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| My first naan pizza - a Margherita. |
But just now, sitting here in the darkness of too early, in the stillness of everyone else's sleep, and with the windows open, I took a deep whiff of that smell and realized that while it smells of the impending coolness and briskness I love so well, it's also the harbinger of the time of year I like to call *Holiday Clusterfuck*. A time of year that I have long decided to decide is no longer for me.
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| On another day, chorizo, red onion and basil for the Girl... |
- Kids wanting to buy fifty dollar costumes that they'll wear for all of three hours while they're running around trying to get candy in a neighborhood that seems to prefer not to celebrate Halloween;
- you thinking about how you're going to prepare a bird you don't even like to eat for the one holiday you can actually get behind while having it ruined for you because you're subjected to Christmas carols wherever you go so you'll subliminally begin the Zombie Shopping Apocalypse Countdown in your mind like the good sheeple they want you to be;
- everyone around you trying to figure out how they're going to pay for all the crap all the grabbing hands around them want to be given on a day of the year that's supposed to be all about a little swaddled babe you don't even worship sent to bring peace, love, and compassion to Earth...
It's enough to make a holiday hating binch want to hibernate til February if I didn't love autumn so damned much.
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| What the Girl had plus sauteed mushrooms and pickled jalapenos for me and the Man... |
What in Hell does this have to do with naan (nahn) pizza? Consciously, nothing but the fact that it was a revelation that presented itself at roughly the same moment it occurred to me to post about my latest happy kitchen accident. But on a subconscious level, it may very well be the synthesis of writing about a good and fast meal idea on the verge of a time of year when a lot of us feel like there are so many demands made of our personal reserves that we can hardly come up for air much less make dinner.
NAAN PIZZA
I've been very blessed this year to be able to spend as much time as I care to in the kitchen, so my recipes are rarely suited for busy workday dinners. But other limitations such as budget sometimes coax my hand into making something that, by its nature, cannot take a lot of time.
A few days ago, too hungry to wait until dinner to eat and left with one frozen hunk of animal protein that needed to be saved for another day and some other odds and ends that needed to be used up lest they should go to waste, I pulled:
- the last piece of naan,
- 2 half-used and withering Roma tomatoes,
- 1 stray clove of garlic,
- a leftover chunk of Monterey Jack with a tiny growth of mold on it (I'm no stranger to excising mold from cheese), and
- a few leaves of basil,
and I made myself a surprisingly good thin-crust Margherita-esque pizza. While the storebought naan as naan was just serviceable as compared to the good and fresh stuff you get at a good Indian restaurant, it turned out to be a superior palette for making a quick homemade thin crust pizza as compared to the usual shortcut options of either Boboli or even Trader Joe's raw pizza dough, which I find to be salty, dense and overworked.
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| A closeup of the grownups' 'zza... |
Since we're using storebought bread as crust, there's no real recipe here, but a few guidelines:
- Preheat your oven to 425F.
- As naan can be more porous than Boboli or pizza dough, give the upside a light brushing of olive oil and a thin layer of cheese before saucing to keep it from getting soggy, then give it the usual sprinkling of cheese.
- As with regular pizza, if you're using multiple toppings, try not to layer them one on top of the other, and rather spread them out in a single layer. Stacked toppings make for more steam. More steam makes for more sogging.
- As these are individual pizzas and bake in as little as 8 minutes, it's better to cut the toppings into smaller or thinner pieces. (The only reason the mushrooms on that one are so thick is because I bought them pre-sliced for another purpose.)
- Tossing raw vegetable toppings in a little bit of oil helps to cook them faster in the oven and also keeps them from leaching too much water.
- Give your baking surface a generous brushing of olive oil to help crisp the edges and bottom. If you like really brown and crisp edges, brush the top edges with a little extra olive oil too.
And finally, bake for at least 8 minutes, and up to 12 or 13 minutes for really crisp crust in a PREHEATED 425F oven, and enjoy. :)
Bah humbug,
shinae
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