Welcome along with Grilled Rainbow Chard, Mushroom and Bresaola Pizza

I have been meaning to do this for a while as a writing exercise and it is, firstly, an attempt to get me to write something regularly every day.  That being said, I believe and hope that my “exercise” will not prove as boring as that designation suggests and will impart some random bits of food knowledge to you the gentle reader.  I use “gentle reader” because, as many of you might know, I am student of the writing in England’s seventeenth century, when everyone seemed to begin their books with a similar salutation.  My focus in that period is culinary texts - books and letters and pamphlets about food preparation – including what I consider the first real cookbooks.  The name of this blog comes from one such work called The Accomplisht Cook. So I am going share some of that with you but do not dismay if historical food is not your thing.  Old English food will be accompanied by my thoughts on: the culinary television I get a chance to watch, my rare visits to restaurants and, like today, things that I cooked, either based on recipes or improvised.  So please enjoy and I will try to provide some useful and interesting (I avoid the food pun “morsels” here) bits.  

Grilled Rainbow Chard, Mushroom and Bresaola Pizza

We decided to make up a few different healthy pizzas a few days ago, all with seasonal farmers' market vegetables that had been grilled on the barbeque.  This was our favourite combination of the bunch. Bresaola is an Italian prepared meat in which very lean beef is dry-cured for two or three months.  A decent Italian deli should have it.  I was doing a bunch of vegetables, so the chard and onions are grilled but you could as easily but you fry them in a pan with a little oil until slightly caramelized.  We happened to have oyster mushrooms, which were really nice, but a mix of most any kind would work.  

One of my favourite products is the Artisan Salt Co.’s Alder Smoked and it gives a really strong flavour but Maldon smoked salt can be used or any regular coarse salt in a pinch. 

After I finished this recipe I realized that I had some Stilton blue cheese in the fridge which would have work very well on this pizza, but then it would not have been nearly as healthy.

Makes 1 large pizza

·         Pizza dough for a 12 inch pie (We used this part whole-wheat recipe. It is quick and makes a nice crispy crust.)

·         1 cup of part-skim shredded mozzarella

·         ½ small onion, medium sliced carefully, keeping rings together

·         6 medium to large stalks of rainbow chard, leaves removed, chopped and reserved; stalks chopped into ½ inch dice.  

·         1 cup of mushrooms chopped

·         200 grams of bresaola, thinly sliced at the deli

·         Good extra virgin olive oil

·         Smoked sea salt to taste

Instructions:

Preheat your oven to 500° F and set barbeque to medium.

Sprinkle a pizza pan or cookie sheet with corn meal, roll out pizza dough quite thin and place on, forming to the sides.  Sprinkle the mozzarella evenly over.  (This is really not a whole lot of cheese, only enough to hold the other toppings in place and give a little flavour)

Grill chard stalks and onion slices (this was a bit tricky but possible with a large grill flipper) until just beginning to show char.  Scatter them over cheese.  Do the same with the mushrooms.

Place pizza in the oven and cook for about 5-7 minutes until the crust is just barely coloured.  Remove and place on slices of bresaola and the chard leaves.  Dress with olive oil and smoked sea salt and return to oven only until leaves are wilted.

The taste is brings a combination of the earthiness of the mushrooms and chard, the almost iron taste of cured beef and the smoke from grilling.  I apologize, I did mean to take a picture of a piece to show but the last one got eaten before I had a chance.

Enjoy and watch this space, as they say.