Delayed Gratification... But Gratification

Knowing in advance that we would be out of town for our weekly vegetable delivery, we authorized (read: cajoled) A. and K. to pick up our CSA box from the porch and do with it what they liked.

When we returned home yesterday, they gave us the contents. This, I guess, is what they liked. A. and K. have their own garden, you see. But it's an act of kindness all the same.

Judging from the contents of the box, it would seem that things are starting to pick up. The results remain similar to those of previous weeks:

A small head of iceburg lettuce
A bag of mixed lettuce
A nosegay of kale
A crown of broccoli
Four green onions
A bag of mange-tout snap peas.

In addition, I bought from the farmer's market today a dozen or so garlic scapes, a packet of micro-greens, and some fresh fingerling beets with their greens intact. I'm especially pleased with the garlic scapes, which I'd never used before. They're magnificent: imagine a long bean that tastes like garlic. Eaten raw, they're rather strong, yet much more edible than the garlic bulb. Sautéed, they become much milder and sweeter in flavor.

As a result of this produce surge, virtually everything we ate today was grown within 25 miles of us. We had salad greens with our lunch and dinner. We made an omelet with garlic scapes. And for supper we made pizzas on the grill.

Grilled pizzas are a summer favorite, and for the first time I actually bothered to make the dough. Please don't judge me: it's mighty simple-- especially for a crowd-- to pick up prepared dough from the pizza parlor, and it costs almost nothing. So there's never been much need to make the dough from scratch, and thus I'd never done it. Now I have. The earth still turns on its axis.

For unlike the fussiness of oven-baked pizza, with its algorithms and alembics, grilled pizzas derive their appeal from the intense heat of the grill. They cook quickly and effectively, with wonderful crispness and irregularity. They have, I am sure, a strong following, in spite of remaining one of those cookbook secrets tucked away somewhere in the back pages near the beans, or the desserts and novelty cocktails. But they're a summer marvel; David Rosengarten raves about them in the Dean & Deluca. Ditto Steven Raichlen in his Barbecue Bible. And rightly so: there's no home pizza, in my mind, that comes even close to the texture and flavor of the crispy little pizzas you can make on the grill.

Here's how it works: you heat half the grill to high and half to low. On the hot part you lay out a thin square or a triangle of dough and let it bake for 30-45 seconds, until the dough starts to bubble and firm up. Then flip the dough, and cook the top side for about a minute. Flip again, and move the pizza crust to the cooler side. Then add the toppings; the residual heat from the grill will warm them. We don't use a lot of cheese, so melting things isn't our priority. But it does work; you just can't load the thing up like some Pizza Hut leviathan. This is, shall we say, more subtle fare.

With our vegetable bounty we made four small pizzas. Beforehand I cooked some Italian sausages and roasted a few cherry tomatoes in the oven. I also sautéed up some garlic scapes with the beet greens, adding a little chicken stock and cooking until the greens softened. I did the same thing with the kale and broccoli. These became the toppings; later in the summer, when tomatoes are in season, we'll trot out the more traditional favorites.

Our menu tonight consisted of the following:

Pizza #1: sausage, beet greens, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza#2: kale/broccoli, tomatoes, Parmesan, olive oil
Pizza #3: sausage, kale/broccoli, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza #4: Parmesan, olive oil, black pepper.