Pumpkin and Black Bean Pizza on Roasted Pumpkin Dough

A hearty vegetarian pizza with pumpkin, black bean, and maple topping on a roasted pumpkin dough

Once you've shredded butternut squash and made pizza dough out of it, or roasted sweet potato and made pizza dough out of it, or steamed spinach and  made a pizza dough out of it, pumpkin pizza dough is not much of a stretch.

Roasted beet pizza dough?  A stretch.  A vibrantly-colored-yet-amazingly-found-in-nature stretch.  And a tasty one, to boot.  Where was I?  Right, roasted pumpkin in a pizza dough.

With this non-stretch of a pizza dough, I wanted to go a bit wild with a meatless topping.  I'd read Aimée's account of tapping her maple trees and making syrup (I love the photo of her daughter 'nursing' on the tree) so I was primed to include maple syrup in the mix.  The black beans and pumpkin flowed from there.  This is a hearty, filling, cold weather pizza that left my belly quite satisfied.  The kids proclaimed it "strange" but finished their pieces anyway.  I used too much filling in my pizza, above, and I have adjusted the amounts below accordingly.  This filling is quite tasty, and would be tasty in a rolled pizza, folded into puff pastry, or in a quesadilla as well as this pizza.

We have Friday Night Pizza Nights around here, but if you do Meatless Monday this recipe lends itself to weekend prep/weeknight cooking.  Fix the dough and topping on the weekend.  Have the kids take the dough out of the fridge when they get home from school (or tuck it with your lunch at work and take it out--put it by your house keys--an hour before you're due to leave work).  In the time it takes to preheat the oven you can stretch the dough and spread the toppings.

Cheddar Apple Onion Bacon Pizza

Two notes!  First, I've installed a print button, with options to remove images and non-recipe verbiage, in case you'd like to print a recipe.  It's down at the bottom of the post, let me know if you like it.

Second, I wrote the CSA Cookoff segment this week on HOMEGROWN.org, since I was merely walking a half marathon while Jennifer was having a blast at Farm Aid.  You can check out my Slow Cooker Sweet Potato and Chicken Curry recipe here!

In the pre-braces life, a favorite 'I don't want to cook' supper when it was just me and the kids was popcorn, apple slices, and cheese cubes.  I liked to make it with Gala apples, though my favorite apple is the delicious Larry variety from the Shenandoah valley that I got in a fruit share in our first ever CSA farm share. That easy meal satisfied the sweet, the salty, the need to chew and the desire not to be hungry in an hour.
Until we embark on the post-braces life, I will miss that meal . . . and corn on the cob, and everything bagels with lox, cream cheese, red onion, capers, and summer tomato.  Note to self, sneak out and get a bagel with the fixings before all the tomatoes are gone.  I never was a fan of Laffy Taffy, so I can't say I'm missing it.
Last week my mom brought me a red delicious apple, and since I'm not a fan of eating red delicious plain, I was primed to think of pizza.  When I saw this Apple Harvest Cheddar at Costco (with apple pieces and cinnamon--how cool does that sound?), I thought it would be good on a pizza with apples and something else, so I bought it.  I didn't really think I wanted to try corn on the pizza to recreate my easy supper, but caramelized onions and bacon sounded like good replacements.

Conveniently, I'd caramelized a mess of onions in the crock pot (I used and love Dorothy's method, though I'm going to try Alanna's Sweet, Dark and Dreamy method next time.  For research purposes) and froze them in recipe-size portions, so it was easy to grab what I needed.  I also had bacon baked and frozen.  My freezer can be a magical place.  Is yours?

In the interests of full disclosure, in addition to my mom giving me the apple, my neighbor gave me a big bag of onions that I used to make these caramelized onions.  I bought the rest of the stuff.

It's possible I'm becoming a foodie.  The jury is still out, but go ahead and try this pizza (with any type of cheddar cheese, of course, if you're not near a Costco) while the deliberations continue.

Shaved Kohlrabi Meat/No Meat Pizza

I'm still working on the 'elevator speech' about what I do here on this blog.  At work the other day I was trying to describe this to Sharon (I'm paraphrasing here).

Me:  I blog about feeding my family from the CSA farm share.  Have you heard of a Community Supported Agriculture farm share?

Sharon:  No.  What is it?

