Garden Pizza

After six months of just about bi-weekly late night stomach aches and next morning groans of "Ugh....damn you Pizza Night", I think I have made - and eaten - enough pizza dough to start the Italian grandmotherly process of muscle memory training. There are pizza muscles just as there are pasta ones, potato gnocchi muscles and pie crust ones, as many muscles as there are culinary traditions to carry on. And so after many failures (edible nonetheless), I am beginning to recognize a pizza dough when I feel one. But just beginning.

I was weeding the garden yesterday, sporadically and randomly and just trying to make a dent in the jungle that the garden has become, when I pulled up one after the other oblong beige tuber. I had forgotten that I had dropped off some sprouted spuds several months back, in a back corner of the un-scientific experiment of our vegetable garden, and, sure enough, they had taken hold and flourished. On my way back inside I snipped some broccoli that was getting pretty leggy, and thought that our house-marinated olives would round out the pizza toppings nicely. Still in possession of around 20 pounds of yellow onions left from last week's event, I caramelized a bowlful for good measure. Add to that some ricotta I had made earlier in the day for some cookies, and we were sitting on quite the pizza larder.

While the cooking was not ideal this first attempt on the Big Green Egg - I'd like more radiant heat to blister the top crust before the bottom crust gets too dark - it was plenty successful as a first attempt, tasted absolutely delicious, and didn't heat up the entire house as the kitchen oven used to. We dined al fresco, mere steps from the land that had given us the toppings. And, learning my lesson from abundances past, I only made three pizzas.