Sunday, January 31, 2010

Salad Days


Dinner tonight was easy, delicious, and took all of 20 minutes to prepare. I made Salad Pizza! I used the recipe that I linked for inspiration, and went from there. First, I went to Whole Foods and bought some pizza dough. Yes, I know how to make my own pizza dough, but I was feeling lazy. Plus, it cost all of 3 dollars and tasted better than my homemade dough. When I got home, I plopped the dough in a bowl that I had greased with cooking spray, covered it with saran wrap, and let the dough double in size, which took a couple hours. I then stuck it in the fridge until I was ready to use it.
When it was time to make the pizza, I made a quick tomato sauce (though I've been known to use canned spaghetti sauce in the past). I took some leftover canned tomato sauce I needed to use (b/c I had eggs poached in tomato sauce for lunch on Sat.), and heated it up in a pot with a little olive oil, garlic, basil, pepper, red wine, and red pepper. It was probably about a half of a cup of sauce, total. I then spread my dough into my big tart pan (b/c I don't have a pizza stone). I haven't made pizza since getting my tart pan, so I was really excited to try it out as a pizza pan because I am a dork. :)
I topped my pizza dough with the tomato sauce (spread thin b/c I didn't want it to overpower the salad topping) and a thin(ish) layer of mozzarella. I also added some thinly sliced tomato b/c I a) love tomato on pizza and b) needed to use up 1/2 a tomato that had been in my fridge for a while (does anyone see a theme to my dinners?). I baked my pizza at 450 for 15 minutes.
While the pizza was baking, I made my salad. I just took about half of a bag of spring mix and tossed it with some homemade salad dressing. My go-to dressing recipe is olive oil, lemon juice, freshly ground black pepper and Parmesan. I tend to use a little more lemon juice than is called for in the recipe, b/c I like a nice tangy dressing.
When the pizza was done, I topped it with the salad and some prosciutto. I popped it back into the oven for a minute so everything would be warm, but in the future I will skip this step. The heat of the pizza wilted the greens anyway.
The pizza was delicious! This "recipe" is also very versatile. You could pretty much top it with any type of salad you like, and the cheese and tomato sauce on the crust is completely optional. I think it would be excellent with just some olive oil and herbs baked into the crust. One variation I would like to try is grilling. In my quest to figure out how to cook my dough (b/c it didn't come with instructions), I found this video recipe for grilled pizza from Gastrokid (and now I want their cookbook even though I don't have kids) that looked amazing.

2 comments:

  1. Must investigate this Gastrokid--I have a kid and he like food.

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