Me:  It's where you pay the farmer a chunk of money in late winter/early spring when they are gearing up for the season, and in return you get a box of vegetables each week during the growing season.

Sharon:  My friend did that . . . she got kohlrabi.  What do you even do with kohlrabi?

Me:  Sushi!  Pizza!  See, that's why I started the blog!  I've been figuring out how to use the fresh veggies from the farm share for so many seasons that I've got several ideas for kohlrabi!  I hate to waste food.

Sharon:  Me, too.

My elevator speech may not be slick or smooth--yet--but the conversation reminded me that I made a couple of kohlrabi pizzas that I'd like to share with you.  I'd already made pizza using the greens from kohlrabi (of course they're edible--not just for composting pigs or worms, just like chard stems) but I was intrigued at the thought of shaving wafer-thin slices of kohlrabi onto a pizza pie.

As usual, dithering ensued, so I'm sharing a pair of pizzas--with or without meat.  I was a mite ambitious this particular Friday Night Pizza Night, and to keep track of what all went on each one I ended up scribbling the toppings on the parchment paper.  Who knew parchment paper was good for more than preventing my children from hearing unsavory language when I attempt to transfer the dough into the oven keeping the dough from sticking to the peel?

Grapes, Goat cheese and Red Onion with Fennel Focaccia

Sweet purple grapes, fresh red onion, and tangy goat cheese on a chewy light fennel focaccia.

After sharing a pair of peach pizzas last Friday, and a raspberry pizza the Friday before, I thought I should move back to vegetable pizzas for my Friday Night Pizza Night posts.  After all, I've got a sweet potato dough and a roasted pumpkin dough that I want to share with you.

However, I don't want this focaccia to drop off my radar.

I had a very productive period making and poorly photographing--but not writing up headnotes for--a pile of tasty recipes, and I thought I'd get them all written up over the summer.

Didn't happen.

I don't want everything to slip through the cracks, or rather fall off the stacks of recipe notes on my work table or dissolve into rows of scrolled-past photos in my ever-expanding photo library.  I don't want to start posting every day, either.  Three days a week is working for me (is it working for you?  too much? I should do a survey sometime.  After I've gotten all those blogs written up I'll ponder it).

I'm going to share a third fruity Friday Night Pizza Night (that's a link to my board of the same name on Pinterest) and then switch over to vegetables next week.  The chicken, peach, Hatch chile, spinach, red onion BBQ pizza will have to wait until next summer, as will the cantaloupe and prosciutto.  Something to look forward to, my spouse always says.

This focaccia uses fennel seeds in the dough.  I bought a bag of them because Alyssa's Skinny Italian Wedding Soup With Kale recipe over at Everyday Maven sounded good, and I figured the seeds could be useful to have on hand.  I'm glad I did--I now use fennel seeds in sourdough bread, Italian sausage, and spaghetti sauce.  Fennel seeds (for me at least) are versatile and not a seldom-used spice around here (I'm talking about you, sumac-for-fattoush and dill-seed-for-pickles).

This is not my first focaccia rodeo, though apparently all of the focaccias I've been making, photographing (and not writing up blog posts about) have yet to grace the screen.  So I'm going to refer you to my Arugula Pesto Focaccia with Artichokes, Feta, Goat Cheese and Green Olives if you want a thorough write up about what to do with your focaccia dough to turn it into focaccia, or why you should listen to my spouse and try focaccia.

Baked Eggplant Chip Pesto Pizza

Cheesy, crunchy, breaded eggplant slices on a pesto pizza crust spread with extra pesto and topped with shredded Italian and crumbled feta cheeses.

If you've been or known a picky eater, could you ever imagine that picky eater to say "this spaghetti sauce needs more cowbell some eggplant"?  

My kids were picky, or at least not game for any vegetable, when we first started getting a CSA farm share.  Ever since I figured out that I could take the farm share eggplant and puree it with other vegetables to make spaghetti sauce (my first ever posted-on-the-internet recipe, at Tasty Kitchen, is here) I haven't had eggplant the way I love to eat it--breaded and covered with cheese.  Since the kids will eat eggplant in spaghetti sauce, that's what we do with our farm share eggplant.  Period.

