For a while now we've been making home-made pizza that I consider much better than delivered pizza. (Well, Corey makes it, I help clean up.) We'd started with the traditional full-of-stuff pizza before Corey decided she wanted her half to be Pizza Margherita, the classic tomato, basil, and cheese combination. I stuck with the meat-lover's pepperoni and Canadian bacon half. I thought I'd never try a meatless pizza but last night we tried something new and it was fantastic! I stumbled across a picture of Pizza Rustica with Wild Nettles in the June 2008 issue of Coastal Living (p.144; the picture's in the table of contents, but the one to the right is what ours looked like). We substituted kale for the wild nettles since Core got a bushel of it with her Clemson veggie load (I keep forgetting the name of this program she signed up for). Unlike our normal pizza crust, the pizza dough was a bit thinner but just as tasty, if not tastier. It had a touch of honey in it, maybe that's the secret. Along with the kale, the toppings consisted of roasted garlic, red pepper flakes, pepper, and four types of cheeses: pecorino romano, fresh mozzarella, provolone, and fontina. Excellent!
Corey said the pizza was gourmet; something reminiscent of what you'd get a decent restaurant. It reminded us a bit of what we had on The Rock Boat where they had 24 hr pizza and the one that was similar was with fetta and spinach (if I remember correctly). Subbing in spinach for the kale is something I'd like to try next. The pizza was the second really good gourmet dish we have tried, to my tastes, in about as many weeks. The one just prior was Penne with Calamari and Malvasia, courtesy of Mario Batali and available on the Food Network (we saw him prepare this on his Molto Mario TV show). I love squid, but I can't stand when restaurants bread and deep fry the stuff—what a waste! I much prefer this style of preparation, as the squid is just slightly pan-fried until it's opqaue. No need to cover it up in greasy breadcrumbs.
Along with these two dishes, my other favorite dish is Pasta Shells with Black-Eyed Peas and Artichokes that we discovered some time back.1 So right now I have three preferred items in the food rotation, with the occasional Bistecca Fiorentina thrown in.
1 Vegetarian Times, Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005, p.248.
1 comment:
There is also fresh thyme in the pizza. The layers go: fresh dough rolled out to about 10-12 inch circle, roasted garlic head spread on top as best as possible, sprinkle with crushed red and black pepper, 2 tbsp pecorino, then 1 tbsp chopped fresh thyme, distribute 4 cups of greens (kale, spinach, etc.) cooked in microwave with 1 tbsp water for about 3-5 minutes then squeezed and roughly chopped, and finally 2oz grated each of fresh mozzarella, provolone and fontina. Bake at 450 for about 8 minutes.
Post a Comment