pizza | What's Annie Making?

What’s shakin’ bacon? Over here in this neck of the woods were are learning to adjust to our new schedule and take care of our new little son, Charlie. At this point he does not like his crate at all but we know he needs to sleep in it. He cries the second he goes in at night and the lights go out for about 10 minutes and then passes out. Then he wakes up 4-5 hours later and starts crying again. If he’s been asleep for 4 hours or more we get up and let him outside to pee. If it’s only been an hour or two we usually just lay in bed and cringe and hold each other until he calms himself down. I’m sure our neighbors love us. It’s so hard to just sit there and let him cry, but I know we need to get him trained and if we give in to him he’ll think he can get out any time by crying.

Oh, and then this morning I literally was bawling my eyes out as I put him back in so I could go in to school for a few hours. The look on his little face. OMG. Break my heart. I left him in front of the tv with animal planet on so he wouldn’t be so lonely maybe.

We’re still working on being good new puppy parents.

So our meals are quick and simple. I can’t leave the puppy’s side for too long or we’ll be in trouble.

This BLT naan pizza fit the bill. Quick and tasty.

I just spread some hummus on naan bread (from Costco) sprinkled them with mozzarella, feta, and bacon and baked them for 8-10 minutes at 375. Then I topped it with fresh cherry tomatoes and spinach.

Easy and delicious. And those summer ripe tomatoes – divine!!!

I loved the chewy naan bread for crust. You could obviously do this on a pita or tortilla too if you don’t have naan.

The best part is that this meal is so easy and quick I still had tons of time to play with the little mister. If you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to go get some more puppy kisses.

This pizza was a long time coming.

When Josh and I first started looking to move to the area we currently live in, we decided to do a quick drive through after church one Sunday. I was slightly apprehensive to move to begin with, moving from the city to the country, but this trip about did me in. I felt like we just kept driving and driving and driving. Away from friends, school, malls, fro-yo, and civilization all together… Pretty sure I cried the whole time he was driving. When we finally arrived, I was emotionally exhausted and famished. Bring on the hangry monster. Josh is a pretty smart cookie, and could sense what was about to strike. Unfortunately, the only food in the immediate area was in the form of Casey’s Pizza (aka – everyone in Iowa’s favorite gas station pizza). We walked in and took a look at the menu, the special for the week was Taco Pizza, that sounded promising, so we got a large pizza to share. We took the pizza to go and went to a local playground (real mature, I know) to eat it.

We sat on the swings and opened the pizza box. It looked, well, interesting. Not what I had imagined a taco pizza to look like at all. It was covered in giant hunks of sausage (not taco meat, sausage) and soggy iceberg lettuce. It also had regular pizza sauce. I took a bite, and was somewhat sorry I had. It was pretty gross. We proceeded to pick off the sausage and lettuce, and tried to eat what we could.

As I swung back and forth, tears started flowing again. We were moving to the middle of nowhere, where they can’t even make pizza right???? (Emotional much?)

Since then, we ended up moving into a beautiful apartment, that is an okay commute for both of us. There are wonderful little mexican restaurants here, and it has turned into our home for now.

The only thing that hadn’t been remedied was that pizza. I guess I just was not expecting it to be what was given to me (not that I had ever had taco pizza before). So that was my mission, to create taco pizza the way I wanted it to taste. And Friday night I finally succeeded.

This recipe is not hard, it has quite a few steps, but you could easily cheat and not do so many parts from scratch. I’m sure it would still be wonderful.

I started with doctoring up my normal pizza dough recipe, using part corn meal instead of flour. I wanted it to have sort of cornbread/corn tortilla crust. If you want to use normal crust, I’m sure it would still be lovely. You could even buy one of those pre made ones from the grocery store, or make this on a tortilla.

For the sauce, this was one of my main issues with the Casey’s pizza (sorry Casey’s, your pizza is great, just not the taco kind). I ended up using a can of mexican diced tomatoes with green chiles mixed with a little tomato paste. I heated it on the stove, blended it with my immersion blender, and reduced it a little so it had the texture of pizza sauce. It turned out divine. If that’s too many steps for you, you could get a can of regular tomato sauce (not pizza sauce), and just mix in a little garlic powder, cayenne pepper, and chiles.

The other part that needed fixing was the meat. I just made a tiny little portion (less than 1/4 lb) of taco meat and used the taco crumbles right on top of the pizza. No sausage here.

We topped ours with a mixture of shredded mozzarella and cheddar, black beans, black olives, and taco meat. Then cooked it on the pizza stone in the oven. When it came out, we topped our slices with a little avocado, sour cream, crumbled tortilla chips and cilantro. It was delicious! No soggy iceberg in this house.

Taco pizza success!!!!

Taco Pizza

by Annie S

Prep Time: 1.5 hours

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Keywords: bake entree Mexican

Ingredients (2 12 inch pizzas)

For the crust

3 c all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading
1 c cornmeal
2 1/4 t active dry yeast
1 T honey
2 T olive oil
1 c hot water

For the sauce

1 can diced tomatoes with chiles
3 T tomato paste

Toppings

1/4 lb cooked taco meat
shredded cheddar and mozzarella cheeses
1/3 c black beans
2 T diced black olives
2 T corn kernels (I used frozen)
sour cream
avocado
cilantro
crushed tortilla chips
chopped tomatoes

Instructions

For the crust

Mix flour, cornmeal, and yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with dough hook

Add hot water, honey and olive oil, kneading until a ball forms (if it looks too wet remove the bowl from the mixer, and stir in additional flour 1/4 c at a time by hand)

Cover a clean workstation with flour, remove dough and knead the dough by hand, working in more flour if necessary, until a nice smooth ball forms

Place the dough in a large bowl that’s been sprayed with cooking spray, cover with a damp towel and put in a warm place (I like the inside of my microwave) for about an hour, until the dough doubles in size

For the sauce

Put tomatoes and tomato paste into a sauce pan

Using an immersion blender (or you could pour them into a food processor or regular blender) blend them together until an almost smooth sauce forms (don’t liquify this)

Heat the sauce over medium heat until it cooks down a little and is the consistency of pizza sauce

To assemble the pizza

Put pizza stone (if using) in oven

Heat oven to 435 degrees

In the mean time, take half of your dough and shape it into a 12 inch circle

Place the dough on either your pizza peel, or a cookie sheet that’s been covered with corn meal

Spread sauce over the dough

Sprinkle with cheese, taco meat, black beans, corn, and black olives

When the oven is preheated, slide the pizza onto the stone carefully (or just put your cookie sheet in the oven)

Bake for 15-17 minutes, until the dough is cooked through and the toppings start to bubble

Remove from oven, let sit for 2-3 minutes for the toppings to settle

Slice

Top pieces with sour cream, tomatoes, avocado chunks, cilantro and crushed tortilla chips

Enjoy!

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