caramelized onion pizza anyone?

I love caramelized everything.  Including caramel corn, though that didn't turn out so hot the last time I made it (typo = 3x too much salt, yuck!).  This week, I grabbed a pizza crust from the freezer when I got home from work and,  voila - when I got back from my ride, it was waiting for me on the counter, ready for cooking.

In an effort to lighten the amount of food that I waste, I'm trying to use what I've got - egg scrambles and pizza crust can help with that.  So this week's pizza was a caramelized onion, garlic, and spinach white pizza.

The crust:
Herbed Whole Wheat Crust (freezes maybe better than it is fresh)
Proof 2 packages of yeast in 2 cups warm water with 1 teaspoon sugar.  Add 3 cups whole wheat flour, 2 cups white flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1-2 tablespoons Herbes de Provence or similar dried herbs. Stir until sticky.  Knead approximately 5-8 minutes incorporating another ~1 cup white flour until it's an elastic ball.  Allow to rise in an oil coated bowl for about 1 hour and divide into 4 crusts.  Wrap tightly with saran wrap to freeze.  Each will make a 10-12" thin crust pizza.

The toppings:
olive oil
garlic
spinach
caramelized red onion
pizza cheese
parmesan romano

Assemble and bake 15' or until done at 425 on a pizza stone dusted with cornmeal.  Yum.

Fresh ginger gelato

Scouring the internet for ginger gelato recipes... As the result of a good-natured bet, I'm making ice cream for my coach, who had some pretty awesome success at track nationals.  Ginger ice cream recipes are easy to find, but no gelato.  For the unintiated, gelato has a lower ratio of heavy cream to milk, so is lower in fat and tends to come out of my little ice cream maker creamier.  So, I modified a basic gelato recipe and a ginger-infused ice cream recipe to come up with this:

Fresh Ginger Gelato
makes 1 1/2-2 quarts

• 4 cups milk - technically, this should be whole milk - I often use 2% - this time it's skim because that's all the co-op had left
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 8 egg yolks
• scant 1 1/2 cups of super fine sugar - this is less sugar than in most American recipes but closer to what my Silver Spoon Italian cookbook recommends for gelato; honestly I think this could be more like 1 cup if you use good milk and cream
• 1 heaping cup of fresh ginger - chopped into 1/2 inch pieces - this seems like a lot but looks like less when it's in the milk - this is about the yield from a 4-6" chunk of ginger

Combine milk, cream, ginger and half the sugar.  Scald over low to medium heat until bubbly, stirring occasionally.  Remove from heat and allow ginger to infuse the milk for 20-30 minutes.  Return to heat and stir constantly until returns to a simmer. Prepare egg yolks by whisking in a large bowl with the remaining sugar until frothy.  Slowly combine hot milk mixture into eggs, whisking constantly to prevent scrambling.  Pour the mixture back into a pan and heat over medium flame with constant stirring until it has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon without erasing a line drawn with a finger (before clumps begin to form!).  Strain custard into another bowl set in an ice water bath to chill the custard (or overnight in fridge). Save approximately 1/4 cup of the ginger chunks from the straining (with their clumpy custard if there is some) and shred in food processor.  Add back to custard before freezing.  Freeze according to your ice cream maker, allowing to harden for a few hours to overnight.  Garnish with small chunks of crystallized ginger.

But what you really wanted was:

Peach Ginger Gelato

So... I made the above and used about a third of it for my peach ginger experiment. Mix 2 cups of pureed fresh, peeled peaches into 3 cups of the cooled custard before freezing.  The edges of the freezer bowl tasting is good but a little too raw. Next time: simmer sauteed peaches with 1T rum and 1/2 cup brown sugar or to taste for about 10 minutes.

Sorry, no pictures this time!  Just yumminess...