CSA Week 3, plus Pizza with Kale, Roasted Garlic, & Four Cheeses

CSA Week 3: 6.25.09

Our CSA is doing  a nice job this year of mixing things up a little from week to week. We still get the same general categories of vegetables this time of year: some greens, radishes, turnips — but the other items have been varying a little from week to week, which makes for nice surprises when I open our share box.

So here’s the rundown this week: a nice head of romaine, a head of red curly kale, spinach, arugula, radishes, spring onions, salad turnips, and garlic scapes. Yum!

And in our fruit share, strawberries and rhubarb:

Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl Share: 6.25.09

I used the spring onions and arugula to make a dish I saw recently in Bon Appetit magazine — halibut with white beans, wilted arugula, and a brown-butter-caper vinaigrette. The original recipe uses fresh-caught trout, which oh boy, would I have loved to have used — but seeing as I hadn’t planned any fishing excursions, the wild Alaskan halibut I had was a nice substitute.

But the dish I really want to tell you about today was the pizza we had on Friday night…it was a white pizza, topped with little nubs of sweet roasted garlic, sauteed red curly kale, and four cheeses: fontina, asiago, provolone, and mozzarella. It was a winner!

Every time I roast a whole head of garlic I wonder why I don’t do it more often. I slice the top off a head of garlic so the tops of the cloves are exposed, place the head in a square of aluminum foil, drizzle some olive oil over the head, fold up the foil to make a little purse-like package, and bake it for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. I love the perfume of sweet garlic that wafts out of the package as I open it, and squeezing the soft cloves out of their papery skins is fun, to boot.

Curly kale can be a bit on the tough side, so I sauteed two big handfuls of it down in some olive oil until tender, then chopped it into small bits. I then layered this onto the pizza dough, mixing it with bits of the roasted garlic and grated cheese.

And out from the oven emerged…voilà!

Oooh, so tasty. It was like garlic-sauteed kale in cheesy, crusty form. A new favorite in our house!

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Pizza with Kale, Roasted Garlic & Four Cheeses

an Eggs on Sunday original

view printable recipe

Ingredients
pizza dough – your favorite or mine!
2 big handfuls of kale, sauteed in some olive oil until tender, then chopped
cloves from about half a head of roasted garlic,  thickly sliced
3 cups of grated cheese, a mix of fontina, asiago, provolone and mozzarella

Directions
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F with a baking stone inside (I place my baking stone on a rack, and place the rack on the lowest slot in the oven.)

Generously dust a pizza peel (or the back of a sheet pan) with coarse cornmeal or flour. Roll or stretch your pizza dough out to a 12 to 14 inch circle directly on the peel (or pan.)

Top the crust with half the grated cheese, then half the sliced roasted garlic and half the sauteed kale. Repeat with another layer of cheese, garlic, and kale.

Bake in the oven for about 8 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and just starting to brown, and the crust is golden brown.