Tuesday, December 27, 2011

December 27, 2011 - Holiday Leftover Pizza

Holiday Leftover Pizza or A pizza hodgepodge of glaze, cheeses, turkey and mangoes

This holiday season has been a particularly lovely one!  I spent Christmas over at my very special Teta and Uncle's with them and my three cousins.  It was wonderful.  I can’t even continue to express how great it was, but it was completely great. However, aside from assisting with the mashed potatoes, and helping with the poticia, between Christmas and the leftovers from my ladies night holiday party, there hasn’t been a whole lot of cooking going on in my kitchen.  

There’s been a lot of thinking about cooking, like contemplating what to do with the leftover glaze, and how many different ways to make turkey interesting.  So I came to the conclusion that holiday leftover pizza was an absolute must.  I solidified that plan as I walked home from my physical therapy appointment and met the most adorable puppy in the world named Gus whose owner’s name I unfortunately did not catch (curses, foiled again).

I got a lot of cooking paraphernalia for Christmas, so I figured it was time to make use of those things.  I started out with a plan to make enough dough to use some for pizza dough and the rest for bread rolls for lunch. 

Holiday Leftovers Pizza – from my brain
Ingredients:
  • One batch of pretzel recipe dough, plus some salt in the dough – check; note you can use whatever kind of pizza dough you prefer, even Boboli if you most desire.  I was just going with the flow...of my brain
  • Cut up chunks of leftover turkey – check
  • Spoonfuls of leftover glaze from the cider glazed turkey recipe – check
  • Three cheeses – I know I used Gorgonzola (love), and I think the other two were Dubliner Cheddar and Gouda, but that could be wrong…since they were the Cheeses Bindy brought for last week’s party
  • Mango pieces – this wasn’t technically leftover since my cousins got me mango themed body buttery things and an actual mango…that was perfectly ripe. So check anyway!

Step 1: Make the dough, set aside to rise as you prep the remainder of the ingredients; also preheat the oven to 400F.
Step 2: Put a little oil on the pizza stone your EXCELLENT Teta (a different one than who you spent Christmas day with) gave you for Christmas.  It’s also blue, which is my favorite kitchen color.
Step 3: Cut apart the dough into seven pieces to use to make rolls, and one big piece to use as pizza dough.  Roll the rolls into their baking sheet (or mini loaf pan if you are me and was good and Momma got you something nice for Christmas) and let to rise.  With the main pizza dough roll into a pizza looking roundness that will fit your pizza stone.  Then transfer to the pizza stone.
Step 4: Spoon the leftover cider glaze onto the dough, be careful that it doesn’t decide to totally roll everywhere off of your pizza, stone, and onto counters and stovetops...danger.
Step 5: Cut up the cheese and spread on the pizza…if you’re me that just meant literally cutting slivers of the Dubliner, then using your new grater (thanks Dad and Alison!) to grate the Gouda (which is not really meant to be grated it turns out) and then sprinkle on the crumbled Gorgonzola.  If you’re me next time it means switching the slivering and the grating so you grate the hard cheese (Dubliner) and sliver the soft cheese (Gouda). 
Step 6: Sprinkle on the Turkey and mangoes.
Step 7: Pop into the oven for 25min or roughly golden brownish crust and a little bit of browning is going on. Also the duration of writing thank you cards. Let cool for about five minutes (so you can finish your cards) and then cut right on the pizza stone and enjoy.

WOW.  So sometimes I think things might work in my head, and then when I put it into action...it totally DOES work.  Using the glaze as the “pizza sauce” made everything epic and slightly sweet, also I couldn’t use too much because it kept trying to fall off the stone.  But the combination of cheeses was exciting, since none of them were touching due to my mix up of grating vs. slicing, and the mangoes were amazing!  If I didn't have the turkey, I think it would have been fine but what is a leftovers holiday pizza without turkey, you know what I’m sayin?  This foodsperiment gets a +10 for flavor, +7 for ease, +5 for using up leftovers and creating tomorrow’s lunch, and +5 for using almost all of my new kitchen equipment.  I could so make a great Italian wife, if I was actually Italian.  Happy Sperimenting!

1 comment:

  1. I love that you are posting pictures and recipes here. It is getting me to be more adventurous cooking.

    Sheila

    ReplyDelete