Broccoli rabe pizza

This is a pizza recipe I came up with about a month ago to use up some leftover broccoli rabe. Broccoli rabe is a vegetable that I always think I will like more than I do. I don't dislike it, but honestly, I'd rather have broccoli or kale. Anyway, this pizza came about when I was browsing around for broccoli rabe recipes, and I ran across this pizza from smitten kitchen. When I saw the pictures initially, I thought the black blobs were raisins. When it turned out they were olives, I already had my heart set on raisins, so I swapped that out. I also decided to caramelize the onions on the stove instead of roasting them in the oven. I added pine nuts and used fontina cheese instead of mozzarella because I had some I needed to use up.

This pizza was excellent. Jon was rock climbing that afternoon, and he is always really hungry when he gets home from that. He inhaled 2/3 of the pizza and raved about it the whole time, but I don't really trust his judgment when he's that hungry.

Broccoli rabe pizza

Vegetable oil for sauteing

1 large onion, sliced into thin rings

1/2 pound broccoli rabe, washed and chopped

1 pizza crust (I used my standard 1/2 whole wheat crust)

1/2 cup shredded fontina cheese

1/4 cup raisins

2 tbsp pine nuts

Salt to taste

Start by caramelizing your onions. To do this, put a generous amount of oil in a large saute pan and heat it over medium. When it is hot, add the onions and lower the heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are brown and soft, between 45 minutes and an hour. Remove onions and set aside. Sometime while the onions are caramelizing, put your pizza stone in the oven and turn it on to 425 F.

Turn heat up to medium and add broccoli rabe to remaining oil. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until broccoli rabe is wilted and bright green, about five minutes.

Roll out pizza crust. Top with cheese, onions, raisins, broccoli rabe, and pine nuts, roughly in that order. Sprinkle with salt if desired. Put the pizza on the stone and bake until done, about 9-12 minutes.

Personal salad focaccia

Jon had the brilliant idea of personal focaccia salads, so we made that for lunch today. I don't think I cooked them quite enough, but they were pretty good. We saw figs on sale, so I sliced one up and put it on the focaccia before it cooked, along with some goat cheese. I also sliced one up for the top. Honestly, I felt like the cooked ones might have been a little too desserty. I'm on the fence about it. The concentrated sweetness was a little weird with the other salad ingredients, but the fig and warm goat cheese thing was pretty great. Maybe make one with and one without, and see how you like them.

Personal Salad Focaccia

Delicious lunch for 1.

1/4 recipe focaccia dough

2 figs, sliced

Goat cheese

Mixed greens

Basil leaves

Sliced avocado

Sliced red pepper

Sliced cucumber

Sunflower seeds

Pumpkin seeds

Olive oil

Balsamic vinegar

Prep dough according to directions in this post. Before baking, put one sliced fig and some goat cheese on dough. Bake at 450 degrees for about 12-15 minutes, or until dough is golden. Top with the rest of salad ingredients. Dress to taste with oil and vinegar.

Grape-rosemary focaccia

This recipe from smitten kitchen had been on my to-make list for a long time. We moved into our new apartment last week, which means I finally had access to my stand mixer again. When I saw Concord grapes at the grocery store, I knew it was time to make this recipe! I made one for dinner on Sunday, and we took the other one to a concert in Millennium Park on Monday. They were delicious! It's more work than using the bread maker, mostly because you have to plan on being at home to do various stuff to the dough on a schedule. But darn it, they were tasty. They might work in a bread machine, too. I'll have to try.

I was initially disappointed with the Concord grapes I bought at the store because they didn't taste as Concordy as I thought they should. But the heat of the oven concentrated the flavors, and they were so good with the salt, olive oil, and rosemary. I'm not going to post the recipe because you can just follow the link at the beginning of the post. I made a few changes: I didn't have milk, and yogurt seemed to make a fine substitute. Water probably would have worked, too. I also added about twice as much rosemary for the second one. I thought the rosemary flavor was overwhelmed the first time. Next time, I'll probably add some rosemary to the dough as well. I baked mine on my pizza stone, and I think that (and the olive oil) made the crust really nice and crispy on the outside, but not hard through-and-through. We will probably use this recipe for other focaccias in the future.

I think I have mentioned my friend's blog The Weekly Pizza. Well, we've been inspired, and we're going to try to make weekly pizzas too. I love having structured projects like that, and one that leads me to eat more pizza is an extra bonus. Even though this is focaccia, I've decided that it counts as our first weekly pizza. Thanks for the inspiration, Golda!