Until this blog happened along, which probably coincided with me thinking that, just this once, I'd like to eat eggplant as the star of its own show, not as a bit player in an ensemble.  I've been all about treating myself this summer, making foods that I want to eat, and this is another one of those.  It's my hope that you'll also benefit from my self-pampering.

This is the third time recently that I've posted a recipe-within-a-recipe, and I hope I'm not violating some sort of blogger laws or setting up some unrealistic expectations.  Just like you don't need to make pizza with your Sun Dried Tomato Pesto, nor do you need to use Kale Hummus in your Fattoush Dip, you don't need to make Baked Eggplant Chips the way I describe below in order to make Baked Eggplant Chip Pizza.  You can make them another way.  The first eggplant chip recipe I ever had was from my CSA in Virginia, Blenheim Organic Gardens, and you can find Becky's tasty eggplant chip recipe here at the Washington Post.

I wanted a breaded cheesy crunchy sort of eggplant chip, and I had a hunch, when I got a great coupon for Kraft Fresh Takes (not sponsored, I bought this because it was a good deal and I wanted to play), that instead of coating chicken or fish I could coat slices of summer vegetables.  I tried it with zucchini,  patty pan squash, and eggplant.

I got a little carried away.

With the leftover eggplant (because it's frequently about the leftovers around here) I decided to toss it onto a pizza.  This was a good call--the breaded eggplant slices retained their crunchy cheesy eggplant goodness.

Buffalo Chicken on Buttermilk Pesto Pizza

Ever want to let someone else make the pizza for a change?  Yeah, me too.  Sure, there are times when I lay awake plotting what to put on a pizza.  But there are also times that I just don't feel like making the effort.  I happened upon a Buffalo Chicken Pizza at the grocery store (marked down!) during one of those times, and the flavor was a big hit with the males of the family.  Well, the intact males--Simon the pup and Quartz the composting guinea pig did not sample the pizza.  TMI?

One of the reasons I'm delighted that my son enjoys Buffalo Chicken is that he consumes celery when he eats it.  Since I'm like the simple dog about my regrown celery ("Look!  I made FOOD!") I planned to scatter freshly chopped celery leaves over top of any Buffalo chicken pizza I'd ever make.  I knew the leaves would a) look pretty and b) use some of the celery taking over the garden make the taste more authentic.

When I decided to make Wheatier Buttermilk Pesto Pizza dough after my success with plain buttermilk dough I was thinking that it would be a good base for Buffalo chicken topping--after all, buttermilk + herbs is close to ranch dressing, amIright?  I got a little frou frou with the post production of this pizza (that would be after I pulled it out of the oven, not in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Nothing).  My dribbling skills have improved ever so slightly, and I was please not only with the taste but also with the look of this pizza.

Even if you're not The Little Red Hen who grows her own celery and can pop out to harvest the leaves, try this one at home.  When you feel up to it, that is.  It's delicious.

Zucchini, Corn, and Leek Pizza with Pesto and Feta (Pizza Night!)

The flavors of a summer vegetarian pizza: shredded zucchini sautéed with leeks and corn then topped with feta cheese on a roasted garlic oil-brushed pizza crust. 

Pizza in the summer should be easy.  Not that pizza in the winter should be complicated or anything, but there's something about the bounty of ripe produce coupled with spending more time outdoors doing yard work that lends itself to easy meals.  With such delicious stuff coming in the the farm share box the pizzas practically make themselves (let's be honest, I'm doing the work here) the idea of what veggies to combine in a pizza practically falls into your lap.  At least that's what happened with this pizza.  Sometimes, the ingredients choose you (Meghan is so wise).

Note:  I made this pizza in January.  It's true!  I'd love to show you a photo with the pizza and the 3 inches of snow that fell in the morning, but in fact it was wicked cold and dark so I have no 'outdoor' natural light photos.

Over the winter, while rooting around in the freezer for something else, a bag of shredded zucchini, a bag of corn kernels, and a bag of chopped leeks fell into my lap.  How did I make a pizza using zucchini and corn in the midst of winter?  Easy!  When I am overwhelmed with my crazy garden volunteers, or we get more than my family can eat in the week's CSA farm share box, I put it up.  The zucchini was shredded (love the fine shred disc on my food processor, the smaller and cheaper version of this one) then bagged, and frozen.  The corn was cooked in a cooler, cut off the cobs, frozen on a tray, and bagged.  The leeks were sliced, washed a lot, spun dry, and frozen loose on a tray before bagging.  That way, we can enjoy summer flavors all year long.  And this taste of summer was delicious after shoveling snow!

