Celebrate Oktoberfest with beer and Oktoberfest pizza. This pizza is fun and easy to make. Heck, why not drink the half a beer left over from sauteing the onions while you cook and raise a toast to our German brethren. Cheers!

Oktoberfest Pizza

1 large onion, sliced

1/2 of a beer

1 small apple, thinly sliced

1 sausage, sliced

3/4 cup grated cheese

Saute onions over medium-low heat. After a few minutes when the onions have started to brown, add 1/2 a bottle or can of beer and let them gently simmer. Cook until all the liquid is absorbed and the onions are a golden brown.

When onions are done. Spread them on the bottom of your rolled out pizza dough. Add cheese. Then top with apples and sausage pieces. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bake on the bottom rack of a 500 degree oven for 8-10 minutes. Grab a beer and enjoy!

For a printer friendly version of this recipe, click here.

I was in Portland last weekend. What a great city with an amazing local food scene. One of my favorite finds was a pear hazelnut flatbread. The hazelnuts were toasted and finely chopped then sprinkled on the crust with a little honey drizzled on. The pears were added next. When it came out of the oven, it was topped with some fresh thyme. Simple and Delicious.

Looking to be inspired? Mom’s Pizza Dough has a great library of pizza recipes so get that oven crank’n.

We had a babysitter last Thursday. I made dinner for both my daughter and the sitter ahead of time. What could be easier than pepperoni pizza?

I made a quick tomato sauce with 4 tomatoes on my counter and added some shredded zucchini (I have plenty to use up). Topped the sauce with mozzarella cheese and then P.G. Molinari & Son’s pepperoni and baked it in the oven.

I told the sitter they could eat it room temp or he could throw it back in the oven for 5 minutes.  I don’t know what the did, but they enjoyed it.

I had the perfect plan. I got everything for a waste-free lunch even down to the cloth napkins thanks to Etsy.com.

As someone who makes pizza dough by hand all day long, I was totally going to make everything from scratch, including the bread. Like I said, the perfect plan.

Well, hello reality. Look who just showed up!

As I unpacked the groceries on Sunday, I just stared in horror at my pantry filled with processed foods I had banned from my house long ago. Caramel corn rice cakes, store bought sliced bread, and jelly now sit on my shelves. How did this happen?

I’ll tell you how. I am a working mom just trying to figure out in the trenches how to make a healthy lunch that my daughter will eat. (Not because she is a picky eater but because her best friend tells her her lunch is gross everyday.)

I wish I could write that I will implement the perfect plan, but I won’t. My mantra as a mom has always been good enough and today I am reminded of that. Funny how I have to keep re-remembering that. This week’s lunch will be a compromise of homemade and store bought. That will have to be good enough.

I dug up an old recipe I posted last year listing 5 ideas for a brown bag lunch using pizza dough. I’ll make something from here for next week. Good enough, for now anyway.

The beginning of fall means the end of summer vacations, back to school and the return of pizza and movie night for many a household.  You could keep it simple and just put the usual toppings on or you could get inspired and make a pizza topping that ties into a theme with your movie.

Ratatouille is a great movie that all ages can enjoy. Why not rent the movie Ratatouille and make a ratatouille pizza that even Ego, the food critic, would enjoy.

Ratatouille pizza

(This recipe is adapted from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables.)

1 small ( 1/2 a large) eggplant, cut into 3/4 inch cubes

2 small onions

1 large red pepper

2 small zucchini

4 tomatoes

4 cloves garlic, diced

hot pepper flakes (optional)

basil

3/4 cup smoked Gouda cheese, shredded

Cut the eggplant into cubes. Salt it and leave it to drain in a colander.

To peel the skins from the tomatoes, bring a pot of water to boil. Cut a cross in the bottom of the tomatoes. Place in boiling water until the skin starts to peel away from the cut, about 3 minutes. Remove and drain. When cool, remove skins and chop.

Cut up onions, pepper and zucchini into pieces the same size as the eggplant.

Heat olive oil in heavy saute pan. Add the eggplant and gently fry over medium-low heat until it is nice and brown and yummy. Remove from pan.

Add a little more oil as needed. Add onions and saute until they are soft and translucent, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic (and hot pepper flakes if you like) and saute for a couple minutes. Add the remaining vegetables and saute for about 15 minutes, until done. Salt and pepper to taste. When completed, combine

the vegetables and the eggplant. Toss and remove from pan.

Add the tomatoes and basil and saute until tomatoes have cooked down.

When the tomatoes have cooked, remove the basil. Add the vegetables back to the pan and combine. You can make this a day ahead if you would like to let the flavors develop or to save time on pizza night.

Roll out pizza dough. Add ratatouille mixture. Top with cheese and bake in the bottom rack of a 500 degree oven for 8 minutes. If pizza usually takes longer to cook in your oven, leave the cheese off and cook the pizza for 5 minutes before add the cheese. The smoked gouda will burn if you cook it longer than 8 minutes.

Remove pizza from oven and top with fresh basil leaves. Hustle back to the movie to find out if Remy is okay and enjoy!

We went to Hawaii last week for our vacation. It was my first time and I loved it. Besides sitting on the beach watching the sunset, snorkeling and heading to the pool whenever I needed a change of scenery, I enjoyed hunting down and learning about local foods. (I will probably write more about what I learned in later posts.)

I never did find the pickled mango calling out to me from the roadside signs the first day we arrived, but I did manage to learn a lot about pineapples. We took an amazing farm tour of Maui Pineapple Company.  The highlight of the tour was picking your own pineapples to bring home. We gave them out as gifts and saved two for ourselves.

One pineapple will go toward making a pineapple upside-down cake this weekend and the other went on a pizza, of course. Tonight for dinner we had prosciutto pineapple pizza. It was so good.

It is super easy to make. Roll out dough. Top with red sauce. Cover with prosciutto, layering as close as possible. Add cheese and pineapple on top. Bake on the bottom rack of a 500 degree oven for 8-10 minutes.

August is grilling month. Not only is it too hot to turn on the oven in your house, but there are lots of fruits and vegetables that are delicious when grilled. My new favorite combination, peaches and tomatoes, is to die for. A must try.

I got a beautiful basket of multi-colored cherry tomatoes. I thought it would make a beautiful pizza and it did.

Usually, fresh tomatoes have a lot of water that comes out when you cook them making a pizza crust soggy so you have to salt the tomatoes ahead of time to draw the water out. I got brave with the cherry tomatoes. I skipped that step. I put the cheese down first, lots of it, and then topped it with tomatoes. I also used a heartier whole wheat crust. It worked out great.

What do you do when you put fresh tomatoes on a pizza?

We moved into our house 4 years ago and every year we still find surprises. This year, a weed I was too lazy to pull, turned into a fig tree. It provides for a great view outside my kitchen window. We didn’t get many figs, but I was thrilled because a caterer friend tantalized me with tales of making fig and gorgonzola pizza with figs from her tree. It is simple and delicious.

Fig and gorgonzola cheese pizza

1 large yellow onion

about 1/2 pound gorgonzola cheese

8-10 figs, sliced

Slice yellow onion and saute over medium-low heat until nicely caramelized. Roll out pizza dough and brush with olive oil. Spread out on the bottom of the rolled out dough.

Add figs and crumbled gorgonzola cheese. (I used a creamy gorgonzola cheese called dolcelatte gorgonzola but you can use any kind you like.) Salt and pepper to taste.

Bake on the bottom rack of a 500 degree oven for 8-10 minutes, until crust is slightly brown. Remove from oven. Serve hot. Enjoy!