Eat This While You Read That: Clair Kiernan

When I originally got the dish and title from Clair, I planned to have this post appear close to Halloween. Well, I overshot a little. But zombies are in season year-round, right?

And then when I tell you that even the resident curmudgeon read this book and pronounced it a bit of good, light fun, worth reading, you'll understand that I took that to be something special. He usually  goes for the tongue-in-cheek irreverent type of humor, but zombies? And furthermore, the dish Clair gave me... well, this is a fun read and recipe for a night at home. Meat-lover's pizza! and a book on zombies!

This is when the Jr. Mad Scientist got involved. While she highly approves of pizza, she's not keen on tomatoes. Mama, can you make it with no pizza sauce? Maybe with something like that great garlic sauce we got at that one place? Sure...

So I made toum.

You can find the recipe for Toum here. I have to say that we're loving that stuff, but we love garlic. If your family is not as garlicky-loving as ours, you may want to opt for simply using olive oil. Or pizza sauce.

Pizza, at the heart of it, is flat bread with stuff on it. In this case, we used italian sausage, pepperoni, and bacon. With cheese, lots of cheese. Pizza isn't a recipe as much as it is a stylistic choice. What do you want on yours? Go ahead and put it on there... Oh. I just started with my French bread dough for the crust.

Starting with breadsticks. I made a batch of white bread dough and cut off roughly 1/3 of it to be the breadsticks.

Brush the breadstick dough liberally with toum.

I grated Parmesan cheese on tom of the dough and toum. I  cut the dough with a pizza slicer into one-inch wide strips,  then set it aside to rise again for about 20 minutes before it went in the oven at 400 deg F for 12 minutes. Check at 10 and remove when golden brown.

I rolled out the rest of the dough into a circle, brushed it with toum, and started sprinkling meat on it.

I added the cheese - a blend of mozzarella, paremesan, and asiago - and then put on the pepperoni.

Oh, I should point out that before the meat went on, the dough was put on a cookie sheet. Our baking stone wasn't big enough for this pie. I sprinkled cornmeal on the pan to prevent sticking.

So: you can make your crust as thick or as thin as you like. Mine is fairly thin, partly because I only let it rise for about 20 minutes after putting toppings on. Also, this didn't come out greasy!

Yummy, garlicky and of course, meaty. Satisfying finger food.