Spring veggie pizzas

After work last Friday, I left the farm with an armload of leftover produce (okay, so it was a shopping bag, an overflowing shopping bag) and headed home for the weekend with fresh Harmony Valley arugula, spinach, salad mix, green garlic, and some tiny red beets leftover (and still fresh!) from the fall.
My parents and sister were visiting for the weekend, and I thought it would be a fun idea to have a few neighbors over for a little pizza party. My mother was concerned that cooking for 11 people might not be a relaxing way to spend a day off; I tactfully pointed out that after cooking for 35 people a day, dinner for 11 ain't no thang.
For pizza # 1, I finely chopped several bunches of green garlic, then pureed it in the blender with olive oil and a little apple cider vinegar. I spread it raw on an uncooked pizza crust and topped it with mozzarella and sliced summer sausage.
For pizza #2, I roasted all those tiny little beets with olive oil until super tender, then peeled them and pureed them with balsamic vinegar, oil, oregano, and black pepper. I spread this on my pizza crust as the sauce for a pizza featuring fresh chopped morels (the last of my stash for this year!) simmered in butter, Fontina cheese, and a little bit of Sterling Country Jack goat cheese. Yum.
Pizza #3 was a simple combo of sundried tomato, Capri goat feta, and lots of chopped spinach with just a little olive oil.
Served it all with a huge lovely bowl of salad and a maple balsamic vinaigrette.
So how did it turn out? Well, definite thumbs-up to the green garlic sauce. Try it. The pie's cooking time was just long enough to take the edge off the raw garlic bite, but it was still robust enough to be fun ("fun" and "garlicy" are basically synonyms in my mind.) I have been having a reeeeeeeally good time with the green garlic these last few weeks.
The morel and beet pizza was equally delightful, although the flavor of the morels sort of got buried in all of those other ingredients. I tried to select milder cheeses for this one, and felt that the earthy flavor of beets would be a nice complement to the tasty wild mushrooms. I guess the mushroom to crust ratio was just a little low. Eh, c'est la vie. There's always next year.

Spring Field Tour

Read this week's CSA newsletter for the (loose) narrative. Here's the pictures to go with it (taken Sunday, May 10 - love you Mom!):

Sunchoke, (Richard goofy on) spring radish, spring spinach, lettuce, garlic field, freckles, currant blossom, blueberry blossom, asparagus, arugula under cover.

yum.