Yes, You Can Have Tea With Pizza

Another Stellar Summer Treat is on the menu for tonight.  It is cool enough to have the oven on and we're having fresh tomato pizza.  It could not be simpler - one pizza crust, either bought or homemade.  Smear it with good extra-vrgin olive oil - I have some very nice California oil, which is a bit fruitier than others.  Slice your summer-fresh tomatoes and crowd them on.  If your tomatoes are super juicy, let them sit on a paper towel for a while.  Add a little mozzarella if you want to, bake in a 475 degree oven until you think it's done and there you have it.  An alternative is to smear the crust with pesto or top the tomatoes with some pesto or put fresh basil leaves under the tomatoes.  If you on put them on top, they burn.  Guess how I know that little piece of info. 

You can also grill the pizza, but I will leave you to go to other sources to find out how.  The fresh tomato pizza is a nice savory for a tea party - just cut it so each small piece has a slice of tomato.  You could also alternate with slices of squash and that would be pretty as well.  If you do either, decorate with some small, fresh basil leaves.  These are good cold as well as hot.  I learned a trick for warming up pizza from a chef friend of mine - do it in a frying pan over low heat.  Cover the pan until the toppings warm and it is practically indistinguishable from fresh, especially the mostly veggie sort.  This way, you could make the pizza the day before, cool it, wrap it well and pop in the fridge.

I have discovered that you can have tea with pizza.  For this, I make a strong dark tea, like an English Breakfast - this is not the place for something delicate.  I use a good bit of lemon in it and it seems to go pretty well.  I tried it with some basil in it to go with the pizza - not a great idea.  It's not as good as beer or root beer, but if you must have tea with everything, this is pretty good.  I am going to try it with some lemon flavored seltzer.  I know, it sounds weird, but you need to experiment, right?

If you like fresh chives in the winter or thyme or most of the perennial herbs, now is the time to pot them up to bring in the house later, provided you have south facing windows.  This, of course, is for those of us in the north.  I have pots of rosemary, chive and a new herb, culantro, all set.  I really miss fresh basil in the winter, but a paste of basil and a little oil, frozen flat in freezer bags, goes a long way towards getting me through.  For us, it is more useful than basil cubes.  If you can't grow chives, I have found that snipping them and rushing them into the freezer in flattened bags and only adding them at the very last second, works quite well.  Then you have chives to decorate your tea sandwiches with or to mix into them.  I especially appreciate garlic chives this way, as grocery store may have the regular ones fresh, but never the garlic.  Dried chives are just so much paper.

The walkway around a monastery high above the German Village of Obernhof.