Pizza, Pizza

I am amazed at the versatility of store-bought pizza dough. It is turning me into a pizza-making fanatic, or at least it soon will be. I just made two thin-crust 8" pizzas with one bag of plain pizza dough I got at Trader Joe's.

Using the whole bag for just one pizza, as they recommend, isn't such a great idea for a personal pizza person like myself, and I had a few ingredients to use up anyway.

Cilantro Pesto Pizza

The first half of my well-floured pizza dough got covered in the following (this I made up on-the-fly so if it bears any resemblance to something someone else made it is purely a coincidence):

• about 1/3 c cilantro pesto (made from fresh cilantro, cashews, lemon juice and garlic)
• 1/3 to 1/2 tomato, thinly sliced
• slices of mozzarella and ricotta cheese, to cover as desired (showing here - the ricotta was a $2.60 wedge of roasted ricotta I picked up today at the Wine Source)
• 4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

Bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes.

Vindaloo Pizza

I was originally going to put the rest of some yemisir wot that I bought at the Waverly Farmers' Market on this pizza, but it was starting to turn, so instead I used some vindaloo sauce I made and froze a few weeks ago (freezes beautifully in ice cube trays). And so the second half of the dough was covered in (again, improvised):

• 1/3 c vindaloo sauce
• 1 shallot, thinly sliced
• the rest of the aforementioned tomato, thinly sliced
• slices of goat cheese and ricotta cheese, to cover as desired (showing here - I used Drunken Goat Cheese I bought a few weeks ago at Whole Foods). Here the somewhat dry-textured roasted ricotta is almost paneer-like. In fact this ricotta was, I thought, a good substitute for paneer, which I would have used otherwise.
  

Again, bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes.

My God, had I known it was this easy to make a pizza - and thereby not waste cheese - I would've been doing this a whole lot more. And I thought I was part Italian, napoletano no less. **Sigh**