Grilled Pizza

Last year, I was making some great pizzas, but in the process I was testing the oven's ability to handle extreme temperatures, bumping it up to 500 or 550 degrees, smoking myself out of the house and cracking baking stones left and right.

This year I decided to try a new method in the hopes that it would be easier on my cooking equipment and my nostrils... grilled pizza! I used this dough recipe from the Other Martha, and grilled it inside on my cast iron grill pan. it was really easy and really tasty. I rolled it super thin and it crisped up quite nicely. Still some smoke, but no cracked cookware!

Topped it with sauteed sweet cherry tomatoes, garlic scapes, mushrooms (all from the CSA), as well as some Italian sausage, mozzarella and basil.

Crostini with Ricotta and Garlic Scape Pesto

I got some more garlic scapes in my CSA share this week... Randy the farmer says it's the last of them for this season. After seeing the idea on foodgawker, I decided to make some garlic scape pesto, and mix it with some of the ricotta I also got through Randy. Plopped it on some toasty baguette slices... tasty and easy.

Garlic Scape Hummus

I made some hummus (to Tony's delight), but instead of regular garlic, I used minced garlic scapes (which I got from my CSA). Garlic scapes are the curly shoots that come out of the garlic- the farmer cuts it off in order to stimulate growth in the bulb, I've learned... check out this video to see the scape harvest in action. The garlic scapes have a fairly intense garlic flavor (although less so that regular garlic), and nicer green color than regular garlic. You can also make a pesto out of them.

As far as the hummus recipe goes, I used to use Ina Garten's recipe. Now I just kinda eyeball it and throw the basic ingredients in to taste. I also add some olive oil, which she doesn't seem to use.