Zen Pizza (Sorta)

I made a black olive with Alfredo for the girls, then couldn't decide what to do for my pie. I had leftover hamburger from making cheeseburgers, not much, but a little nugget of ground beef that wasn't quite thawed and thus didn't become patties on the grill.



I'm not much for hamburger as a pizza topping, but mix in a jar of pesto and it's not bad. Then I had some jalapeños, Paul Robeson and Limmony tomatoes and three kinds of basil from my garden (Sweet Italian, Thai Magic and Purple Stem), so there was that. Some olives left over from the girls' pizza. Half a red onion which I caramelized with some dried fenugreek and minced garlic.



What the hell, why not throw a tin of anchovies in as long as we're breaking two of my cardinal rules of pizza making:

1) Keep it simple, stupid.
2) Go easy on the toppings.

I make a thin crust, and generally you want it lightly topped to ensure the slice has some structural stability. Plus, cooking at extremely high temperatures, (550ºF for about four minutes), a thick pie threatens to not really cook through before the crust starts to scorch. And some of the most delicious combinations are utterly simple: bacon, fig and gorgonzola with caramelized onions is about as complicated as I normally get. Pizza Margherita, shrimp scampi, chicken carbonara, these are simple things.

On the plus side, this complicated supreme type thing is colorful. And managed to be pretty stable despite being overloaded. And since the pesto meat sauce and caramelized onions went on hot, all the cooking that was really required was to cook the dough and melt the cheese.

It's good. It'd be better with hot Italian sausage instead of hamburger, but I worked with what I had.

And the combination reminds me of that bad joke about the Buddhist monk and the hot dog vendor, the monk saying, 'Make me one with everything.

Which reminds me, in terms of complicated food, I keep meaning to try an Indian pizza, say my Goan shrimp curry made into a pie...