grilled pizza and a copycat eggplant

Grilled pizza is a fantastic thing here at our house. It is hands down the best pizza ever. In fact we never ever order pizza out anymore because nothing ever compares to ours. Not to toot our own horn or anything. (toot? we don't even own a horn). Nathan is our resident dough master. I have been left to make pizza dough once and it came out very bad. I blamed it on the 400% humidity and 98 degree weather of that day, however Nathan isn't so sure. Funny though I can make a mean baguette, ciabatta, or any other yeasted bread without a problem. But I digress....pizza.

This round consisted of a "taco pizza" and an artichoke heart, green olive and chicken sausage variety. The taco had salsa, smashed black beans, ground beef and queso fresco courtesy of Narragansett Creamery. The latter had artichoke hearts, green olives with marinated in lemon and garlic, hot italian chicken sausage and fresh mozzarella also courtesy of my favorite cheese people, Narragansett Creamery.
If you've never tried grilled pizza I highly recommend it. It takes some skill to get the crust right, but my good god it really is quite fantastic.


For the weekly eating experience I tried to recreate an eggplant dish that Last Night's Dinner
inspired me to try. The eggplant and cheese did me in and I had to have it for myself. So my version took eggplant sliced lengthwise, roasted for a few minutes to get soft. I also tossed some more chicken sausage in the oven (it was on sale at Whole Foods) because Nathan really likes his protein. Once the eggplant was softened sufficiently I topped it with slice fresh mozzarella, again Narragansett Creamery, and some grated pecorino romano and popped those babies in the broiler to get super toasty. Nothing is complete in this house without some kind of sauce. To satisfy that I chopped up a whole mess of garlic, softly sauteed it in olive oil and right as the eggplant was done threw in some chopped fresh tomato. To give it all a bed to lie on until being devoured I cooked a bunch of swiss chard, because I could eat greens with everything.