Pesky Pesto

This summer, at one of the September farmers' markets, I bought a $12 bag of basil. Doesn't sound like much. It was a gallon-sized bag stuffed with leaves, no stems (sounds like a good dope score). Anyway, I quickly discovered that I was in possession of a hell of a lot of basil, and a conundrum: What does one do with this much herb? There's only one answer, really. Make pesto.


So I bought fifteen bucks worth of pine nuts (that's about a quarter cup), and commenced to making several fragrant batches of green ooze. Since I was intending to freeze the stuff, I left out the garlic and the Parmigiano-Reggiano (thus postponing a run on my retirement savings). I netted well over a quart of pesto, and that's sans garlic and cheese, which are to be added in when thawed out to use. My point of all this is, what does one do with all that pestiferous pesto? A little bit goes a long way on the space-time continuum. 


Here it is, already December, and I've managed to use an eighth of the stuff. For this excursion, I'm making a little pesto pizza pie.


Note: Before you begin this recipe, put your bread stone on the lowest rack in the oven. Allow 20 minutes to pre-heat oven to 500 degrees.

I started out with a quarter batch of artisanal bread dough from the fridge—about a grapefruit-size hunk (tumors, and apparently also bread dough, are measured in fruit). Roll it out on the counter and transfer it to a cornmeal-covered pizza peel. Bye the bye, I have since purchased a new innovative peel that my friend Laura turned me on to. It's called the Super Peel and it makes putting bread, and especially pizza, on an oven stone a snap. I highly recommend it.

For those who must know (Judy) the beer in the background is St-Ambroise Oatmeal Stout from McAuslan Brewery in Montreal. It's amazing. If you ever get to Quebec, give it a try, especially delish when infused with nitrogen.

Choose your ingredients. These should be prepped before the dough is rolled out as the dough shouldn't sit long before putting it in the oven. On this outing, I chose kalamata olives, baby bella mushrooms, onion, and fontina and mozzarella cheeses.

Top the olives and onions with cheese. Top the cheese with mushrooms. Gently slide the pizza onto the stone. This can be a trick as the crust beneath the ingredients is quite thin. Bake for eight minutes.

Eat, maybe topped with a few dabs of Sriracha, or "rooster sauce", from Huy Fong foods in Los Angeles.

http://www.huyfong.com/no_frames/sriracha.htm