Mediterranean Pizza  

After kicking this one around for a while, we finally up and made a pizza.

Ingredients:
Trader Joe's whole wheat pizza crust, refrigerated but otherwise ready to go
Globe artichokes, 2
Cherry tomatoes, halved
Brussels sprouts, halved (probably should have been boiled or marinated)
Black beans
Homemade pesto: Parmesan, oil, basil, garlic, pine nuts.

Procedure:
After rolling out the dough, I spread full leaves of basil around on it, not covered but sort of evenly spaced. Using a food processor to chop the basil, garlic, and nuts into the oil and cheese, we then spread the very garlicky pesto sauce over the basil, and added sliced tomatoes over top:


Then black beans, halved Brussels sprouts, and a handful of pine nuts were added to that:


Meanwhile, the globe artichokes were boiling in the pot in the background - lid off so as to allow certain acids to boil off, otherwise the artichokes turn brown. Leslie learned me how to prepare the soft, boiled artichoke, by clipping the talons and saving the lighter green leaves after stripping them off to the heart. We used the chopped hearts of two artichokes to top off the pizza, and baked it for around 20 minutes on 350.

Here's the finished product:


It was delicious; although like I said, the Brussels sprouts could have used some treatment as they were fairly bland. I also forgot to put any oil on the pan before we started, so there was a little cleanup on the slatted cookie sheet. But it was a good learning experience, and we have two more artichokes to have fun with; by the way, we ate the boiled artichokes' leaves with an oil, garlic powder, dried basil, and sea salt mixture, scraping the soft parts with our teeth. I didn't know about that little bonus of artichoke prep either.

The great thing about Mediterranean pizza is the versatility. We could have used a marinara dipping sauce at any point; obviously kalamata olives and feta cheese usually come to mind, as well as any number of fish products; radish, capers, vinegar, eggplant; practically any vegetable would have been just fine with this one.

In the future, I think we'll probably make a big batch of pizza dough and freeze it, but for $1.50, the whole wheat dough from T. Joe's is really good: if all you're putting on it is vegetables, it's a pretty cheap dinner for two.