Instant Ramen Pizza

Instant Ramen is a stereotypical lazy man’s, I-don’t-cook kind of meal but it doesn’t deserve the bad rap. Less than a year ago, if you asked, I’d have told you I never eat the stuff preferring to cook “actual meals” but then I watched  this video from Tasting Table, gave it a second chance, and my opinion of Ramen completely changed. It only takes a little sprucing up with fresh vegetables, cheese, eggs, or some additional spices to turn even a cheap Ramen packet into something truly enjoyable to eat.

Of course re-imagining instant Ramen onto a pizza goes about 10-steps further just to get some benefit out of a noodle packet but the experiment was fun and, I think, worth it to create this unique, non-traditional pie.

Ingredients, bottom to top:

• 1 large (400 g) pizza dough
• Drizzle of sriracha sauce and sesame oil
• 6 oz (170 g) American cheese, sliced
• 1 packet (85 g) instant Ramen noodles (boiled for 2 minutes then pan fried with onions, garlic, & Ramen seasoning packet)
• 1 clove (5 g) minced garlic (pan fried with the noodles)
• ½ cup (50 g) onion, sliced thin (pan fried with the noodles)
• 5 oz (142 g) sliced steak
• 3 large eggs
• Sprinkle of coarse grain salt, after baking
• Garnish of green onions and shredded carrots, after baking

Deep Dish Pizza with Eggplant, Spinach and Roasted Red Pepper

Gone are my days of trying to bake Chicago-style pizzas in a heavy cast iron skillet. I now have the bake ware to prepare a proper deep dish at home and let me tell you I’m pumped about it! This vegetarian affair represents my first attempt in a new, personal era of pizza baking. With many more to come, I hope.

Initially this pizza was going to be eggplant and red pepper only but then I discovered (or rather remembered too late) how completely vegetables shrink once roasted and I found myself scrambling at the eleventh hour for more ingredients to fill up the space. A single deep dish pizza requires twice the pizza dough and about three times as many toppings and sauce as a traditional pizza. This 12 inch pie alone contained about a pound (450+ g) each of cheese, vegetables and sauce; it’s no wonder that a single slice can fill a person up. They may be a lot of work but deep dish pizzas are super fun to make and the leftovers last for days.

Mushroom Pizza

It’s been one full year since I started documenting our Friday night pizzas on this blog. In that time I’ve attempted some strange pizzas, and some relatively basic ones. We’ve explored deep dish pizza, took a dive into cracker crust, explored best practices in baking at home, and refined our pizza dough recipe. But in all that pizza baking activity there has been one thing regularly present at our house that I have, until now, held back from the blog : Mushroom pizza.

Hands down, all-mushroom (or really, mushroom & garlic) is the absolute favorite for pizza topping in this house. It’s the first pie we ordered on the day we moved to Missoula, it’s the pizza I bake for friends and family when they visit us, and it’s one that I bake when enlisted to make pizza while visiting others. It’s what we make for Friday night dinner when I’m not planning a blog post and it’s what gets baked as a backup when I’m trying some pizza idea that no one expects to work out(I’m lookin’ at you Fried Pickle). Bottom line is, if more than one pizza is being made in this house on any given day there is a high likelihood that one of them is mushroom.

By rough estimate we’ve baked and ate at least one mushroom pizza per month over the last year, not including the various other pies I’ve managed to sneak mushrooms into. And thus far I’ve kept this recurring, favorite pizza  of ours in the background in this blog, knowing full well that once I write about it I can’t do so again. Basically I’ve been holding out for the perfect reason to merit its feature. So happy 1 year anniversary, blog, here is your post on mushroom pizza.

Roasted Beet and Chard Pizza

Choosing pizza toppings these days seems to be less about inspiration and creativity and more a matter of “what is the garden producing today?” and “what do we need to eat in order to free up space in the fridge?”  Not that I’m complaining, I love fresh vegetables, but right now the answer to the above two questions seems to be “a lot of leafy greens” and absolutely no tomatoes, which excites me just a little bit less. I look forward to making that first, fresh Margherita pizza of the season, but we’re just not there yet in Montana.

This week’s refrigerator space filling culprits are beets and chard so onto a pizza they went, with a little flavor help from a new yellow onion and the our recently harvested garlic.

Spinach, Mushroom, and Brie Pizza

This is only the seventh pizza I’ve posted on this blog and already it’s the third time I’ve included spinach as a topping, the second time both spinach and mushrooms were included together. What can I say? Everyone has their go-to, favorite ingredients that they keep stocked in the house for quick use in any meal and that’s mushrooms (to a lesser extent spinach) in our house. It’s the Friday after New Years and we were looking forward to a quiet, recovery night at home with a pizza that requires very little work but was still guaranteed to please. Naturally we reached for the mushrooms. To add some flair we also included a bit of  Brie that went unserved on New Years Eve as well as the flavor staples, onions and garlic.

Toppings, bottom to top:

• Tomato sauce
• Mozzarella cheese
• Fresh Spinach, steamed then squeezed dry
• White Mushrooms
• Red Onion
• Garlic, 1-to-2 cloves sliced thin
• Brie cheese

Spinach and Artichoke Pizza

It’s the Holiday season which means a lot of time spent with family around the dinner table consuming meals rich in meats, starch, and gravy, not to mention all those sweets. As a respite from the heavy foods I tried to make today’s pizza a somewhat lighter fare.

Pizza doesn’t have to be the unhealthy, greasy creation that today’s franchise pizzerias have turned it into. In fact when baking at home the simple acts of i) using fresh ingredients, ii) selecting olive oil instead of vegetable oil, iii) increasing whole grains, and iv) not adding sugar to the tomato sauce can take pizza out of the category of “fast-food” and bring it back to its roots in the Mediterranean diet, generally considered one of the world’s healthiest styles of eating. You do not have to sacrifice flavor in the name of health where pizza is concerned.

Toppings, bottom to top:

• Tomato Sauce
• Mozzarella cheese
• Spinach, uncooked and roughly chopped
• Artichoke Hearts, chopped
• Garlic, 1 large clove thinly sliced