as good as bread: pizza

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Chicken and Olive Pizza with Lemon-Oregano Vinaigrette

Pizza night is always a great night at the Starke house. Dressing up dough is a creative process, and you can take it so many different places. This ended up as a type of fusion — sort of Italian-American-Greek, maybe. Or Argentinian. Why not?

Ingredients
{Printable Recipe}
1/2 lump pizza dough from Whole Foods (or wherever you buy pizza dough)
1/2 can green olives
1.5-2 cups roasted chicken
5 slices Provolone cheese

For the Dressing:
1/2 olive oil
1 lemon
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/4 cup fresh parsley
1 anchovy
1 clove garlic
Salt & Pepper

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Roll out the dough and prick several times with a fork so that it doesn't get too bubbly. Slice the olives lengthwise.

Combine the ingredients for the dressing in a food process.

When the oven is ready, lay the dough down on the pizza rack, top with cheese and chicken. Let it bake for 7 minutes.

After 7 minutes, rotate the pizza 180 degrees and top with olives and dressing (dabble the dressing on the crust too to get a nice shiny halo around the dough).

It's like a haiku:

Simple, balanced, tasty.

Man, I love pizza.

-Katie

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Thai Chicken Pizza

Sometimes it's fun to try something totally out of your cooking repertoire. Lately I was surfing through the interwebs, looking for something tasty to try, and I came across the Iowa Girl Eats blog. This girl makes some good food, and it all looks really healthy. She made a thai peanut sauce for noodles and I think a turkey burger, and I thought we might as well switch things up and make a pizza out of it.

Chicken and peanut butter might not sound like a natural pairing, but man is it good. But if you imagine all those salty/meaty things together, you might think — hey, let's put something sweet in there.

No? Well, that's what went through my brain, anyway.

Something sweet and crunchy, to be exact. So I thought a mango-coleslaw type of thing would work.

{Printable Recipe}

Ingredients for Peanut Sauce
3 tbsp smooth peanut butter
1.5 tbsp soy sauce
1.5 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1.5 tbsp water
1.5 tsp Srirachia sauce
1.5 tsp sesame oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 tsp ginger, minced

Preparation

Mix everything together until smooth.

Give it a try. Add more ingredients if you like it spicier, saltier, or peanuty-er.

Ingredients for Mango Slaw

1 cup cabbage coleslaw mix

1 mango, cubed

1/2 tsp ginger, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 jalapeno, minced (seeds removed)

1/2 cup chopped green onion

Juice of 2 limes

Salt & Pepper

1 tsp olive oil

Preparation

Again, just mix up. Pretty easy, huh?

Thai Chicken Pizza
2 chicken breasts
Pizza dough from Whole Foods (we use half of the dough provided for a thin crust)
Thai peanut sauce
Mango slaw

Preparation

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees.

Smear a little peanut sauce on your chicken

Grill it up until done (6-7 minutes per side, depending on the thickness of your chicken)

Let the chicken cool for 10 minutes before you go slicing it, or the juices will drain out and you'll get dry chicken. Nobody likes a dry chicken - just saying.

Roll out the dough, spread on the sauce. Slice the chicken breasts. Top the pizza with it.