw on a long sleeved shirt, a scarf, & some boots and marched down to Starbucks to get a Pumpkin Spiced Latte, mmm.  Yup, fall really is here :).

Fall brings my favorite types of food and the BEST smelling kitchens.  I feel an apple crisp and pumpkin bread in my kitchen’s future.  My friends and I are also trying to throw a Halloween party, so I’ll have to come up with something exciting to bring to that… suggestions are always welcome… hint, hint ;).

Anyway, on to the good stuff: what I’m sharing with you.  This week I’m in Seattle for a full ten days!  That’s the longest I’ve been in my apartment all month, I’m really excited.  Obviously, the first thing I did yesterday was figure out what recipes I wanted to try while I’m here and then I embarked on a journey to Whole Foods (I tagged along with my favorite married couple: Erin & Luis).  I wasn’t able find everything I needed at Whole Foods, so I happily walked around the city and stopped at Target, Kress IGA, and my new favorite store: City Kitchens (where I spent wayyyy more money than I needed to…oops!). 

I felt like, after my introductory post, it was only fitting to feature a pizza recipe that I had been DYING to try.  I found this recipe over on Just a Taste; Kelly is my newest obsession.

So, this pizza pull-apart bread… I’m just going to call it out of this world.  It’s actually blissfully unfair, if you ask me.  I think I used a little too much pizza sauce, so mine was really gooey, but honestly… I’m not complaining.  Another thing I’m totally not going to complain about: how wonderful my kitchen smelled while it was cooking up in my oven.  In fact, I’m going to share what’s left of the loaf with Erin for lunch so we’ll see if she agrees, but, oh man I can’t wait for 11:30 to roll around!

I did a couple things differently than Kelly did in her recipe.  First, I used premade pizza dough from whole foods.  I know, I know… what a way to start this adventure out…cheating.  But in my defense, I don’t have a mixer to make dough in… it’s a cop out, but whatever.  Speaking of mixers though, Kelly has a KitchenAid Mixer giveaway going on right now… I’m trying to be nice and share this with you even though it’ll hurt my chances of winning: here it is.  Second, I made a really stupid rookie mistake… I forgot to get a roller.  So I improvised, I used a round coffee mug to roll out my dough; it worked better than I thought it would (I’m still going to buy a roller first chance I get).  Aside from some other small technical stuff, I followed the rest of the recipe the way it was developed.  Here we go:

Pizza Pull-Apart Bread

Slightly adapted from: Just a Taste

Yields: 1 Loaf                  Prep Time: 1.5 Hours             Cook Time: 30 Minutes

Ingredients

1 package of premade pizza dough

½ cup pizza sauce

¾ cup shredded mozzarella cheese

¼ cup sliced pepperoni

2 tablespoons butter, melted

1 tablespoon crushed garlic

Procedures 

Place pizza dough in a bowl, cover, and allow to proof for 1 hour, or until it has doubled in size.

After it has proofed, lay the dough out on a floured surface and roll it into a rectangle.  (My rectangle was approximately 15” X 11”).  Lightly brush the dough with the pizza sauce, then top with cheese and pepperoni. 

Trim and discard the edges of the dough, to make a rectangle with straight lines. 

Cut the rectangle into 5 equal strips, approximately 3” wide.  Cut the strips into four squares, I found it easiest to run a line down all the strips at once, creating twenty squares total.  I found it easiest to then stack five squares on top of each other, making four piles.

Lightly spray a 9” x 5” loaf pan with cooking spray.  Stack the squares against each other, in the pan, with the cut edges down.  The squares will not fill up the pan, so don’t worry if it looks empty!  Cover the pan and let it proof for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350°F  

Place the loaf on a baking sheet and let it bake for 15-20 minutes.

Mix the melted butter and crushed garlic together.  Remove the pan from the oven, lightly brush the top of the loaf with garlic butter, and allow it to bake for another 15-20 minutes.  The top of the loaf should be golden brown.

Remove the loaf from the oven and let it cool before turning it onto a serving plate. 

Enjoy!

Welcome to My Kitchen

Where does one begin when starting a food blog?  Hi, I'm Ashley and I like food.

Me.

Wow, that intro sucked.  I guess I'll start with me.  I just graduated from Bryant University, this past May, and moved 3,000 miles away from home, in June.  I left my family, friends, and boyfriend in Rhode Island to move across the country to Seattle, Washington.  Why would someone do this, you ask?  Well, I accepted a job as a National Bank Examiner for the United States Treasury.  Super nerdy, I know, but I was a finance major (as if that makes it normal).

Fun fact?  I'm writing this from 30,000 miles in the air.  Pretty cool, right?  I travel a lot for work... and I guess you could say I caught the travel bug while spending a semester in Florence, Italy, my junior year in college.  Ironically, it was that semester that also sparked my obsession with cooking and, let's face it, food in general.  I think we should call a truce... if you are reading this, then chances are that you are as obsessed with food as I am; so I'm going to stop feeling judged!

Anyway, like I was saying, I travel a lot for work.  Which on one hand is awesome, but it also means I can't be in my kitchen as much as I'd like to.  For the purposes of this blog that is not entirely bad because I had an idea.  As I travel, and eat out, I'll feature places I eat at and love.  Who knows when you'll be in Eastern Washington looking for a good bite to eat... it could happen.

Let's discuss my eating habits, shall we?  That just sounded 50 shades of grey ish... Moving on, awkwardly...  In all seriousness, I'm incredibly picky and weird when it comes to food.  I've gotten A LOT better at trying things, but boy am I picky, it's almost tiring to me.  Here's the thing: I don't really like dairy products.  I'm not one of those people who drools over a thing of string cheese (ahem... Laura, my college roommate, that was pointed at you) and I honestly haven't drank a glass of milk in at least 15 years.  My dad grew up on my grandparents' dairy farm, so trust me I've been pressured to like them my whole life, I just can't.  I'm pretty sure it stems from a bad experience I had with mac and cheese as a kid.  Not only do I not like the taste of dairy, but because I rarely eat it, I get sick when I do.  Here's the kicker, the huge joke in my family: one of my favorite foods is pizza.  It's not even worth trying to explain.  In summary, I will do just about anything to avoid adding dairy products to dishes.  I'll tell you if a recipe called for a dairy product that I didn't use, and you are more than welcome to throw cheese on something if you think it will taste good... I will not.

I guess I should talk about my cooking experience: it's minimal.  When I was in Italy I enrolled in two cooking courses (one focused on pairing food and wine).  Aside from a home economics course in high school, that's it.  I learned everything else I know (which isn't much) from watching my parents cook.  My dad loves to cook, I like to think I gained some of his genes in that aspect, but dinner was always a quick event in my house.  Italy taught me how to savor food, how to appreciate food, even how to taste food (no seriously, there was a day devoted to that in class).  Dinner became more than a meal for me in Italy, it was a time to appreciate your day and be with friends and family, and I Ioved that.

So, that's my goal.  Aside from everything else, I want to make food more than a meal.  Hopefully you like some of the stuff I try, it'll be a bumpy road, so bear with me and maybe we can learn something together.

The view of the Pike Place Market out my apartment window.