Veggie Squares

The other month, I heard an amusing story about a pizza competition, and although I more-or-less remember the story, I cannot remember where I heard it (friend? coworker?? radio???). I hear the voice, I think I even picture hand gestures, but I have no specific recall of who or where or whatfor. Fortunately (or not), ML has an equally vague memory of said story, so at least I'm not just dreaming up pizza anecdotes.

The tale goes something like this: There was a major pizza-making competition and a high-profile Italian chef was brought in to award the prizes. Contestants made all sorts of remarkable gourmet concoctions, using wonderful ingredients, but after tasting each recipe the chef announced, "Dees-a good, but eet's not-a pizza!"

All of that to announce — officially — THIS IS GOOD, BUT IT'S NOT A PIZZA.

At least not quite.

It contains three main components you might expect from a pizza: a bread-based crust, a layer of cheesy substance, and a variety of veggie toppings. After that it goes straight from not being a pizza to being plain old GOOD. Like clean-off-the-platter-in-a-matter-of-minutes good. Take it to a potluck and you will be winning awards from the other guests.

Now, this recipe is originally a convenience recipe that calls for biscuit dough from a tube, dry ranch dressing from a package and mayonnaise. But one of my rules of thumb when grocery shopping is to try only to buy foods that contain ingredients I might actually have in my kitchen. So no high-fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oils. No mono-benzo-sodi-nonsense. Takes a bit more time to read labels and requires going without Twinkies, but makes me feel like the food is healthier and my body has fewer weird chemicals to digest. Let me tell you, you don't particularly want to read the ingredient list for refrigerated biscuits or dry ranch dressing. Also let me also tell you, everything about this is super easy to make from scratch with familiar ingredients — especially if you have a food processor.

THE CRUST:
The biscuit recipe comes from my dearly beloved "Super Natural Every Day" cookbook by 101 Cookbooks.

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a rack in the middle of the oven.
2. In a food processor (regular blade), combine 1&1/4 cups whole wheat flour, 1&1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 1&1/2 teaspoons salt and 1 tablespoon baking powder. Pulse a few times to mix.
3. Cut 1/2 cup cold butter into very small cubes and sprinkle across the top of the dry ingredients. Pulse about 20 times, until dry and sandy looking.
4. Add 1&1/3 cups plain yogurt and pulse a few times until yogurt is just incorporated. Don't over-mix! A few dry patches are fine.
5. Scoop out the dough onto a floured surface. Knead five times and then press out into a rectangle that is about 1-inch thick. Use additional flour as needed to prevent sticking.
6. Cut the slab of dough in half and stack on top of each other. Repeat the flattening and stacking two more times.
7. Press the dough evenly into the bottom of an ungreased 10"x14" jelly roll pan. 
8. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes until the top is slightly golden.
9. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

cutting in half

stacking the halves

THE CHEESE:
Have I mentioned it isn't really pizza? Well, this isn't really cheese either... Combine all of the following in a medium bowl and mix well. Spread evenly across the cooled crust.

• 8 ounces of cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• 1 teaspoon dried parsley
• 3/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon seasoned salt
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/8 teaspoon dried thyme

THE TOPPINGS:
As this was originally a convenience food recipe, I suppose you could take the easy way out and chop your veggies with the food processor. However, all of those drooling potluckers will laud you for how pretty it looks, so take advantage of that. Personally, I like to select four brightly colored veggies and chop them evenly and finely. Then I lay them out across the surface of the cream cheese in narrow strips, both to make it attractive and to ensure that each square ends up with an even assortment of vegetables. Here I used cucumbers, red bell peppers, carrots and broccoli — but any of your favorites will work. Cut the not-a-pizza into squares and serve!

 

I'm not kidding about the potluck. We took this to a Labor Day gathering and it was gone before the burgers were even on the grill.

Pesto Pizza the Third

As fall gradually creeps in, it looks like the basil season is, sadly, winding down. My plants appear a little scraggly, less prolific. *sniff* But all sadness about the end of summer aside, now is prime time to mix up more pesto and make the most out of every last leaf. So if you're ready for pesto batch #2, here's a fresh and tasty combination of toppings to try out.

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. The very best pizza crust ever, par-baked.
2. Generous spread of homemade pesto
3. Grated mozzarella
4. Chopped leeks
5. Slivers of bacon, par-cooked just enough to be not-raw, but not enough to be crispy (optional)
6. Halved cherry tomatoes and/or sliced tomatoes
7. Sliced bell peppers

Bake at 450 degrees F for 7 minutes and top with just a teensy sprinkle of extra Parmesan.

