Broccoli and Cheese on a Boboli® (Pizza Night!) Plus Bonus: How to Grow Celery

UPDATE:  It's a pet peeve, but I don't like reading a blog post about how someone starts a new venture.  I want to hear how it turned out, as well.  So scroll down and see the rest of the celery story.

This is clearly not a pizza.  I felt kind of bad posting something so simple to make, like the pizza below, so since I've had some questions about it on my FB page, I've included a bonus How to Start Celery on your Kitchen Windowsill below the recipe. Though it's also incredibly simple to do. Pizza now:

There are times when my best intentions (of making dough Monday before heading out of town, knowing that we're rolling home Friday afternoon hours before Friday Night Pizza Night happens) are OBE. (Is this common knowledge or one of those military acronyms?)

OBE:  Overcome By Events.

This was one of those times.  No pizza dough in the house, though I had plenty of sauce, cheese, veggie, and meat topping choices in the pantry and freezer.  Had I hit Trader Joes, I would have picked up some of their bags of pizza dough.  But our beer/milk/eggs run took me to the rare grocery store that had no pizza dough. Not in the deli.  Not in the freezer section.  Ok, pre-baked crust it is.

I got a Boboli® instead.  I was surprised at the high cost of a Boboli® crust--a bag of uncooked dough is less than half  the cost of a Boboli and isn't that much harder to work with! [I bought the Boboli® myself and this post is completely unknown to the Boboli® corporation, but I feel I should clarify in case you were wondering.]

If you have a pathological fear of uncooked pizza dough and will only use a prebaked crust such as Boboli®, rock on.  You too can make amazing pizzas using ingredients from your CSA farm share.

Because we love pizza here on Friday nights, I bought 2 Boboli® and made 2 pizzas. (And will write 2 blog posts from 1 meal).  This one is the kiddie pizza--because during the grocery store run, while not finding dough, I found a marked down bag of precut broccoli florets.

Ok, so the Italian cheese didn't get used and I forgot the broccoli in the photo. Eep!

Broccoli and Cheese on a Boboli

1 prepared pre-baked pizza crust, like Boboli
1 cup chopped broccoli
1/2 cup Fresh Tomato Pesto (using arugula for the leaf and cashew for the nut, from my freezer stash)
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar Jack cheese

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  Preheat on medium heat a small skillet with a dab of oil in it.  Sauté the broccoli until bright green, about 3 minutes.  Set aside.  On a plain old ordinary piece of parchment paper, no oil needed this time, spread tomato pesto across the Boboli.  Top with broccoli.  Scatter cheeses evenly across the top.  Bake 8-10 minutes.  Cool, slice, and serve.

Ok, now for your late winter, when is spring coming? bonus:  next time you finish a bunch of celery, stick the end in a shallow dish of water.  Bonus points if the dish was hand-selected by your spouse when you lived in Japan (and has crossed oceans a few times without breakage) and if you're using rain water.  In a few days, you'll notice the center getting taller, like the one on the right.  Then, if you don't forget to water it, your celery will grow and grow, forming roots and multiple branches. 

Yes, it was cold enough for ice on the inside of my kitchen window.

I could feed these branches to the composting guinea pigs, but I decided to keep growing them and transplant them into my garden come spring.  They did amazing!  I thought the varmints would go after them, but they chose my tender dill, fennel, and parsley instead.  I'm harvesting celery by the handful!

I have no experience with celery in a container, but my guess is that with good soil and good drainage, celery will grow in a pot.  If you try it, let me know.

Simon photobombs again.  After standing in front of me, barking at squirrels, he finally lay down.

My re-grown celery makes a great dipper for hummus with garlic scape and basil pesto.

This post is linked up with the Farm Girl Blog Fest at Let This Mind Be In You, the Creative Homeacre Blog Hop at Self Sufficient Home Acre,  with What's Cookin Wednesday at Buns In My Oven the Wednesday Fresh Foods Link Up at Gastronomical Sovereignty, What's In The Box at In Her Chucks, Green Thumb Thursday  Food on Friday and Taste and Tell Thursdays.