I think I should close by gushing about how the kitchen smelled. While the dough was rising, there was a delicious yeasty smell in the air, which gave way to a buttery/olive oil-y bread-baking smell once it hit the oven. It was divine!

Don't expect leftovers.

BBQ pizza

Inspired by Golda of The Weekly Pizza, whose mission I admire very much, I decided to make a bbq pizza for lunch on Saturday. I used my go-to half whole wheat crust. I jazzed it up a bit more than Golda did, adding kale and pineapple, two of my favorite pizza ingredients. Next time, I might use more sauce or a spicy wing sauce like she did. The sauce kind of disappeared, even though I thought I put a pretty thick layer on. My sauce was sweet prepared bbq sauce mixed with a spicier steak sauce in equal portions.

I intended to use both "pizza blend" and blue cheese, but I forgot to add the blue cheese. That might have been too much, though, with the extra ingredients. The end result was a pretty satisfying pizza, and I think it was even better as dinner the next day, although maybe that's just because I was really hungry!

BBQ pizza

1/3 cup steak sauce

1/3 cup prepared BBQ sauce1/4 pound firm tofu, pressed and cut into 1-inch cubes

Vegetable oil for sauteing

1/2 medium onion, sliced into half-rings

3 kale leaves, washed and coarsely chopped

1 pizza dough, rolled out

1 cup (or so-I didn't measure) pizza cheese

8 oz diced pineapple

Mix steak sauce and BBQ sauce in a medium bowl. Place tofu in a large container with a sealable lid and spoon some sauce onto it until it's covered. Marinate for about 30 minutes. Spread in a single layer on a baking pan. Bake in an oven or toaster oven at 350 for about 30 minutes, turning once while cooking. The tofu should be a little chewy. Set aside.

Pour oil into a saute pan. Add onion and cook, disturbing only occasionally, until onion is soft and has browned a little. Add the kale and cook until wilted. Set aside.

Spread remaining sauce on pizza dough, or make up some more if necessary. Cover with pizza cheese and add tofu, pineapple, and kale, in that order. Bake in preheated 425-degree oven for about 10 minutes, or until crust is done.

Kale week and two recipes

Jon is working in France right now and will be for the next six months or so (don't worry; I get to visit this summer), and his departure has thrown me a little out of my food and cooking rhythm. Specifically, I barely have to cook because I eat much less than Jon+Ev. So I have fewer opportunities to try new things, and I don't have as much motivation to be fun and creative in the kitchen. Here is a post I started a while ago when Jon was in town and gave up on at the time because my pictures weren't uploading properly. I have a few other recipes I've been meaning to write up, so those should be appearing soon. And I'm working on getting my groove back. A big part of this is learning that "serves six" means "you can eat this for eight meals" instead of "you might have leftovers for lunch tomorrow if you're lucky" like it used to.

It is no secret that I love kale. A couple weeks ago I proposed that we should have a "kale week" where we ate kale every day. Jon was a bit skeptical and suggested that we only do a kale work week, but we ended up eating kale the Sunday before and Saturday after as well, so it was a full week of kale. I proposed kale week in part because I love kale and in part to see if I would get tired of it. I didn't at all. In fact, the Monday after kale week, we made a kale pizza, pictured above, recipe below.

Sunday: Potato, kale, carrot, and onion skillet.
Monday: Southwestern quinoa salad (recipe coming soon, perhaps) with a side of sauteed kale

The picture uploaded 90 degrees clockwise from what the file looked like in the folder the first time, so I rotated it 90 degrees counterclockwise and tried again. That time, it uploaded in the same orientation as the file in the folder. I tried to rotate it again, but it was not having any of that. Technology!

Tuesday: Chickpea crepes topped with red Russian kale, golden beets, and feta cheese. Delicious!
Wednesday: We knew we would be eating dinner out with friends, so we sauteed some kale with sesame oil and salt and had it as a side to our lunch of sandwiches.
Thursday: Spinach ravioli with kale added to the cooking water at the last minute, topped with cheese.
Friday: Mac and cheese and kale. Jon makes great mac and cheese from scratch, and this time we sauteed up a bunch of red kale and stirred it in. It was great! Next time I might increase the kale to two bunches to get even more kaley goodness. The recipe is below.
Saturday: Leftovers of various kale-containing foods
Sunday: No kale.
Monday: Kale pizza

Macaroni and cheese and kale
This is based on the mac and cheese recipe from the New Basics Cookbook. We reduced the cheese significantly from their recipe and added kale. The recipe dirties a lot of dishes and takes a while, but it sure is tasty. I think this could be made with blanched broccoli or asparagus in place of the kale.

vegetable oil for sauteing
1 or 2 bunches kale, washed, tough stems removed, leaves coarsely chopped
1 pound penne or rigatoni
4 cups milk
4 tbsp unsalted butter
6 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 tsp paprika (we use sweet or hot smoked, or a combination)
salt and black pepper
4 oz gruyere cheese, grated

In a saute pan over medium heat, saute the kale in the vegetable oil until it just wilts. Set aside.