Roasted Cherry Tomato Pizza

You may recall from our Kale Salad Pizza recipe my love of food blog 101 Cookbooks. Or maybe I only mentioned my enthusiasm for Heidi's raw tuscan kale salad and forgot to elaborate on how much I truly enjoy every single recipe she creates. Every. Single. One.

So I anxiously awaited the arrival of her latest cookbook, "Super Natural Every Day," and this summer have been working my way through the many delicious combinations of whole, healthy ingredients. I'm not getting a commission for selling cookbooks or anything, but if you have any foodie bones in your body, you should buy this book. Even if you don't like to cook, the pictures are stunning enough to set it on your coffee table and drool over it on a regular basis.

This pizza recipe emerged after flipping to a page describing how to make oven-roasted cherry tomatoes. We already enjoy cherry tomatoes on pizza for their juicy, punchy bite of tomato-ness, so intensifying and sweetening that flavor sounded exciting. Fortunately, we had several tubs of golden cherry tomatoes already on hand from our CSA.

OVEN-ROASTED CHERRY TOMATOES (from Super Natural Every Day):

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with the rack in the top third of the oven.
2. Wash and remove all stems from 1 pint of cherry tomatoes. Slice them in half and place them in a large baking dish.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon maple syrup and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Pour over the tomatoes and toss to coat.
4. Arrange the tomatoes with the cut side up so that the juices don't run out and roast them for 45 to 60 minutes, until the tomatoes shrink and start to caramelize around the edges.
5. You can use them right away, or let them cool and store them in a glass jar along with any leftover olive oil. Top off the jar with additional olive oil to help preserve the tomatoes. They will keep for about 1 week in the fridge.

Cut-side up in the baking dish

Roasted, with more olive oil than the recipe calls for

Stored for later

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. Whole wheat crust, par-baked
2. An entire batch of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes, thinly spread over the crust, with any remaining olive oil. If you want an extra tomato-y pizza, consider using two batches.
3. Several handfuls of fresh basil, torn into large chunks
4. A chopped garlic scape or 2 minced garlic cloves
5. Grated mozzarella
6. Grated Parmesan

Bake at 450 degrees for 7 minutes. Top with another sprinkle of Parmesan and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil if it looks dry.

We had friends over for dinner that night and made both this pizza and our go-to-for-impressing-guests Potato-Leek Pizza and it was a toss-up which one people liked more.

Perfect Pesto Pizza

Here you can see a basil plant in our backyard:

What you can't see is the second equally enormous plant immediately behind this one, nor the big bunches we have been receiving each week in our CSA box. I suspect we would have basil growing out our ears if we weren't careful. Of course, there is only one logical option for such an inundation... make pesto!

PESTO:
I base my pesto on the recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, Simply in Season, which contains wonderful everyday dishes using seasonal produce from the northern half of North America. It's the perfect cookbook if you shop regularly at a farmer's market or participate in a CSA, and provides helpful tips for how to eat seasonally and inexpensively.

First, toast 1/3 cup of pine nuts, walnuts or hazelnuts in a heavy skillet over medium heat. Personally, I like to use walnuts since they're a little less expensive than the others and we usually have them on hand. You don't need any oil, just keep stirring the nuts to keep them from scorching until they start to turn golden and smell fragrant. Allow the nuts to cool.

Next, put all of the following into a food processor and finely chop:

• 1 cup packed fresh basil leaves
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1/3 toasted nuts
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

With the food processor running, gradually add 1/3 cup (or more to get a consistency you like) extra virgin olive oil to make a thick paste.

If you intend to use the pesto within a few weeks, you can store it in a glass jar with a lid. When you first put the pesto in the jar and each time after you use it, flatten out the surface of the pesto with a spoon and pour a thin layer of olive oil over the surface. This helps the pesto stay a bright green color (it oxidizes and turns brown in contact with air) and keeps it fresh longer.

If you want to freeze pesto for use through the winter, omit the garlic and cheese and pour the pesto into ice cube trays. When frozen, you can pop the cubes out and store them in a bag in the freezer. It's easy to defrost a cube or two as you need them; just add garlic and cheese.

All of this talk about pesto might leave you wondering "where's the pizza?" Well, one of the best parts about making super delicious homemade pesto is that the pizza itself can be very simple. We put artichoke hearts on ours, but I thought they were unnecessary and over-complicated the flavors. The pizza would have been perfect with just three toppings:

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. Whatever crust you have on hand, par-baked. The very best pizza crust ever or the simple crust are equally delicious for this one.
2. Thin spread of pesto. A little flavor goes a long way, so there's no need to overdo it.
3. Grated mozzarella cheese or thin slices of fresh mozzarella
4. Thinly sliced fresh garden tomatoes or halved cherry tomatoes

That's it! Bake at 450 degrees F for 7 minutes. There's no need to top this one with more Parmesan or olive oil, since the pesto supplies more than enough of those flavors.

