Tuscan Kale Pizza and a Blood Orange & Grapefruit Margarita

It's been a crazy few weeks around here, but it seems like I've started almost every post like that lately....I mean, the rare times I've actually posted something!  We spent a great week in San Francisco and Napa with friends only to come home to two little crisises.....one involving family and one involving our dog, Rafter.  I'll spare you the sordid details with the one involving family, but we came home to Rafter only walking on three legs.  Seems he got a little excited while we were gone and tore his ACL in his right rear leg.  Which meant that he had to have surgery this past week and is supposed to remain calm for the next six weeks.  Yes.  Six loooooong weeks.  In a cage.  I tried for the first two years of this dog's life to cage train him and he fought it every.  single.  day.  He finally wore me out and I gave up.  Fast forward 10 years.  He's still not having any of that cage.  Yes, I'm forcing him to stay in it when I can't give him my full attention, but it's pure hell.  He whines and barks and whines and barks and......well, you get the picture.  It's brutal.  And don't get me started on the "cone of shame" he's supposed to wear to keep from licking the incision.  Talk about pissed off.  Only five and a half more weeks to go.

So let's talk about something a lot more fun......like this pizza.  It's been a really wet and grey winter in B'ham and earlier in the week, James Spann the Weatherman promised us that Saturday and Sunday would be sunny and warm so I made plans to fire up the pizza oven and have some peeps up to celebrate my BFF's upcoming birthday.  Well, I should know to never trust a weatherman, because we never saw the sun yesterday (it's, of course, beautiful today) and it was cold and foggy but we followed through with our plans to make some pizza anyway.  

I usually make about 4-5 pizzas to feed everyone and one of those is always something new and a little out of the ordinary just to keep myself interested.  The men always want meat, meat and more meat on theirs but I can usually count on my girlfriends to be a little more adventurous.  Since Kale seems to be having it's moment in the spotlight right now, I figured I'd try to incorporate it into a pizza somehow.  After a little research, I found a recipe I thought I could work with.  It starts with a white bean, rosemary and garlic base topped with some spicy Italian sausage and some sauteed kale and shallots.  And just because it's not pizza without cheese, I finished it off with some fresh mozzarella.

 This was soooo delicious and a huge hit with just about everyone.  I started with browning the sausage in my cast iron skillet.  When it was done I removed the sausage with a slotted spoon leaving the drippings behind because spicy sausage grease is one of the great pleasures in life.  I added a little more olive oil to the pan and on a medium low heat added a heaping tablespoon of chopped rosemary and a few minced garlic cloves to the pan.  I let them get to know each other for a few minutes then added a drained and rinsed can of cannellini beans.  Let those warm up and soften a bit then mash it all together with a potato masher until it's the consistency of lumpy mashed potatoes.

Remove that from the pan and set aside.  Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and saute one good sized, thinly sliced shallot until softened.  Remove the ribs and thinly slice 5-6 kale leaves and add those to the shallots and cook until just wilted. Set aside.

Use whatever pizza dough you prefer, either homemade or store-bought.  If I'm feeling ambitious, I'll make my own but lately I've been getting fresh dough from Whole Food's pizza counter.  Can't beat it.  To assemble the pizza, roll out your dough and place the dough on a pizza peel covered with corn meal or flour.  Spread the white bean mixture over the entire surface of the dough leaving about an inch of the edges uncovered all the way around.  Top with the sausage and then the kale mixture and finally some fresh mozzarella.  Slide it into either your pizza oven or onto a preheated pizza stone/steel in your regular oven. Bake that sucker until the dough is crispy and the cheese is bubbling and starting to brown.  Slice and enjoy.  The garlic and rosemary in the white beans, coupled with the spicy sausage, crispy kale and gooey cheese is everything I look for in a pizza.  This will become a regular on pizza night.

The only thing that might have rivaled the pizza is this margarita.  This was a birthday party, after all, and since National Margarita Day was this week, it was only fitting that we have a few.  I had never been told that there was a National Margarita Day, but now that I know, I totally on board.  

I suppose you could make these with store-bought juice (although I've never seen Blood Orange Juice in the store) but c'mon people.  Juice some fresh fruit.  If you don't have a juicer, do it by hand a consider it your workout for the day!

These are the perfect combination of slightly sweet and slightly bitter and taste extremely fresh.  I loved them a little too much!

Here's the recipe for the margarita.

Blood Orange & Grapefruit Margarita

Makes enough for about 4 drinks.

1 cup freshly squeezed blood orange juice

1 cup freshly squeezed pink grapefruit juice

1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice

1/4 cup triple sec

1 cup tequila (I prefer Patron Silver)

1/4 cup simple syrup (or to taste)

Combine all ingredients in a pitcher and stir well.  Pour into a salt-rimmed glass with ice.

