Barbecue Chicken Pizza

Last night's dinner was pizza again, though this one was a bit more successful than the last.

It's pretty basic, though, so not much to say: barbecue sauce, slices up cooked chicken breast, red and yellow peppers, and cheddar cheese. I over-baked it a little trying to get the cheese to crisp up a bit, but no luck with that.

Apple Zucchini Asparagus Pizza

This is, you know, pretty much what it says on the tin. MacIntosh apple slices, zucchini slices, asparagus, and underneath a mound of caramelized onions. It's also got feta, Swiss and Parmesan cheeses.

It was a strange thing, and I didn't really eat it because I over-baked the crust and the skinny little asparagus sticks were remarkably tough to chew through. But I really liked the taste of the cheese baked on the apple with the caramelized onion, so I picked all those tasty bits off and ate them before throwing away the rest.

I think it would be really great reworked as a tart of some sort, minus the zucchini and asparagus. I'll have to think about it, see if I can talk myself into making pastry dough one day.

Roasted Tomato Pizza with Garlicky White Bean Puree

Another pizza experiment, and my final one at least until I've moved. (Not buying anything that'll have to get chucked in the freezer; we're trying to use things up, rather than add to them.) This isn't at all the pizza I'd planned to make with my last pizza shell - it was going to have roasted zucchini and eggplant and bell peppers and mushroom and onion and feta cheese on it. But I used up all my feta cheese yesterday with that Greek salad, so I had to change plans.

I decided to do a version of this salad instead, just without the artichokes and olives. I had already packed the cookbook, though, so I had to figure out a way to translate the concept without even the recipe as a reference.

So I came up with the idea of a bean puree as the base. I didn't want it to be too blandly beany, so I heated the beans in a bit of oil with a lot of garlic, (dried) basil, salt and pepper, then mashed them up with a potato masher and used them in place of a sauce. The tomatoes were roasted with oil, basil, garlic, salt and pepper. I peeled off the skins when I put them on the pizza, so they wouldn't hold their form so strongly (those little tomatoes had strong, thick skins).

I was going to do it as a cheese-free pizza, with an egg cracked over the centre and baked on (to reference the hard-boiled eggs from the salad), but I chickened out and just used a bit of mozzarella cheese instead.

It was really tasty. The taste of the garlic was quite strong in the puree, and I really liked the texture of the soft mashed beans. The tomatoes were exquisite. But I should have learned from my last go around with bean puree on pizza that it doesn't look nice once it cooks. The edges dry out so much.

Maybe if I try it again, I should pre-cook the pizza shell with a bit of olive oil or something, or a sauce (though I really wanted to use the beans in place of a sauce), then pile the hot bean puree on top, add the rest of the ingredients and only just give it a quick few minutes under the broiler to melt and brown the cheese.

Caramelized Onion Pizza with Gorgonzola and Toasted Walnuts

This picture has been sitting around for almost a week, waiting for me to get around to deciding whether or not to post it. Thing is... I never ate it. But I decided to put it up anyway, since it was an interesting experiment, if not one I'd like to repeat. Or rather, one I might repeat if I use a slightly different ingredient or two next time.

This was part three of my (soon to be) four part March pizza odyssey. (The pizza shells come in a pack of four.) The recipe came from a vegetarian cookbook of mine A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop. His recipes have always been really delicious when I've made them, and I think this one probably is too, but I just have not developed a taste for blue cheese.

This is a pizza without a sauce. The base is just a huge mound of caramelized onions, which have been finished with a bit of balsamic vinegar. (I was too lazy to cook it off properly, so the onions were a bit more pungent than sweet, but I still think they tasted delicious. My sister thought it smelled foul.) It was baked with some crumbled gorgonzola over top (I read somewhere that gorgonzola is a bit more mild of a blue cheese, but I don't know if that's true, and if that was mild... I'd hate to taste the properly pungent stuff) and then in the last couple minutes of the baking time, I added crumbed walnuts.

When I went to eat the pizza... everything was fine up until I got my first bit of gorgonzola, and then I immediately pitched the lot of it into the bin and went out for McDonalds. (Or not McDonalds, but... something that wasn't covered with blue cheese at any rate.)

Mexican Taco Salad Pizza with Refried Beans

It's.... a taco salad pizza. I guess. With refried beans in place of the ground beef.

I don't think it's possible to do anything new with pizza anymore, but this weird idea came to me today (I'm sure someone else somewhere else sometime else came up with it first) and I absolutely had to make it.

So, from the bottom up: a pizza shell, half a can of refried beans cooked with half a packet of taco seasoning (I should have made my own, but I was too lazy) and a bit of water, cheese (cheddar and an Italian blend), slices of tomato. So I baked that until it was heated through, the cheese was melted and the crust was darkened. (Obviously I darkened it a bit too much, but that's what I get for wiping up the counter when I should have been taking it out of the oven.) Once it was out of the oven, I topped it with lettuce and more tomatoes. If I'd had salsa, I'd have spooned some of that on top. And if I'd had green onions, I'd have used some of those. And if I'd thought of putting sour cream on it, I might have done that too.

It was really good. Even my sister and her husband liked it, though they think I should use beef rather than beans next time.

Pizza Margherita

One of the things I do for my job is make price labels to go on the shelves at the grocery store, and today the dairy guy asked me to make some new labels for the mozzarella cheeses because the old ones had almost all fallen off. (They're in a shoddy channel and rarely last out the week before I'm replacing some of them.) And I suddenly got a craving, standing in my work room with an armload of mozzarella cheeses, for tomato and mozzarella cheese pizza.

How fortunate I work in a grocery store. Of course, I still managed to forget fresh basil (I had to dollop on pesto to get that basil flavour) and the tomatoes weren't quite ripe enough, but I think it still came together well enough in the end.

Pizza Margherita is one of my absolute favourite pizzas. It's so simple, but completely delicious. And even if this isn't quite a proper one, it was the best thing I've had to eat in ages.