Zucchizza

With the arrival of my Christmas present cookbooks, I will share a slew of fun new recipies, but add my own twist. This recipe hails from Ina Garten's barefoot contessa cookbook "Make It Ahead" and will definitely grab your attention.

 It is a zucchini  pizza, or zucchizza, and it's somewhat like a tart or galette. You can make it more of a pizza or more of a dessert, it just depends on what you have a hankering for. I started out by making the crust.

I threw together 1 1/4 cups of flower, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 1 1/4 stick of cold butter into a large bowl and mashed/mixed them together till the butter was more or less the size of peas (more if you are hungry  and want to eat this thing right now) The easiest was is to use a food processor, but you can use a mixer or just your hands. 

After that you want to add about 5 tablespoons of Alaska's finest purified glacier water. Remember to add them one at a time so the dough forms correctly. I also added lemon jucie and zezt to make the dough taste fresh. I put a little too much in, but all it did was make it taste more dessert-like. Twas still delish. To finish her off I added a splash of vodka to give the crust a nice flaky texture, and plus she has had a hard week and just wanted to take a load off.

Once she is nice and doughy, you want to wrap her up and pop her in the fridge for about a half hour. At this point you want to preheat the oven to 400° and start on zé  toppings. Ina said to use 1 1/4 pounds of zooks, but who is really going to weight out their cucumber cousins like that?

I used 3 zooks and sliced them up like little pickles on a "ghetto mandoline" (cheese grater). Next you want to dry off the zook slices with some paper towels so they won't make the zucchizza super watery in the oven.

I followed that up with a douse of olive oil, salt, and pep.

Put those guys aside and take out what you've all been waiting for, the cheeses! In a bowl mix together 1/2 cup of ricotta, 2/4 cup of mozzarella, and 3/6 cup of parmesan. Melt them in the microwave just a bit so it becomes one mass of deliciousness.

By now your dough should be chilled, so you want to take that out and roll it out on a nice circular shape and roll the edges up a smidgen to make a baby crust.

Next glob on your cheeses and spread them out. Bring them about an inch from the crust so it doesn't ooze off sides.

Then, lay out your zucchini in a nice spiral pattern staring the middle or wherever you want, it really doesn't matter.

Sprinkle some parm on top and slide this puppy in the oven for 30 minutes. That lying cheat "INA" said 40-50 but mine was done a lot sooner.

Let the sweet babe cool then slice it up and serve it for brunch. BAM!