When I made this pizza, I knew that I eventually wanted to try leeks with corn on a pizza as well.  When I got leeks in my farm share I even did a little happy dance.  Tonight's pizza is very summery in nearly all respects--it's loaded with ripe-in-summer produce, tossed with pesto, flavored with a hint of garlic . . . but I think I may have used an eggnogandbutternutsquash crust.  So here's today's lesson, folks!  Always Label Random Bags of Pizza Crust In Your Freezer.  The crust tasted just fine with the toppings.  In fact, it may have been just a plain butternut squash pizza crust (is that an oxymoron?).  I'll never know, because I didn't label the bag!

If this pizza looks delicious enough for you to want to make it now, not wait until January, just make sure to squeeze the shredded zucchini until it's as dry as you can get it.  If you don't have leeks, substitute onions, shallots, or even green onions--but add them to the skillet at the very end because they burn easily.  At least in my skillets.  Now that my garden is growing some of these ingredients, I'm already planning my next "summer pizza" though this time I will know what dough to use.

Drunken Mushroom Pizza

I am not one for cute recipe names (I gravitate more to the prosaically literal titles) primarily because I'm thinking ahead. (This trait spills over into my parenting and annoys my kids who would like to, just once, get a snack from the goodies near the check out line.)

If I post a plain old ordinary "mushroom pizza" now, what if I wanted to post a different mushroom pizza in the future?  What would I call the second one?  I find it easier just to be exceedingly descriptive.

And Drunken Mushroom Pizza is exceedingly descriptive.

I made this pizza shortly before my spouse deployed, and I chose the topping for 2 reasons:  first, I knew I'd be the only mushroom eater in the house for a long stretch, and second, because I knew he'd not be drinking wine for a long stretch.  My goal was to duplicate my Skillet Mushroom Dip for Two on a pizza crust.  I poured the wine in my German wineglass (love the wine festivals, and love the German efficiency of having the measuring line so the server knows how much to fill the glass) thinking that I'd add a splash to the skillet and then drink the rest.

But I forgot and dumped the entire thing into the pan.  Whoops!  Change of plan, we'll just make a red wine reduction and get those 'shrooms drunk.  We enjoyed this pizza our last Friday night together, and I hope you enjoy it with someone you love (who also loves mushrooms).

Basic Kale Pizza Dough (Pizza Night!)

The first weeks of a seasonal summer CSA farm share are like the Spanish Inquisition:  no one ever expects it, and by it I mean all the greens.  You sign up for a summer share and you're thinking tomatoes, corn,  cucumbers, zucchini.  Those crops are all heat-loving summer crops.  What is ripe in August is not what is ripe in June.  In June, because what is ready was started weeks/months before in the cool spring, so you get greens.  Arugula, beet greens, cabbage, collard greens, mustard greens, salad greens, spinach, Swiss chard, turnip greens, and kale, kale, kale. (See the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient for ideas!)

It took me a while to embrace the greens, I admit.  Oh, not the salad mix, or spinach, those are pretty easy to love.  And Swiss chard is home and mother to me as I grew up eating it from our backyard garden.  My trouble with spring greens is this:  while I like cooked greens, by May/June I'm craving light, fresh fare, not long-simmered flavorful "pots of greens" goodness.

Yes, I could put the greens up to enjoy in winter soups.  But it's not even summer yet, and I'll be getting more greens at the end of the CSA season as the weather turns to fall.  I needed to find ways to enjoy my spring greens NOW.

My current obsession is sautéed beet greens and spring onions seasoned with sherry vinegar and topped with a sunny side up egg.  On rainy days, and we've had a few, we're enjoying a Finnish summer soup with kale.  In the meantime, however, it's time for a Friday Night Pizza Night and this time, I bring you a basic kale pizza dough. [Does my use of the term basic mean that in the future there will be another type of kale pizza dough (link to Spicy Kale Pizza Dough)?  Why yes, yes it does. Clever reader, you.]
Not interested in kale on a pizza?  Try my Visual Pizza Recipe Index for other ideas!

Sunset Pizza: Mango, Pepperoni, Red Onion and Yellow Pepper (Pizza Night!)

