Tag Archives: Pesto

Tomato Mushroom Pesto Pizza on From Scratch Dough

We have made pizza before in the oven and on the grill and enjoyed it, but used a store bought dough when doing so.  It was a good dough that was made in the store and frozen, so at least it wasn’t a Pillsbury canister but not quite as good as fresh so we took that final part on.  Being our first time, we wanted to just go with a Basic Pizza Dough Recipe courtesy of the food network.  It was fun and easy to do it all ourselves despite living within close proximity to Aiello’s, the best pizza in the world.

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Caprese with Lemon Basil Pesto

Oh, Summer… so sad to see it come to an end but luckily the produce from the summer crops are still going strong. We have been growing these lovely little tomatoes all summer and have been thoroughly enjoying them. One of our favorite ways to have them is with fresh basil and penn mac’s fresh mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. So simple, so good. Recently, we received some ‘lemon-basil’ in our CSA and naturally a pesto came to mind.

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Homemade Onion Rings

Onion rings are a fun food you don’t often make at home. We were deep frying chicken (you’ll see that soon too!) and figured why not throw something else in there too for a tasty side dish. My mind immediately went to onion rings, so here you go.

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Crab Pesto Grilled Pizza

Yes another crab dish and I think that this may have been the best one yet.  We had a hankering for some pizza and being that we live in Maryland, making your own pizza is the only option.  So we stopped at Marchone’s Italian Market in Wheaton and grabbed a frozen dough ball.

A thorough thaw is very important

This was about 2 hours of thawing and the dough had expanded to about twice the original size.

Thoroughly thawed and ready to work with

If the dough is not thawed to room temperature, it will be very difficult to work with which I have learned from experience.  At the same time, you can’t work with the dough too much and remember that flour is your friend!

I rolled the dough out to the desired size while the grill was heating up.  Once the dough and grill are ready, give the top of the dough a thorough spray of oil.  You will then put the dough on the grill otherwise plain.

Straight on the grate oil side down and plain

Leave the dough on for about 3-5 minutes.  Just until the down side is lightly browned and basically firm enough to pick the whole piece up without folding and flopping like raw dough.

We need a new grill!

The bottom of this piece is uncooked.  The top would look better if we had a better grill that cooked evenly(grill companies we are looking for a sponsor!).  When we move, the gas grill is not coming.  The grill doesn’t know that, but I guess once this is published the news will be out.

Now it is time to dress the pizza with your toppings as you normally would and then throw it back on the grill.  Instead of a red sauce we used a pesto base.

Summer basil is great

Next we used some more of the famous leftover crab which was starting to run low.  Note that this was published well after the dish was made and we did not keep fresh crab in the fridge for 3 weeks.

We were able to be pretty generous with the crab since we had so much.  This was almost but not quite a pound.

Cheese it up

We used a store bought Italian blend.

Fresh tomatoes

We love fresh tomato slices on pizza.  Now it is ready to go back on the grill for a little longer than the plain dough.

Close the lid, which will help to melt the cheese.  I gave it a few turns because of our extremely uneven grill as you can see the full blast flame or no flame options.  It would be a good idea to give it a spin either way though.  This stage will take closer to 7-9 minutes to melt the cheese and cook the pizza through.

Summer basil again

It turned out great!  Slice it up, cheese it up, and go to town!

Recipe for Standard Pesto with Walnut

Greg

(Since I have been begun posting over the last month, we will start to tag our posts)

Walnut Pesto Grilled Chicken Thighs

Honestly, this did not turn out great but I am posting it for the basic idea and vision and as some pointers for myself and the readers.  The idea was to grill chicken thighs with a thick walnut pesto paste that was almost like a jerk sauce.  The first step was the sauce and I started that by prepping some garlic to be roasted in foil.

In some foil with a little oil, salt, and pepper

Into the over for about 15-20 minutes.

After the oven

While the garlic was roasting, I harvested some fresh basil from the garden.

Yep, thats basil

Now it was time to combine all of the ingredients and blend them into the paste.

The base ingredients

All of the ingredients

A side view of the many layers. Like a middle school science project

The final blended product which was not so pretty

Once the paste was prepared, I was ready to apply it to the chicken.  I got bone in thighs and took the skin off of about 2/3 of them and left it on the rest.

Dressed up

Then onto the grilling and this is where things started to go astray.  A combination of the oil in the sauce, the fat of the thighs, and the skin of some of the thighs led to the grill seriously flaming up.  I had to turn the gas off and move the chicken to the other side for a bit until the flames died down.  A dirty grill also contributed to the problem.  I was able to save most of the thighs, but some did get pretty scorched.  They were still edible, but some were a bit too blackened for my usual liking.  So I would suggest to use this recipe and bake the thighs instead.  I don’t think it was a flawed recipe, but a flawed method.

These flames are nothing compared to what was to come!

I threw some veggies in the grill basket as a side

We dressed them up with some fresh chopped tomatoes and basil and a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.  The meal was fine, but not one of our finest.  As mentioned, I think that it would have been better prepared if it were baked and suggest trying that way instead of the grill.

Recipe for Walnut Pesto Paste