Roasted Butternut Squash, Bacon and Goat Cheese Pizza

We just had what was probably the last perfect weekend of the year.  The last few days of wind and rain succeeded in knocking the last of the Fall colors from the trees and we can start to feel the bite in the air.  All of this means that time out at the pool house is going to be limited for a while, so we took advantage of the nice weather while we had it and fired up the pizza oven last Friday.

(Sorry for the poor quality of the photo but all I had out at the pool house was my iPhone!)

I usually end up making about four pizza's with three of them being the basics that everyone will eat.....some combination of tomato, mozzarella, pepperoni, mushrooms and sausage.......but I always like to throw one "experiment" into the mix.  This time it was this Roasted Butternut Squash, Bacon and Goat Cheese Pizza.  Surprisingly, this was everyone's favorite of the night!

I used the wood fired oven to roast cubed squash, chopped bacon and thinly sliced shallots, but your could just as easily roast these on a sheet pan in your oven.  I could have just eaten this all on its own as a side dish, but spread on top of the pizza with some goat cheese and chopped rosemary, this was simply amazing.

I doubt we'll see many more of these beautiful Fall sunsets either! Could we just avoid Winter this year????
 

Here's the recipe:

Roasted Butternut Squash, Bacon and Goat Cheese Pizza

Ingredients:

1 small butternut squash; peeled, seeded and cut into a small dice
1 large shallot, thinly sliced
4 slices applewood smoked bacon, sliced lengthwise then cut into about 1 inch pieces
1 tablespoon chopped rosemary

Put all of these onto a sheetpan and toss with enough olive oil to coat and salt and pepper.
Roast in a 400 degree oven until squash is just fork tender.  You don't want it too soft as it's going to bake in the oven a little longer.

Pizza dough (Use your favorite recipe or store bought is fine)
Olive Oil
Goat Cheese

On top of your favorite pizza dough, drizzle some olive oil and spoon the roasted squash mixture over the dough.   Sprinkle with goat cheese.  If you like a lot, go for it.....it's your party.  Drizzle with a touch more olive oil and pop it into the oven or grill it.  However you like to cook your pizza.

Wood-Fired Mexican Pizza

Can you flippin believe today is August 1?  That it's only 32, count 'em THIRTY-TWO, days until COLLEGE FOOTBALL begins!!  And that it's been 2,444 days since Michigan last defeated Ohio State in football.  Bwahahahaha.

But it also means that I have to endure the ridiculous month of August in Alabama and 30 more days of the heat index being 1,000 degrees.  That's what it was here yesterday.  1,000 degrees.  Brutal.  So I thought the best thing to do was to make hubs fire up the pizza oven.  Doesn't that sound like fun?  Building a fire in an oven that's outside where it's 1,000 degrees?  He thought so too.  

This is about the seventh or eighth time, I guess, that I've cooked in the oven but I'm still not quite organized enough to make the pizza, cook the pizza and serve the pizza all while taking amazing pictures!  I think that because there are always at least six people sitting at the bar watching me and drooling (not at me.....at the pizza) so I feel a little pressured to feed them.....quickly!  But I promise I'll get better.

Because the oven bakes the pizza at temps of between 750-900 degrees F, in order to get that nice thin, crispy crust associated with wood fired oven pizza, I make my own dough with "00" flour, or Italian Flour.  With the recipe I use, I can get four (roughly shaped) 12" pies.  I almost always make the first one a traditional margherita pizza mainly because it's the easiest (and will get them to stop pounding their forks on the bar) and the second one with some kind of meat  -  pepperoni, sausage, proscuitto  -  because men want meat!  The other two I like to experiment with.  I've made  caramelized onion and goat cheese a few times, a shaved asparagus pizza with  truffle oil, and a dessert pizza with chocolate chips and butterscotch chips.  All of them were fabulous and I have absolutely no pictures to prove it!!

This time I tried a Mexican version and it was equally fabulous and really simple.  I spread refried beans (from a can, but if you're ambitious you can certainly make your own) directly on top of the dough to within an inch of the edge, sprinkled on some cheddar cheese/chopped scallions/chopped tomatoes/browned Italian spicy sausage/a little more cheddar and popped it into the oven.  When it came out (about 3 minutes later!) I sprinkled it with some chopped cilantro and served it with sour cream.  So delicious.

You certainly don't need a wood fired oven to make this.  This would be just as good grilled.  And you don't even have to make your own dough.  I've walked into my local pizza shop on several occasions and just purchased a ball of dough.  Try it.  

And if you're a Buckeye fan, check this out.  If only!  GO BUCKS!!