French Fridays with Dorie - Celebration Week #2: "The Never-Doubt-Dorie Moment”

Hard to believe that after four years, seven months, and twenty-one days, the very talented, utterly determined, and quite industrious members of the online cooking group French Fridays with Dorie, finished cooking their way through Dorie Greenspan’s book Around My French Table. In order to celebrate that momentous occasion, we were asked to post a few celebratory posts for four more Fridays.

Given this week’s theme which is the “Never-Doubt-Dorie Moment”, we were asked to chose a recipe which that provided us with „an unexpected nugget, a new technique, our own bonne idée or some other lesson". Considering that there were about three hundred recipes to chose from, predictably, this proved to be a rather lengthy task. But it was also a lot of fun, as it gave me a chance to revisit all those recipes that I made from this book – no, I did not reach the finish line but I participated in French Fridays for about three years and did my best to make as many of Dorie´s recipes as I could. Not all that bad considering that I am by no means what you would call a native English speaker (it was actually the third language I learned) and in light of the fact that I have a rather smallish kitchen....

For today I chose the Fresh Tuna, Mozzarella, and Basil Pizza that we made back in September of 2013. The technique that I took away from this particular recipe is one that I have come back to many times since - it is actually the making of the crispy, flat puff pastry rounds as bases for this „pizza“ . Since making that recipe for the first time almost two years ago, I have served these crispy rounds with all sorts of lovely appetizers. Everything from honey-roasted tomatoes to walnut-olive tapenade has graced these during the last two years. A wonderful and easy technique that I learned while merrily cooking my way through the bulk of the recipes from Dorie´s book. A technique that I would probably not have tried had it not been for this particular recipe - Thank you, Dorie!

To see what the other members of the French Fridays with Dorie group included in their celebratory posts, please go here.

For copyright reasons, we do and did not publish the recipes from the book. But you can find the recipe for the Fresh Tuna, Mozzarella, and Basil Pizza on pages 166-7 in Dorie Greenspan´s cookbook "Around my French Table".