Hi guys! I’ve been trying to lay off the meat group a little bit, and after a long day of shooting vegetable and animal still lives with Josef Kraska, I had a lot of vegetables leftover!! Quite frankly it stressed me out a little bit thinking about what to do with all these leftover veggies. How do I cram as much arbitrary vegetables as possible into one dish? I thought to myself… oh, okay, I guess I can make a vegetable pizza. Luckily me endless summer schedule has allotted me the time to make everything from scratch.

I started out with a spinach dough. I melted a packet of yeast in some warm water with some honey. It started looking pretty fizzy after about 5 minutes or so. Sorry for the arbitrary measurements. While the yeast was activating, I cooked a whole bag of spinach down in a little olive oil, and then pureed it with a hand blender. It looked like a green dump! I added that to the activated yeast!

Here is the dough recipe:

  • one packet yeast
  • 2 tb honey
  • 1/3 cup warm water
  • one bag fresh spinach, wilted, pureed
  • 2 1/4 cups of flour
  • 3/4 cup cornmeal
  • 1/2 tsp salt

Okay, I guess where at the part where you add the flour, cornmeal and the salt. I added the cornmeal there to give it some more crunch texture. It works well!!! Mix that all together with your hands and let the dough sit for a few hours, until it’s at least doubled/tripled in size.

SAUCE

Meanwhile, I made a very rich sauce for the pizza. I sauteed some onions and garlic in butter and garlic. After that got soft, I added 2 diced tomatoes. I also had a bunch of kale. The kale was unfortunately covered in poly-fil from the photoshoot, so I tried to labor-intensely wash and pick out all the fuzz. Imagine your bathrug covered in pubes, this was what this process was like.

I did my best until I said fuck it who cares, and chopped up the kale and put it in the pot with the rest of the crap. I then poured it a generous amount of balsamic vinegar, and let that reduce down. I also had some leftover syrupy PLUM PUREE from making popsicles, so I dumped that into the sauce as well! This might have been the magic ingredient here. I let all this cook down until most of the liquid was evaporated, but the vegetables were still soft and wet.

TOPPINGS

I had some mini eggplants, so I sliced them up into coins, and then I made my boyfriend go get some cheese, which was the only thing I had to go out and get. He returned with a cube of fresh Polly-O mozzarella, and I cut it up into some chunks.

I also had some leftover romano cheesse, which I grated.

ASSEMBLING AND BAKING

So the dough got nice and poofy, so I kneaded like 3 times, and stretched it out into an oiled sheet tray. Then I put on the sauce, then the eggplant, then the mozz, then the romano, then I ground some black pepper on top.

I baked it in a preheated oven at 400 F for 20 minutes. My oven runs a little hot, but ideally you want the oven in the 420 range of temperature.

It came out perfect!

And in one fell swoop, I got rid of the almost rotting spinach, kale, tomatoes, onion, garlic, eggplant, and plums. The kale was a surprisingly awesome element to the pizza, the sweetness from the plum puree syrup and the vinegar and the onions, really set off that kale in a stellar way. Who knew this vegetarian pizza would be so satisfying? Might be the best I ever had!