There’s a new sensation in my house

Grilled Pizza

I know, we came to this one a little late since grilled pizzas are showing up everywhere, but that’s okay.  While I will never be confused as being cutting edge, I do tend to make a mean dish once I finally hop on the culinary bandwagon.

And I have jumped on this bandwagon with both feet.

Grilled Pizza – The Beginning

To begin my initiation, I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some of their regular pizza crust (regular as in note whole grain.)  My wife makes a mean pizza crust, but frankly both of us had had long weeks. Thus we made the not-terribly-difficult decision to pay the $3 and let the fine folks at Whole Foods take care of all our crust needs.  Plus,  Whole Foods pizza crust is pretty darn good.

When I got my crust home, I figured we’d want to have pizza with caramelized onions, so I got them started.  Then, I divided the pizza dough into four smaller balls, rolled them out flat, and let them rest.

But what to do about toppings?

Grilled Pizza and Laughing Cow Cheese

A long, long time ago the good folks at Laughing Cow cheese sent me a coupon for a free sample, which, of course, I accepted.  Because I am kind of a big dummy, I never actually used the darn thing, but that’s okay since my wife keeps a pretty steady supply in the house.  (Sorry for the anecdote, but for FTC purposes, I wanted to say something.  I mean I did receive free product, I just never really used it.  Silly FTC.)  Anway, she loves the stuff and puts it on toast, crackers, tomatoes, etc.  Edit: that never happened.  It was Alouette and Chavrie that sent me coupons.  They’re obviously much better for it.

I wasn’t even thinking about it at first.  As I was trying to figure out how to top my resting crusts, I settled on doing a balsamic/caramelized onion jam and goat cheese pizza.  The problem: no goat cheese!  But, as stated above, we did have Laughing Cow Swiss cheese. 

You know, sometimes it’s okay not to have all the ingredients you wanted…

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Caramelized Onion Gratin

I have no idea how this recipe slipped through the cracks.  It’s the thing my wife requests I make the most.  It’s

Caramelized Onion Gratin 

Hurray!

What?  Gratin I say?  Yes, gratin.

Wait!  Like au gratin?  Well, sort of.

See, I used to think that all gratins were au gratins, like potatoes au gratin, which is potatoes sliced and then baked with cream, butter, and cheese.  However, I attended a cooking class at the Kansas City Culinary Institute where we made these awesome little appetizers which Chef Cody Hogan called gratins (that’s gruh-TAN rather GRAW-tun like I was used to).  Anyway, it got me scrambling over to Wikipedia to get the 411 on exactly what a gratin is.

According to that venerable font of knowledge, a gratin is a baked dish with a browned crust on it, traditionally from bread crumbs or cheese.  In the case of this gratin, we use Parmesan cheese sprinkled on some slowed cooked, caramelized onions for a little browning.

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