Cook penne in plenty of water until just tender. Add the kale to the penne. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350.

Bring the milk to a boil in a heavy saucepan. Set aside.

In another heavy saucepan, melt the butter. Add the flour and cook, whisking constantly, for about five minutes. Do not allow to brown.

Add the hot milk to the flour mixture and whisk well. Add 1/2 tsp paprika and a generous amount of black pepper. Season with a little salt. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, for about five more minutes or until the mixture thickens. Add to the kale and penne and toss to coat thoroughly.

Butter a 9x13 baking dish and fill evenly with sauced penne. Distribute the grated gruyere evenly and sprinkle with more pepper and the rest of the paprika. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until hot. Turn on the broiler (use caution if you have a Pyrex baking dish) and cook under the broiler 3 or 4 minutes or until the top gets a little golden and crispy. (The kale on the top will dry out and get a nice crunch going.)

Kale pizza
I used both sauteed kale added at the beginning and raw kale added at the end. The sauteed kale crisped up a little but stayed substantial and chewy. The raw kale crisped up a lot and added nice crunchy bits. You might recall that I throw it onto a lot of my pizzas for a nice vegetal crunch. Jon said he would have preferred just the kale crispies, but I liked both.

1 pizza crust made with 1/2 whole wheat flour

vegetable oil for sauteing
1 bunch of kale, washed thoroughly, thick stems removed, leaves chopped
extra-virgin olive oil for brushing on pizza
about 1/4 of a large onion, sliced into thin rings or half-rings
1 oz gruyere cheese, cut into thin 1-inch squares
coarse salt and black pepper
Parmesan cheese for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 425 and put your pizza stone in it. Roll out the pizza crust.

In a saute pan over medium heat, saute all but a small handful of the kale in oil until just wilted. Remove from heat.

Brush pizza crust with olive oil. Scatter onion slices and cheese over crust. Sprinkle with coarse salt and black pepper. Top with sauteed kale. It should be a pretty thick layer, but you might not want to use all of it depending on how big the bunch of kale was.

Transfer pizza to pizza stone. Bake for about 8 minutes or until crust is mostly, but not quite, done. Add the raw kale pieces and bake for 3 minutes more, or until crust is done. Remove from oven and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

Lemon-ricotta-chard pizza

This post has been featured in the 38th Grow Your Own roundup! Thanks, Nate and Annie, for hosting! There's a lot of delicious and impressive stuff over there.

I made a big batch of ricotta last weekend because I had wanted to try several ricotta recipes. I made some ricotta gnocchi and some cute lemon-ricotta pancakes.
Both were nice but not anything really special, but this pizza was amazing. I knew that I wanted a ricotta-based pizza topping and that I didn't want it to be too complicated. My aunt gave me a bunch of home-grown Meyer lemons, which are big and sweet and juicy, and in a brilliant stroke of inspiration, I decided that they would be the perfect accompaniment to the ricotta on the pizza. Fiesta had some gorgeous bunches of Swiss chard, so I added that too. It worked nearly perfectly. Cooking sweetened the lemons even more, and the greens got a little crispy without burning. Next time I will peel the lemons because the white pith is a little too bitter. That change is reflected in the recipe.

Lemon-ricotta-chard pizza
Vegetable oil for sauteeing chard
Lemon zest, optional
1 bunch Swiss chard, stems removed for another use (if you're into that kind of thing), leaves cleaned well and coarsely torn
1/2 recipe pizza dough made with whole wheat in place of half the white flour
Olive oil for brushing
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/2 Meyer lemon, sliced into thin rounds, peel and pith removed
Coarse salt for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 400 F with pizza stone in it.
Heat oil in saute pan over medium heat. Grate a little lemon zest into the oil if you want. When the oil is hot, add the chard leaves and saute until wilted. You might cover them briefly to get some nice steaming action going. Remove from heat and set aside.
Roll pizza dough out into 12-inch round. Brush with olive oil. Top with ricotta, chard, and lemon slices. I added the ricotta in little spoonfuls, but you could also spread it thinly over the whole pie. Sprinkle with coarse salt. Carefully transfer to pizza stone and bake for 12-14 minutes or until the crust is done.

