CPK, eat your heart out.
Garry had a bag of Peruvian purple potatoes in his crisper for the last couple of weeks and I've been eyeing them with purple mashed potatoes in mind. Today we were going to do a chicken stir-fry with mushrooms and bean sprouts, but I looked at the contents of his fridge and realized we had all the makings of a fantaaaaastic pizza.
The first time I saw potato pizza on a menu, I was skeptical, but Pizza Antica changed my mind. The starch-on-starch may sound redundant, but it's fantastic in texture and flavor. You can't just use any old potato though--a nice rich one like a Yukon Gold or these purple potatoes works best.
Ingredients
- TJ's herb pizza dough. Next time we may try whole wheat instead.
- TJ's pesto (soo good!)
- Barely grilled chicken breast, cut into cubes (it doesn't need to be cooked all the way through because it'll keep cooking when you bake the pizza and you don't want it to get tough)
- 3 purple potatoes, sliced and zapped in the microwave for 1 min.
- Sliced crimini mushrooms, toasted in the toaster oven to get rid of the juices
- A bit of thinly sliced white onions
- Mozzarella cheese
We're slowly learning that when it comes to pizza, one had best exercise restraint. Usually we're tempted to load a zillion toppings on our pizza, and while hearty and tasty, it sometimes gets soggy and just comes off as kind of...crass. We're not quite where we need to be in terms of pizza-minimalism, but today was a step in the right direction: every ingredient was necessary, and the whole was a lot greater than the sum of all parts. The only thing I might have added is a drizzle of truffle oil.
Needless to say, you can't get a pizza like this anywhere, but if you could, it would probably cost like $25 (with the generous amt of toppings involved). Plus I like how, as Garry quipped, it's "shaped like Oregon."
