Best cheesecake ever!

Date: 25-Apr-12

Menu: gluten free pizza dough artisan pizza; watermelon, feta salad; best cheesecake ever

This week’s Monday night dinner occurred near GF’s Birthday. So I thought I (FFB), would make her a cake. I had skim read a cheesecake recipe for a friend and apparently couldn’t get it out of my brain. In the end GF actually made the cake, but I did a lot of dishes at her house so I’ll call it a fair trade. I also bought all the ingredients. I talked GF into making a cheesecake at her house because she has a fancy Kitchen Aid mixer. I would have been able to mix the ingredients by hand but it would have been less social and time-consuming. The recipe recommended to make the cake ahead of time so this was all done 1 day before dinner.

I call it artisan pizza because there were fancy toppings: spinach; roasted zucchini and eggplant; bell peppers; feta cheese; prosciutto salami and gypsy salami for the meat eaters. Also proper soft mozzarella cheese. I believe Costco had something to do with this dinner being affordable as I know my local store would make this an impossible budget for our weekly meal.

The gluten free pizza dough was tasty and even reheated in the microwave reasonably well.

Now the salad made the group wonder about GF’s palette watermelon, onion, black olives, mint, cilantro and feta cheese. Looks funny when you first see the salad deconstructed. Not trusting the mix TokenBoy took a moment to steal some watermelon pieces before all the pieces got mixed together. Watermelon, feta salad GF used cilantro instead of parsley because she likes it better. This salad is very tasty and is actually good on day 2 as well. According to my google search for this recipe, it made it big by being published in ‘O’ magazine in 2006. Since the recipe showed up from GF’s Mom around that time I’m thinking this is definitely the one.

With all this good food for the main course we managed to stuff ourselves silly. This necessitated a couch and comfy chair lounging intermission before dessert. Even though we were still pretty full, there’s always some room for dessert. We discovered that the cheesecake is the best we’ve had and all wanted seconds but prudently waited until the next day with each of us getting 2 pieces to enjoy later.