I think we've finally found a good pumpkin dinner. And it uses a big onion. Excellent when the vegie box sends a surfeit of onions and pumpkin.
Ingredients
a 12 cm wedge of Jap pumpkin
a big brown onion
a sachet of tomato paste
2 heaped soup spoons of roast garlic paste
3 or 4 mushrooms
some pitted olives
some grated mozzarella cheese
some dried or fresh rosemary
a serve of ready made pizza dough (when I make pizza dough I make enough for 3 pizza dinners and freeze it)
To make
In advance
- Get the pizza dough out of the freezer sometime before lunch to allow it to defrost (unless you have a microwave, in which case you can defrost it that way).
- Peel and cut the pumpkin into slices about 1a nd a 1/2 cm thick. Place on a oiled tray and bake in medium hot oven until soft all the way through and starting to loose a little moisture.
- Slice the onion into rings and place in a heavy frypan on a low heat with a smidge of olive oil, some fresh or dried rosemary and a sprinkling of salt. Cover and cook on a low heat. Stir occasionally. The onion should collapse and turn a kind of golden colour without burning. When it's nearly done, cook for a short while without a lid to allow some of the moisture to cook off.
- Pit the olives and slice the mushrooms.
To assemble
- Oil the pizza trays.
- Roll and press out dough.
- Splodge some tomato paste and roast garlic paste onto each pizza. Mix together and coat pizza bases with the back of a spoon.
- Arrange pumpkin slices, mushrooms, olives, onion and rosemary mixture on each pizza. Cover thinly with mozzarella cheese.
- Bake in a hot oven, rotating at the half way mark. About five minutes before they are ready, slip the pizzas off their pans (I use a flat baking sheet to handle the pizzas when doing this) and bake directly on the oven rack to crisp up the bases.
- Remove from oven, slice and serve.