Crystal is on the left, Quartz on the right--pre-manicure.

If you've ever spent time around guinea pigs you know they are quite comfortable expressing their preferences.  My female guinea pig, Crystal, loves cantaloupe.  [Her cage-mate, Quartz, will eat anything.]  Because I have a tender spot for these pampered spoiled rescued pigs, I keep an eye out for cantaloupe out of season.  When I saw a marked down container of mixed cut fruit, heavy on the cantaloupe, I picked it up for Crystal.

Why am I blogging about this?  The container also had mango in it, and I wanted to try mango on a pizza.  Sorry, Quartz.  That stuff is mine.

 I've wanted to try mango on a pizza for a while now.  I find banana on a pizza delicious, and pineapple on a pizza is commonly accepted, so why not mango?  Because we are living in the midwest, tropical fruits are not part of our CSA farm share.  We get strawberries, blackberries, and pears.  So I shop my grocery store for seasonal fruit and put up the amazing deals that I can't pass up.  Usually, though, mango is not a regular purchase, so I was thrilled with this opportunity.

So was Crystal.

Since I've been making some crazy pizzas for the family lately (2 words:  egg. nog.  and not for dessert) I decided to keep this one pretty standard.  A standard half white flour and half whole wheat flour crust.  A standard pizza sauce.  Standard cheese.  And a bit of pepperoni.  But I am all about using what I've got, and what I've got today is yellow pepper and red onion, so they are going on this pizza too.  All these red and yellow ingredients make us (the moms at wheelchair basketball practice where I am writing this up on Saturday morning) think of a sunset.  So, Sunset Pizza it is.

Five Cheese Pizza with Indigo Rose Tomato and Almond Pesto on a Butternut Squash Crust (Pizza Night!)

Did you get roses for Valentine's Day?  After reading about this pizza sauce, I bet you wish you'd gotten Indigo Rose tomatoes from your local Community Supported Agriculture farm share instead.  

One of the reasons I love my CSA is the variety of colorful produce that shows up in the box each week.  It's like my own personal Iron Chef challenge to figure out what to make with each week's box full of secret ingredients.  And the taste--fresh produce just tastes so much better.

If you've never heard of a CSA farm share, check out Local Harvest. There you can use your zip code (in the US) to search for CSA farms that deliver to locations near you.  Late winter is the time to join a CSA.  By paying in advance you enable your farmer to purchase seeds and repair equipment at the beginning of the growing season.  In return, you get a share of the farm fresh produce all season long.  You're supporting a local business and you get to taste delicious veggies like these Indigo Rose tomatoes!

And now for something completely different.

Not really.  When I made the spinach dough I knew that I was going to continue to explore adding veggies from my CSA farm share into my family's pizza crust--not just on top of it.

But where to start?  To not quote a Monty Python film involving a lecture in a British boys' school, I can't go leaping into, for example, mustard green pizza crust.  Though the idea is intriguing . . . I wonder what I'd top it with?  More greens?  Bacon?

Ahem.  Move your coat to the lower peg and let's move on.

Instead of going to the freezer stash for slow-roasted tomatoes, or pesto, or pumpkin to try in a crust, I turned right and looked at the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve.  Specifically, because they stand head and shoulders above the rest (get it? above?) the Larch the butternut squash.  I'd had my epiphany-while-showering about shredding a butternut squash, so I had some shredded butternut squash on hand to play around with.

And play I did!  If you're on my Farm Fresh Feasts Facebook page, you've seen the golden and pillowy eggnog and butternut squash crust.  The recipe will be up here during eggnog season, because I'm all about eating seasonally with my CSA vegetables (and good deals on eggnog after the holidays).

To start us off here though, I also made a plain cheese pizza with a shredded butternut--nog free--crust. If you are going meatless on Fridays, keep in mind this pizza!  Using one of the packages of Fresh Tomato Pesto I'd put up in the fall, from Heather at In Her Chucks' wonderful Cherry Tomato Pesto recipe, this pizza is another not-so-simple cheese pizza.  Sure, it was simple enough for me to truthfully tell my daughter:

It's a cheese pizza.

But in reality it is a Five Cheese Pizza with Funky Orange Purple Indigo Rose Tomato and Almond Pesto on a Butternut Squash Crust.

And with that lofty name, let's get to it--shall we?