Caramelized onion, pear, and blue cheese pizza

I think I got the inspiration for this flavor combination from California Pizza Kitchen years ago. The onions and the pears are both sweet, but the tangy blue cheese balances it out. I served this pizza with a truly extraordinary salad. In addition to the normal lettuce, tomato, pepper, and cucumber, I added dill, sorrel, kale, and carrot tops from the garden and pear slices that didn't make it onto the pizza. Jon is the onion caramelizer in the household, so I can't give you guidelines on that. Low and slow is my best guess. I'm sure the internet knows how to do it, though, if you need a recipe. In addition to this pizza, we use caramelized onions in wraps with black bean dip and as a topping for veggie burgers. (We made veggie burgers from scratch for the first time a few days ago.) I plan on using the onion-pear-blue cheese trifecta in galettes later this week as well.

Caramelized onion, pear, and blue cheese pizza

1/2 recipe pizza dough made with whole wheat flour in place of half of the white flour
Extra- virgin olive oil for brushing
Caramelized onions
1 pear, thinly sliced
Crumbled blue cheese (we used a mix of Maytag and a local generic blue cheese)
2 tbsp pine nuts
Coarse salt, optional

Preheat oven to 425 with a pizza stone in it. On a floured surface, roll the pizza dough out to a large circle. Brush with olive oil. Arrange caramelized onions, pear slices, blue cheese, and pine nuts on dough. Carefully transfer to hot pizza stone. Bake for 12 minutes or until crust is done. Sprinkle with salt at the table if desired.

Inspiration pizza

A couple weeks ago, we got home late and hungry with very little food in the house. (We were even out of parmesan-the horror!) I felt like a Chopped! contestant. We had a beer pizza crust in the fridge from a couple days before. There were also some green beans that needed to be used. I marinated them in a mixture of lemon and tangerine juice with some black pepper, smoked paprika, and chopped garlic while I rolled out the pizza dough and assembled the rest of the ingredients. I spread some extra-virgin olive oil on the dough, followed that with a hearty helping of jarred pesto. I dotted the top with sun-dried tomatoes and layered the green beans on top. I wasn't sure that the feta would be good on the pizza, so I only put it on half of it. I put it in the oven at 375 and cooked it for about 12 minutes. I sprinkled on some pine nuts and then cooked it for another few minutes. It wasn't bad at all. If I decide to make green bean pizza in the future, I will chop them smaller, but other than that it pretty much worked. The leftover green bean marinade was a nice drizzle for the top. I was impressed by my kitchen ingenuity.
I'm thinking about doing a Chopped-style weird ingredient challenge every once in a while. My idea is that Jon and I each come up with two ingredients and then we each make a dish that has all four. It's dorky, but we don't have TV or internet at home, so how else are we supposed to entertain ourselves? If these challenges ever materialize, I'll post them here.

A tale of two pizzas

Not much of a recipe here. I just like pizza and want to share two pizzas Jon and I made a while ago. Our dough recipe makes two pizzas' worth of dough, so we usually do two days of pizza at a time. In case you need it, the dough recipe is in this post.
The first pizza starts with an eggplant. An eggplant that we grew on our balcony.
We decided to do an eggplant pizza with mozzarella and tomatoes. The eggplant was small, so we sliced it very thinly to get as much of the pizza covered as possible. The seeds made an angel pattern in the middle of each slice.We brushed the eggplant slices on each side with some olive oil and broiled in the toaster oven until they were brown before layering them on the pizza with tomato and mozzarella slices.
Jon put some mushrooms on his half before it went into the oven. After baking for about 20 minutes, it was done.
We scattered some basil on it right after it came out of the oven. Yum! The eggplant slices were good, although all the other goodies probably diluted the eggplanty awesomeness.

The next night we had pizza again. This time we wanted to use up some eggplant-tomato sauce I had made earlier in the week. On a whim, Jon suggested putting some kale on top too. It was a brilliant idea! We put it on in the last five minutes or so of cooking. Jon's half, once again, has mushrooms on it. I elected just to go with just sauce, cheese, and kale. Kale dries out very quickly in the oven and gets a nice chewy consistency, with little patches of crunchiness near the curly ends of the leaves. And the flavor is concentrated by the oven. It works very well.

