Petruchio’s Pomegranate Pizza And A Veggie One

Many learned people speculate about a great many things regarding the romantic lead in The Bard’s The Taming of the Shrew. One of the most famous of debates is, of course, about what the gentleman from Verona liked to eat. Numerous scholarly essays exist on the topic.

No? Of course not. There are many novels and  non-fiction books out there, very, very fine ones, that never bother to mention anything about food. But my memory gravitates most readily to those with famous food scenes or references. Proust’s madeleines? Check. Scarlett’s memories of the ante-bellum groaning board during the post-war starvation at Tara, with its three desserts at every dinner and just as many kinds of breads? I can recite the menu from memory. Francie’s pickle days, those days when after far too many days in a row of the stale, re-purposed 5 cent loaves of bread on which her poor Brooklyn tenement family survived, she just had to have a pickle? To this day, I can’t eat a whole dill pickle without thinking about that one from the bottom of the barrel that she made the Jewish shopkeeper fish out.

I can’t yet ponder what Petruchio must have liked to eat. It seems premature at this stage, when I have just begun to read it **. The pizza connection is to Italy, and the pomegranate connection is to its season, which is right now. I picked some up at the store this afternoon after beginning the read on the bike at the gym. This entry is titled purely from an alliterative sense, after I saw the pizza dough in the deli and knew what I wanted for dinner.

Grilled pizza is a delicious thing, and while it’s hard to replicate the smokiness of an actual grill in the cramped apartment kitchen, my stove top grill pan works out just fine. I went through a cast iron skillet pizza phase, and never seemed to get the knack of temperature control, frequently burning the bottom before the dough in the middle baked. But with the grill pan, I have been reliably able to turn out a tasty dish.

I had decided to go with grilled veggie and pesto pizza, but when the pomegranates winked at me, I thought: blue cheese. Red onion. Arugula. A light brush with olive oil. 

These recipes use one half of the dough for each pizza. Mangia!

Veggies and pizza #1

Grilled Veggie Pizza

·         One red and one green bell pepper, cut in three pieces each, so they’ll lie relatively flat on the grill
·         One red onion, halved and then sliced crosswise into about 5 or 6 slices
·         Sliced mushrooms
·         Sliced heirloom tomato
·         Fresh mozzarella, sliced into thin pieces and Parmesan for finishing
·         Prepared pesto (I use reduced fat Buitoni)
·         Refrigerated pizza dough, brought to room temperature (I use whole wheat from Vons deli section usually)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Heat stove top grill pan on very high heat. When smoking hot, give it a spray with some olive oil and put on the peppers, turning once until soft and starting to blacken, about 7 minutes a side. Remove them and grill onion slices, continuing through the mushroom stage.When the peppers are cool enough to touch, remove the skin and slice thinly.

While grilling the veggies in stages, take the pizza dough, divide in half and form each half into a ball. With floured board and rolling pin, roll out the half and with floured hands, begin to gently pull the pizza in the air until you form a rectangular shape sized a little less than the diameter of the grill pan. Invert a large bowl and dust it with flour. Lay the prepared half across the bowl. This helps keep the dough stretched and from retracting. Repeat with the other half.

Ready for the oven

Wipe pan and return to heat, reducing the heat slightly. Give it another spray of oil and lay the dough on the pan. After about 2 to 3 minutes, turn it over and repeat timing until the dough is about 80% cooked and has gorgeous grill marks. It will puff up quite a bit during cooking. Lay the pizza on a cookie sheet and brush it with a light coating of the pesto. Top with onions, then peppers and mushrooms, finishing with the tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Top with mozzarella and Parmesan. Slide cookie sheet into the oven for about 7 minutes to lightly melt the cheese, finish cooking the dough and warm all the toppings.

You will have leftover veggies. They are wonderful tossed with hot pasta, leftover pesto and Parmesan.

Ready for their close up, Mr. DeMille

Grilled Pizza with Blue Cheese, Pomegranate Seeds and Arugula

• Second half of the refrigerated pizza dough
• Blue cheese, crumbled
Leftover grilled onions

• Pomegranate seeds*
• Baby arugula, lightly dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper

Preheat the oven and grill the dough as in the first recipe. When on the cookie sheet, brush it lightly with olive oil, and then top first with the onion, then the blue cheese and seeds. Pop in the oven for about 7 minutes to warm the toppings and finish cooking the dough.  When removed, put a good couple of handfuls of the arugula on top.

* Best way to remove seeds from a pomegranate without making your kitchen walls and floor look like a shootout scene from Inglourious Basterds is to cut it in half and hold it upside down over a bowl. Knock on the back of it with a heavy wooden spoon until the seeds have all dropped into the bowl.

** I finished it this morning. Turns out, yes, there is a food scene, after Petruchio brings his reluctant bride home to his apparently appallingly-run bachelor estate. A hasty dinner is ordered but Kate is discouraged from eating anything because Petruchio in taming mode throws the mutton to the floor, and by Petruchio's manservant, who insists that anything the kitchen might have on hand will be choleric. Fat tripe, beef and mustard, beef alone, mustard alone, fowl with or without accompaniment, all choleric.

He may have been being sensitive to the idea of the wedding night.Not a good time to be choleric.

This is a very racy play in some parts. Wasps carrying their stinger in their tails, and Kate wants to rip P's tongue out, to which he replies, What, with my tongue in your tail? nay, come again, Good Kate; I am a gentlemen. You tell ME what you think THAT means.