From harvest to pizza

B and I like to make our own pizza. We use the recipe from the Barbara Kingsolver book, Animal Vegetable Miracle (a book I highly recommend if you are into growing veggies at all- in fact this book may be partially responsible for the home grown veggie movement over the past few years).


Pizza Harvest from my garden: Red onions, sweet italian basil, rosemary, greek oregano


Peeled onions


Caramelizing Onions (To caramelize onions cook them in olive oil at a medium-low temperature for a long time until they get glassy and then start to brown a bit)


Pizza dough with oregano and rosemary inside.

Recipe
To make 1 12 inch pizza (enough for 2 people with leftovers or 3 people with no leftovers): in a large bowl combine 3/4th cup of warm (not boiling) water, 1.5 tsp of yeast, let those two ingredients sit for a minute and then add 1/2 tsp of salt, 1.5 tbs of olive oil, 1 and 1/4th cups of all purpose white flour, 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

Kneed dough by hand for around 5 minutes. Incorporate any cheeses or herbs you want to add to the dough (make sure to chop herbs finely). At a certain point you will be like "well this looks like dough, this is probably enough kneading." Knead at least 3 more minutes after that. Cover the bowl and leave to rise for at least 30-40 minutes.

Recipe can be doubled to make 2 12 inch pizzas. While the dough is rising do things like prepare toppings (in my case that's when the caramelizing of onions happened)



Recipe Continued: Preheat oven to 425

Roll out the dough in a roughly circular pattern and fold over the edges and press them into the dough to make a crust. Put some white flour on a 12 inch pizza pan (or a pizza stone, or you can use a regular cookie pan and have a square pizza). Transfer the rolled out dough to the pan. Add some kind of red sauce (we get "pizza sauce" they sell at the grocery store). If you haven't added any herbs to the dough you might want to add some rosemary, oregano and basil to the sauce (just a sprinkling). Cover sauce with layer of shredded mozzarella cheese. Add whatever toppings you want. This one is caramelized onions and basil on my half and pepperoni and prosciutto on B's half. I also like roasted red peppers and artichokes hearts and feta, prosciutto and pineapple, really the possibilities are endless.

Cook for 15-20 minutes or until crust is golden


enjoy!

I really find this recipe to be very easy. The only part that's kinda a pain in the ass is kneading the dough, and waiting around for it to rise. But this pizza is much better than any premade dough from the grocery store. We have most ingredients on hand since we keep yeast in the fridge- the only thing we need to buy special is the sauce, the cheese, and any toppings. It's not quite the same as store pizza, but it's close enough, plus the ability to completely personalize your toppings is awesome.

Meanwhile the peas have all been harvested, the plants torn out and put back in the soil as fertilizer (peas pants area great source of nitrogen). I planted 3 pepper plants where the peas have been, and some more dill and cilantro between the pepper plants

So now the back row has pepper plants and not much else, the middle row has 2 zucchinis, a basil plant and another zucchini, and the front row has a pepper plant, cilantro, another pepper, dill, and another pepper. There is going to be some awesome amount of grilled pepper and zucchini later this summer (This isn't even counting the 6 other pepper plants growing on the other side of the house).


Isn't dill pretty when it's growing? (There also a zucchini leaf in there). I should figure out someway to use this...usually I use dill in chicken soup but it's a bit warm for that.