People ask us all the time, “What do you really eat?”
It’s easy to look at beautifully styled, Pinterest-perfect photos and think: I could never make that. Honestly, we make everything you see on this website. We’ve photographed and styled it to look its best, but most of it is pretty simple food. (In fact, that’s why we wrote a book about pretty simple cooking.) All of our recipes are crafted with the everyday home cook in mind.
When people ask me, what do you really eat? I say that typically, we eat recipes early in the week. Many of these recipes are inspired by seasonal produce or something we’ve found at the farmer’s market. Others are inspired by something we ate at a restaurant. Sometimes, we make recipes from the loads of cookbooks stuffed into the shelf in our dining room.
But when it gets towards the middle or the end of the week, we focus on spontaneous, creative on-the-fly cooking. It’s like the mystery-basket style of cooking on the show Chopped, where each chef is tasked with quickly devising a way to eat random ingredients. Depending on our week, Wednesday or Thursday are usually times to bust out our creativity and go Chopped-style. Luckily, the food we have around isn’t usually as crazy of combinations as in the show (usually something like kale, gummy worms, and kohlrabi).
This recipe is a non-recipe that resulted from one of our cooking from intuition nights. Some might argue that it should not be posted as a formal recipe on a website. But the more we learn about teaching cooking, the more we find that people want to learn how to cook from intuition. Because that’s what being a home cook is all about! Part of it can be making formal recipes you find in books or online. But so, so much of it is becoming creative yourself, like understanding how to use ingredients that are on hand, how to combine techniques, and how to recreate something you tasted at a restaurant using your pantry and fridge. It’s not something that’s easily taught, especially by simply reading information. Cooking is experiential. You must be hands on and practice, practice, practice. There’s no substitute.
With that in mind, here is an incredibly simple yet gourmet pita pizza that I made in 5 minutes on a Thursday night. The weekend before, we’d had a pizza night and splurged on a can of chopped black truffles & mushrooms we found at our grocery. Black truffle is my favorite flavor in the universe and they’re pretty impossible to find for the home cook. The can was $10, but it was worth it for a special pizza dinner. Plus, we only used a bit of the can for our pizza, so we had it hanging out in the refrigerator. A few nights before, we’d also made our Creamy Vegan Pasta Marinara and had some leftover sauce. Plus, I’d made a few flatbreads from The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook, which were getting a little stale and needed to be eaten. When I saw there was shredded cheese on hand, I knew a pita pizza was in order. Quickly topped and broiled, this came together in 5 minutes.
If you know the word umami, it’s one of the five basic tastes (along with sweet, sour, bitter, and salty). Umami is described as meaty. Since most of our cooking is with vegetables, finding umami in creative ways is something we think about constantly. Black truffles are full of sensual, delicious umami. Combine that with the shallots, garlic, and capers in our Creamy Vegan Marinara sauce, and the salty umami of melty, gooey cheese, and you’ve got incredible, eye-popping flavor. Hence, the name of this recipe: Umami Bomb. You could make this exact pita pizza, using purchased pita bread and our Creamy Vegan Marinara sauce. Or, use it as an idea template: grab your favorite marinara and use cheese that’s on hand. However, the canned black truffles make the umami of this pizza shine–they’re easy to grab online and perfect for adding flavor to pizzas, pasta, and sandwiches.
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Did you make this recipe?
If you make our Umambi Bomb pita pizza, we’d love to hear how it turned out. Leave a comment below or share a picture on Instagram and mention @acouplecooks.
This recipe is…
Vegetarian.
- 1 pita bread
- ¼ cup Creamy Vegan Marinara sauce
- 1 tablespoon canned black truffles and mushrooms
- ½ cup shredded cheese of any type
- 2 pinches salt
- Spread the pizza with marinara sauce; top with cheese, then truffles. Sprinkle with a few pinches of kosher salt.
- Broil on high until the cheese is melted, a few minutes. Cut into pieces and enjoy.
A Couple Cooks - Recipes for Healthy & Whole Living
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