9.26.2011

Pizza & pups

Today is my due date. You are not going to get a cohesive sentence out of me, so let's try pictures instead.


Puppies! No Baby Hay yet, but we bred Fisher in July, and his little ones have arrived. My sister and her boyfriend and I went to see them this weekend, and they did a fairly good if temporary job of satisfying our need to snuggle with a small mammal. They're almost four weeks old, big enough to open their eyes and wobble around and chew on each other's chins and tails, but not big enough to do much else. There are five black ones, two yellows, and one tired nursing mama. Fisher came in and took a sniff, but he seemed pretty scared of the whole situation, and quickly backed out. We spent the rest of the weekend teasing him for being such a deadbeat dad.

Oh! and we made pizza.

I'd been wanting to make homemade pizza for a while, and I finally found a good recipe for whole wheat crust. Alex's nieces were over, and my sister was visiting, and it seemed like the perfect night. The only thing was, we didn't have any of the traditional pizza toppings on hand—the tomato sauce was all tucked into the freezer, the basil was dwindling, and there wasn't even a ball of plain mozzarella in the fridge.

And so we went unconventional, and I am so, so glad that we did. Alex caramelized an onion, then stirred in some finely chopped rosemary and a good dollop of homemade fig butter to make a spread. He smoothed this on the crust, then layered on arugula, bits of cooked bacon, pieces of sauteed eggplant, goat cheese, and slices of fig and almond burrata from Kathleen Kadlik. It was sweet and savory all at once, and very, very good.

FIGGY BURRATA PIZZA

This is a pretty loose recipe. We used one ball of the whole wheat crust from the New York Times link up there, and I made fig butter from fresh figs, not dried, following Kim Boyce's recipe in Good to the Grain. This preserve is full of butter. If you use fig jam, be sure to add a few tablespoons of butter when you melt it with the onions.

1 ball whole wheat pizza dough at room temperature
cornmeal, for the peel
1 medium size onion, sliced thin
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary
1/3 cup fig butter
olive oil
1 small eggplant, cut into thin strips
salt
a handful of torn arugula
4 strips cooked bacon, torn into 1/2-inch pieces
1 ball fig & almond burrata mozzarella
2-3 ounces chevre

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Roll out the dough as thin as you can. We used a half sheet pan, so we rolled ours into a rectangle, but obviously you should roll yours into whatever shape your pan is. Sprinkle the pan with cornmeal and lay the dough on top.

Caramelize the onion in a heavy skillet over medium-low heat. When it's tender, add the rosemary and fig butter and sauté another minute or so, until they're warmed through. Spread this mixture evenly across the pizza dough.

In the same skillet, warm up a glug of olive oil. Salt the eggplant slices and sauté until tender, about five to eight minutes. Layer the cooked eggplant strips evenly over the pizza. Do the same with the arugula, bacon pieces, and the two cheeses.

Bake the pizza for 15-20 minutes, or until the dough is crispy around the edges and the cheeses are bubbling. Enjoy hot.

4 comments :

Kellie said...

Happy due date!

I'm definitely going to try out that pizza crust. I've been making the cornmeal crust from Heidi Swanson's (101 Cookbooks) first cookbook, Cook 1.0. It's really yummy and makes enough for 6 smallish pizzas. Sometimes it's nice to have a whole wheat crust though.

Anonymous said...

Oooooh, those puppies are very cute! It must be hard to think about food and cooking when you have your own little one about to arrive any day now. Best of luck to you and the proud papa! ~A Maine Reader

Anonymous said...

Is Fisher definitely the dad? Does that mean your "snuggly mammal" will have a playmate?
Thinking of you all, wishing you a safe and speedy birth, and looking forward to the news from your family! ~ An Orleans Reader
P.S. What an interesting pizza!

Anonymous said...

I have a large plant of BBQ rosemary in a VERY sheltered spot in East Orleans.

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