grilled pizzas

Aug. 17, 2006 - Grilled Pizzas ... as requested!
I'm a Rachel Ray freak!

I loved watching 30 minute meals ... my favorite gumbo recipe comes from her recipe book! It never seems to take me 30 minutes, but ... well, that's a whole other blog!

Now that we don't have satallite and can't watch, I splurged last weekend on her magazine. There were several recipes that intrigued me, but the most accessible with our current budget and our newly dead oven was the grilled pizzas.

I confess that I could have probably saved a couple of bucks making my own pizza dough, but I am terrible at stuff like that. I need to ask sixredheads or Blogless Leigh for a lesson! At anyrate, Bella Roma was kind enough to sell me 2 large pizza dough pieces for $3 ... and home we went to experiment. We had leftover red onion, black olives from chili and chips the other night, baby spinach, a few mushrooms, roma tomatoes, a little pepperoni and leftover real bacon bits from salads the other night and some leftover pizza sauce. AJ created the combination for two different pizzas. We worked on the dough together ... which was enough for 4 small pizzas, too much for our 3 folks ...( I tried to keep the dough, we'll see what happens).

Preheat the grill ...put it on the highest setting for about 15 minutes. Close the lid to create a very hot environment.

This is the drill for the dough ... using olive oil, flatten it out as much as you can (about an 1/8th of an inch), then I rubbed chopped garlic, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper on the dough(both sides) ... I would likely add more seasoning next time. Then, place the dough carefully on the grill (turn the grill down to med ... or we turned ours down to med ... you'll have to play with it). The dough should begin to rise slightly, the bottom should get grill marks fairly quickly and begin to toast. After about 5 minutes or so, I was able to flip the crust with grill tongs. After allowing the other side to cook for a couple of minutes, I turned it back over and began loading the toppings ... I did not start with sauce, but rather with pepperoni, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, black olives, spinach, then a little sauce, bacon and cheese. Close the lid and let the cheese melt for about 5 minutes.

They were a hit. Fun to make, easy, NO CLEAN UP!! When we do it again, I think I'll try more bold flavors AND I'll saute the veggies to give them more pop when they are added to the pizza. It reminded me of the veggie pizzas at Stephano's in Knoxville ... the whole wheat crust would do really well too!