Improvised "Flammekueche"

I came across this flammekueche recipe and decided to improvise it into more of a mini pizza for an easy meal. Using whole wheat pitas as a base, I spread a layer of sour cream and topped it off with proscuitto, red onions, parsley, salt, pepper and nutmeg.

As a side, I made a roasted fig, proscuitto and walnut salad with balsamic dressing.

Pizza Night

I'm still in the midst of unpacking and unsorting my place after the last move, and my sister was nice enough to suffer through collaborating on a pizza dinner while a randomly giant futon frame sat right in the middle of my kitchen/living room/workspace, awaiting removal.

We had come up with the idea of making an Indian Butter Chicken Pizza and an Okonomiyaki Pizza some time ago during a random conversation. So we used the thin crust recipe from The Kitchn and experimented with toppings.

Butter Chicken Pizza

1 portion the thin crust dough, rolled out to 10" diameter
2 cups diced cooked chicken
1/2 cup sauteed onions
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1/2 cup diced yellow and red bell peppers
1 large chopped roma tomato
1 cup President's Choice Indian Butter Chicken Sauce
2 tsps minced garlic

I highly recommend ditching the President's Choice brand sauce in favor of using Sharwood's Butter Chicken sauce, if you are to use a jar sauce to save time. Partially, the reason I only came up with the Butter Chicken Pizza idea was that I had this leftover sauce in my fridge that needed to be used up. The PC brand just doesn't do it--it smells terrific out of the jar, but somehow tastes completely watered down. I would also veto Patak's brand butter chicken sauce if you're looking for something closer to an authentic South Asian flavor.




Okonomiyaki Pizza

2 cups shredded, sauteed cabbage
1 cup chopped baby cuttlefish
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup diced red peppers
1 cup Okonomiyaki sauce

For garnish:
1/2 cup shredded dried nori
2 tsps dried bonito flakes
2 tsps chopped green onion
a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds
a generous drizzle of Kewpie mayonnaise




Didn't have any okonomiyaki sauce on hand, so we raided my fridge and mixed tonkatsu sauce, Worchestershire sauce and ketchup to make a reasonably tasty approximation of it. I'm sure numerous variations of okonomiyaki pizza can be made--minced pork, scrambled egg, soba noodles, mashed potato, octopus, shrimp, dried anchovies can all be added or substituted. The hard part is fitting everything in--our okonomiyaki pizza was more of a mountain, as we observed the cuttlefish and mushrooms slowly cascade downwards in the oven! Oh yeah, and it tasted really really good.