Harvest Meal: Old Meets New Pizza

Fully fledged harvest meals have been a little hard to come by lately.  Even this pizza is a bit of a stretch given that neither the cheese nor the dough are homegrown items.  But everything else on this pizza was either grown on my property, or I had a direct hand in.  It struck me that the toppings are an interesting mixture of a few long-storing items from last year and the earliest crops of this year.

It's April already, and while the fresh garlic that remains from last July's harvest is definitely sprouty, it's still usable.  I think we owe this to the root cellar.  Last year In 2008 I had to dehydrate all that remained of our homegrown garlic by late December.  Garlic is always a key component when we make pizza.  Rather than a tomato sauce, a few of our smoked tomatoes, rehydrated in hot water for a few minutes, gave a tomatoey intensity to about every other bite of pizza.  Although it's hard to see in the picture, I also added a few thinly shaved pieces of the lardo experiment that ended up smoked.  Laid on top of the other ingredients, these shriveled up and began to crisp deliciously during the very brief time the pizza spent in a hot oven. The bites including these little pieces of lardo were unctuously delicious!

From this year's garden came the spinach, shredded and spread over the pie, and a few scallions chopped up for just a hint of oniony goodness.

Can I just say how hard it was to stop and take a picture of that pizza instead of tearing into it immediately?  Yesterday's fine weather had me doing plenty of outdoor work, and I was hungry by the time that pizza came out of the oven.  Fortunately, I made two of these pizzas, one of which is leftover and will be my lunch on the road today.  I'm going to New Jersey to pick up my fig trees.  Part of yesterday's work was finishing up the self-watering containers they're to be planted in.  I should have a post on that very soon.