Ratatouille Pizza

As I was afraid, when I googled ratatouille to make sure I was spelling it correctly, the first three search items were about the animated film. Nothing like associating French cuisine with a talking rodent.

Then again, in our apartment, we automatically associate ratatouille with an outrageous French accent and the gratuitous use of the three French phrases we know: oui, oui; impossible (approximately *ahm-pos-seeb-leh*); and les poissons. I had to turn on some Edith Piaf and stick my recently acquired Bastille Day flag above my desk in order to channel the appropriate je ne sais quoi for writing about pizza.

The wine, unfortunately, is Australian, so it's not helping much.

Ratatouille, for the layperson, is a traditional French dish of stewed vegetables, usually high summer veggies like tomatoes, eggplant (aubergine), zucchini, bell peppers, onions, garlic, basil and marjoram. I have always thought of it as a way to use up garden excess while producing a delicious, colorful meal.

Even though our zucchini plant succumbed to destructive squash bugs the other week and our tomatoes seem averse to actually ripening, we realized we had a pretty good assortment of the necessary ingredients on hand. There were a few leftover zucchini in our fridge, a green tomato fell off the vine when we were trying to fix the stake, our white Japanese eggplant were reaching full size, and various peppers were turning red.

 

The combination is tres délicieux, although you should feel free to substitute whatever fresh summer produce you have on hand.

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. Very best pizza crust ever, par-baked
2. finely chopped garlic
3. diced tomatoes (fresh if you have them; we used some leftover canned ones)
4. sliced green tomatoes (if you have abundant ripe tomatoes, combine #3 and #4)
5. very thinly sliced zucchini
6. thinly sliced onion
7. shredded mozarella
8. very thinly sliced eggplant, tossed in olive oil (I recommend small, skinny Japanese eggplants. If you use a larger eggplant, be sure to salt it for 20 minutes and press out some of the liquid before putting on the pizza)
9. thinly sliced red bell peppers or mild cherry peppers 

Bake at 350 degrees F (lower than usual) for about 15 minutes (longer than usual), until the eggplant is tender all the way through. Top with grated Parmesan and an assortment of chopped fresh herbs such as basil, marjoram, oregano, etc.

Bon appétit!

Pita Pizza

Imagine, if you will, two creative individuals with similarly creative careers (aka they work nonstop doing things they enjoy for piddling amounts of money) arriving at home late one evening after their respective gigs. They are a little hungry, a little grumpy and not at all interested in having a pile of dishes to wash. The fridge seems awfully bare and the pickings look slim, until—voilà—one of them notices that the stale pita bread in the bottom of the lefthand fridge drawer strongly resembles a pizza crust. Out comes a crusty-rimmed bottle of pasta sauce, a few soggy mushrooms, the last artichoke hearts floating in the jar, a chunk of leftover cheese. A few minutes in the toaster oven, and the pita pizza is born.

Hello Summer Pizza

City living isn't always kind to gardeners, but we have the good fortune to have a slab of fenced-in concrete for container gardening, a garden plot in a nearby community garden, and a CSA share from a local farm. Summer produce in abundance. Currently, our CSA has been overflowing with lettuces and kale and our garden plot has been exponentially producing cucumbers, so we've been gorging ourselves on salads while we wait for everything else to ripen. (Picked one cherry tomato today!)

But frankly, we're getting tired of salad and our various attempts to creatively prepare cucumbers are losing their novelty, so we recently gave in and picked up some tomatoes and peppers from a farmer's market.

Tonight, in spite of the 95-degree heat, we thought it was time for our favorite summer veggie pizza, so we fired up the oven (yikes), sliced tomatoes and already-roasted red peppers and walked out back to snip some fresh basil. It was exactly as delicious as we remembered it, although I'm sure when we make it again entirely with vegetables we grew ourselves, all of that hard work and nurturing attention will make it taste even better.

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. par-baked very best pizza crust ever
2. brush of extra virgin olive oil
3. minced garlic
4. shredded mozzarella cheese
5. sliced fresh tomatoes
6. sliced roasted red peppers
7. fresh basil leaves, snipped into small pieces
8. a sprinkle of salt

Bake at 450° F for about 7 minutes, then top with more fresh basil and a sprinkle of Parmesan.

Someday soon we need to experiment with grilled pizza and keep all of that heat outside!