Swiss Chard Pizza

Well, the 90 degree days of summer means the end of our swiss chard. The past few weeks, I have used the kale and chard in pasta dishes, with some sausage and mushrooms, it's a fullproof one-pot dinner. But I wanted to try something different this week, a sort of last hurrah for the chard. I've had pizza before with spinach and cheese and thought..why not chard? It's greens, just like spinach. So, I thought of all the things I like on my pizza (I'm more of white pizza kind of girl, or woman, or old lady..wait I'm getting depressed), back to what I like on my pizza: garlic, olive oil, mozzarella cheese. It doesn't take much to please me.

The first thing I did was make the pizza dough in my bread machine. You can use your favorite pizza dough recipe, or just buy some from the store. While that was doing it's thing, I made the garlic oil. I simmered garlic cloves in olive oil (red pepper flakes would have been a good addition too). I made a little extra so that I would have some to spread on some bruschetta later. Don't you love it when I plan ahead? Sometimes I am so together, other times not so much so.

While the dough was resting and the garlic oil was steeping, I chopped and cooked the chard. If you haven't cooked much with greens before, I've included two pictures, a sort of before-and-after for you. See the big huge pot of greens, too much for one pizza, right? Wrong! See the tiny pile of greens? That's after about 2 minutes of sauteing.

Before:

After:

Swiss Chard Pizza
Serves ? (depends on how much you eat)

1 recipe (or bought) pizza dough
1 bunch swiss chard (stems removed, roughly chopped)
¼ cup olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 ball fresh mozarella cheese
¼ cup parmesan cheese
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 500.

Make or buy pizza dough. Pour olive oil in a small pot and add minced garlic. Heat over medium heat until bubbles appear around garlic. Reduce heat to low and let steep for about 30 minutes. Strain out garlic and pour oil into a jar.

Swirl a little olive oil in a skillet over medium heat and saute swiss chard until wilted, about 3 minutes.

Roll out pizza dough. Brush on garlic oil. If you wish (and I did) sprinkle on some of the strained garlic. Spread the swiss chard evenly over the pizza and season with salt and pepper. Top with parmesan cheese and break apart the mozzarella and dot over the pizza. Bake on a pizza stone (or on a baking sheet) for 10-12 minutes.

This was sooo good! The chard that was not covered by cheese got all brown and crunchy, and that under the cheese stayed all soft and green. I was so proud of myself, thinking that I finally came up with something new. Something that I hadn't read about, or saw a recipe for, and then guess what...a couple days after I made this, I was watching Jamie at Home , and he put swiss chard on a pizza!!! At first I was bummed because apparently my idea was not a new one, but then I got all stoked because I had the same idea as Jamie!!!! How cool is that?