Focaccia!

Yesterday Jon and I made the rest of our pizza dough into tasty, tasty focaccia. I served it with a Caprese salad (tomato, mozzarella, basil, black pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar) and used the bread to sop up the tasty juice leftover from the salad. When that was gone, I switched to pouring olive oil and balsamic vinegar onto the bread. Probably not the healthiest meal I could make, but it was delicious. I have a real weakness for bread dripping with good olive oil. Jon and I just switched to a better EVOO (he hates it when I use Rachael Ray-isms), and it made a real difference. For the record, it's Iliada brand. In case you were wondering about the weird tomato distribution, Jon wanted to try it, but I wanted to take a more minimalist approach.

Focaccia:
1/2 recipe pizza dough
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 thin slices yellow or white onion, separated into rings and chilled or soaked in cold water*
1 tsp coarse salt
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
tomato slices, if desired

Preheat oven to 400 F. Sprinkle pizza stone with cornmeal. Roll or toss or otherwise stretch pizza dough into a round that's a little thicker than you would make for pizza. Brush with olive oil, distribute onion rings on dough, and sprinkle with coarse salt. Bake for 15 minutes. Add garlic, rosemary, and tomato and cook for 3-5 minutes more, until crust is turning golden. Tear off pieces and drown them in olive oil.

*Chilling the onion rings or soaking them in cold water will keep them from burning too quickly in the oven. You could also put them on later. I used part of an onion that had already been cut and was being stored in the fridge, so I didn't do anything special.

Pizza!

I made pizza from scratch for the first time yesterday. I love pizza. It is easily my favorite food, but it's always seemed like too much work to do at home. Now that I have the bread machine, however, I decided to give it a try. I would start earlier next time because the pizza dough cycle is 55 minutes long and it has to rest another 30 minutes after that, but other than that it was really easy. Plus, the dough recipe makes enough for two crusts. We are having either another pizza or making focaccia tonight for dinner. I went with the basic white pizza crust for my first time, but I am planning on experimenting with whole wheat and maybe even other grains in the future. I had some eggplant-tomato sauce leftover from pasta on Saturday, so that was the sauce we used. You can see in the picture that the basil got pretty wilted. I will probably put it on at the very end next time, as I indicate in the recipe. We ate this out by the pool with St. Arnold's Spring Bock and a bulgur salad, which Jon might post about later.

Evelyn's first pizza recipe:
1/2 recipe of pizza dough* or prepared pizza dough
cornmeal for the pizza stone
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup eggplant-tomato sauce**
2 small-ish balls of fresh mozzarella, sliced
black pepper
2 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
10 leaves fresh basil

Preheat the oven to 400 F.
Roll or toss the pizza into a nice round. Mine wasn't that round. Oh well. Sprinkle cornmeal on pizza stone and transfer the dough to the stone. If you've got a pizza peel, you'll probably do a better job than I did. Brush dough with olive oil and then with tomato sauce. Place cheese rounds on top of pizza and bake for about 15 minutes. Add black pepper and parmesan and cook until parmesan is slightly brown, about 5 more minutes. Remove from oven and throw the basil leaves on. Enjoy responsibly so as not to burn your tongue on molten cheese.


*Pizza dough recipe (from bread machine manual):
1 cup tap water
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp powdered milk
1 1/2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp dry yeast (I used 2 tsp because I have old, stale yeast)

Put the ingredients in the bread machine and set it for "pizza dough". Wait 55 minutes and retrieve the dough. Put it in a large bowl and cover with a damp cloth. Wait 30 minutes.

**Eggplant-tomato sauce recipe (I made this one up, so amounts are my best estimates):
1 tbsp olive oil, not extra-virgin
1/2 medium onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3/4 lb eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/2 green bell pepper, diced
1 tsp Italian seasoning (or a blend of any or all of the following: basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary)
1/4 cup red wine
1 14-oz can whole tomatoes with juice
black pepper

Saute onion, garlic, and eggplant over medium heat until onion starts to turn translucent. Add pepper and Italian seasoning and cook until eggplant is soft. Add red wine and let it simmer for about a minute. Add tomatoes. If your tomatoes are salt-free, add maybe a teaspoon of salt. Otherwise, they have enough salt. Cook for a few minutes so the sauce reduces slightly. Transfer to a blender or food processor, or use an immersion blender, to puree the sauce. Add black pepper to taste. This recipe probably makes 2 cups of sauce.