Farm to Table: Polenta Pizza with Herbed Cashew Ricotta & Summer Veggies
Why is it that you don’t really want something until you can’t have it? I guess it’s in our nature to want what is forbidden. In order to curb the mind wandering, I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m talking about food here. More specifically, glutinous things. Since developing a gluten intolerance, it seems to have triggered cravings for everything I can’t have. Pizza! Baguette! Those not-so-good-for-me-pastries at Starbucks! It’s been a bit rough. Since I don’t really live in a gluten-free friendly town, I can cry about it, or, I can suck it up and make gluten free versions myself. (I chose the latter in case you were wondering…)
Pizza has been my main craving lately. I guess there’s just something really comforting about being about to top a warm crust with whatever strikes your fancy. I made a pizza several weeks ago (mentioned in this post and using this crust), and it was okay. The crust was a bit dense and bready, but it was pretty good for starters. Since then I’ve been looking around for dough inspiration and making little notes on post-its (as I tend to do with everything). Last week I happened to come across a recipe on edible perspective using cooked polenta as a pizza crust. I forgot to write it down so it got filed in the back of my brain until I saw this pin on pinterest yesterday. I figured it was worth a shot so I immediately sorted out my plan of attack.
I’m not the biggest fan of tomato sauce on my pizza, so I decided to use a cashew ricotta instead. To keep with a summery vibe, I added fresh herbs to the ricotta and topped everything off with some lovely veggies from the farmers market. To be honest, I half thought that the polenta crust would fail. But, I kind of didn’t care if it did because it only meant that I would eat the “polenta pizza” out of a bowl instead. Well, it didn’t fail. In fact it was a marvelous success that had me exercising restraint not to eat an extra piece. Oh, and in case you were like hey, but I thought you weren’t going to bake anything?! I made an exception because we had some cloudy weather and rain, meaning the high yesterday was only 80. Awesome.
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