happy pizza friday, dudes and dudettes!!!

eggboy and eggmom are currently in the living room rehearsing--eggboy on trombone, eggmom on the piano--for their big show this weekend at the town heritage days! they're playing all-american tunes like yankee doodle and america the beautiful and i'm feeling like i should stand up at attention throughout this whole band practice (licking the lips, on the verge tears, michael phelps-style, you know?). but obvi i've got pizza on the mind since it's friday.

there is this magical zucchini that's been in our refrigerator for weeks now. it's massive and i don't think it's ever going to go bad. i bought it for this pizza but only ended up using a small part of it and so every day for the past five days i've intended on making the chocolate zucchini muffins from love and lemons' book but then a cold attacked and i've been trying to brute force this shit out of my system by way of vegetables and yogurt. or maybe it's allergies and then i think the yogurt makes it worse? oh screw it. i'm making those muffins today.

ok, so, the yas queen pizza is pretty much exactly this pasta but with pizza dough and zucchini instead of pappardelle. i made it over the fire on fourth of july and it was a crowd and twitter favorite. it is so bright and summery and a worthy departure from saucy pies.

the yas queen pizza

(zucchini, feta, fresh mint, preserved lemon, garlic, pine nuts, harissa, jazz hands!)

1. make a batch of jim lahey's pizza dough and give it its full rising. (feel free to use another dough but the temps and timings here are for jim's dough)

2. preheat the oven to 500ºf, divde the dough in half, and flatten it out into a 10-11" circle on a floured surface or piece of parchment

3. top with a layer of thinly sliced zucchini (use a mandoline or vegetable peeler), brush it with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, top with a handful of crumbled feta, toasted pine nuts, chopped garlic, and chopped rinsed preserved lemon (you could also sub out a squeeze of fresh lemon after baking)

4. bake until the crust is browned and splotchy, begin checking for doneness at 7 minutes

5. sprinkle with fresh mint and splatter paint with harissa

6. enjoy!

and here is a very mediocre method of cooking a pizza over a fire (a.k.a. a cry for help): put a baking steel over a fire, either by propping it up with heat-safe bricks or a metal rack, and heat it up. slide your assembled pizza on and cover it with an inverted cake pan. this is kinda janky. check every so often to make sure the bottom doesn't completely char. when it's about to burn on the bottom and the top is cooked just past raw dough status, it's basically edible. top with mint and harissa.

-yeh!