Asparagus, fingerling potato, and goat cheese pizza – Pizza Clack

asparagus-pizza

Man, I wish I could be more like Debbie. She makes her own spelt pizza dough; I buy the pre-made Harris Teeter-brand dealie. She cooks exciting things that she just has laying around the house; I have to go on a grocery excursion. She’s finding inventive ways to cut carbs from her diet; I decide that throwing potatoes on a pizza would be a totally rad idea.

The thing is, it really is a rad idea. Sure, potatoes on a pizza may not exactly up the health quotient, but damn, does it make a good dinner. I’ve been completely obsessed with asparagus lately, so I searched around for new asparagus dishes and found this asparagus, fingerling potato and goat cheese pizza.

I enjoy all of these ingredients, but I wouldn’t necessarily think to put them together on a pizza. I’m always wary of sauceless pizzas, but I decided to give this one a go. Besides, with three different kinds of cheese (goat, mozzarella and parmesan), I figured it would probably be cool.

The key to any good pizza is that it be simple. This one doesn’t disappoint. You throw the potatoes in a pan of water and basically just let them cook while the oven is pre-heating. After that, the only time consuming part is the slicing. Cutting the potatoes is no big deal, but I’m not exactly a graceful cutter (note to self: when you form that emo band, name it “Graceful Cutter”), so slicing the asparagus spears in half was comically difficult for me.

I really should have just gotten a pizza mix, but I saw the prepared crust first, so I grabbed that. It’s a white pizza, so instead of sauce, you just rub the dough with garlic and olive oil. Like always, I tripled the amount of garlic they called for, because garlic is God’s way of telling us, “I love you.” I also just sliced the mozzarella and used it as a base instead of grating it. Other than that, it was just a matter of stacking.

It turned out amazingly. The mozzarella got all brown and bubbly around the edges, and the asparagus got baked and crispy. It was obviously very filling– it is mainly bread, cheese and potatoes after all, but at the same time, it was light; if you could believe that. Maybe it’s because it didn’t have a sauce or a lot of gooey cheese, but it turned out to be a nice, summery pizza. Maybe one day I’ll make things out of spelt, but in the meantime, I’m going to have a glass of wine and eat potatoes on my pizza.