Saturday was slow-food pizza night, with friends new and old celebrating the close of another school year. But our pizza is slow and cocktails strong, so we started out fast and delicious, seafood-style, with three dozen grilled prawns tossed in Louisiana hot sauce. They are as rich and luscious as they are quick and easy, mostly because you make the sauce by mixing together 1 part butter to 1 part Louisiana-style hot sauce. Everything’s better with butter – or bacon! – right? A quarter-cup of each is plenty for a dozen prawns, and Crystal, Original Louisiana, and Frank’s Red Hot brands are all traditional and tasty choices.
Just toss your sustainably-raised, cleaned and deveined prawns in olive oil and throw them on a hot grill. Turn them over as soon as they start turning pink; it takes only a minute or two on each side for them to cook through.
Pop ’em straight into that buttered up hot sauce and dive in – you’ll definitely need extra napkins.
Yum.
Okay – now for the second appetizer: smoked salmon pizza. We’ve been refining this recipe ever since LL’s first taste of Wolfgang Puck’s smoked salmon pizza at Spagos in Las Vegas way back in the old Comdex days. Chef Puck uses thinly sliced smoked salmon – lox – with caviar. We use dry smoked salmon, thick flaky slabs of alder-infused deliciousness. I love Dave’s brand – it’s local but easy to buy online.
- Start by making your dough – click here for a fool-proof recipe.
- Now make a spread of 1 cup whipped cream cheese, zest of 1/2 lemon, 1/4 cup finely minced red onion, and 1 tbsp dill. Set aside
- Roll out your dough to a desired thickness. Ours are about as thin as a saltine cracker, but not as crunchy.
- Cook your dough, either in the oven or on the grill. We fired up the pizza oven and gave it a quick cook at 700 degrees:
- Spread your spread, top with flaked salmon, and sprinkle a small handful of capers to finish. Well, on Saturday I was actually out of capers but happened to have a tin of caviar, a gift I brought home from the Post Ranch’s 20th Anniversary celebration last month. To be clear – you do not cook this again. Just cut into small squares and serve at room temperature. It’s quite elegant and lush. Voila:
And I’m eating cereal right now! Life isn’t fair. Everything looks so good, and I can practically smell the pizza. Is that the oven you told me about?