Throw Another Pizza on the Barbie!

Megan and I love pizza. Probably too much. So much so that Thursdays have some­how jok­ingly become pizza night at our house. In the past that has been a rather poor idea health-wise as it usu­ally involved some guy hand­ing us a pizza at our front door. But, not tonight. Tonight we made our own pizza as we have many times in the past but with a twist. Enter grilled pizza:

We started by mak­ing our own sauce, which I must say is the best sauce we’ve made. We roasted toma­toes & whole heads of gar­lic driz­zled with olive oil, puréed it and added it to sautéed onions, red wine, fresh basil, rose­mary & oregano and salt & pep­per to taste. it was fantastic.

The next step was to roast the veg­eta­bles: baby Italian egg­plant, zephyr squash & green bell pep­pers. Just a few min­utes in a 400º oven to get some of the mois­ture out (around 5 –8 minutes).

The dough was store bought. Trader Joe’s makes a really good whole wheat pizza dough that is cheap and easy — just how I like it. After stretch­ing the dough I threw it on a very hot (550º) grill. After 3 min­utes I pulled the dough off. With the grilled side up we put on the sauce, roasted veg­gies, chopped grilled chicken and sun-dried toma­toes. For the cheese we used unripened cow’s milk cheese curd. I’ve never had a cheese quite like this, it was soft, salty, mild and deli­cious. And best of all we got it at this amaz­ing Arabic bakery/market/grocery at the end of our street. After another 5 min­utes on the grill it was done. We topped the pizza with fresh chopped basil and devoured it. It’s a good thing we liked it cause we made 2 of them — one to eat now and one to freeze. Man it’s good.