walnut, gorgonzola, and caramelized onion pizza

I tried to come up with a more clever name for this amazing Monday night surprise, but knowing that few could resist such an alluring combination, decided to tempt away. I came home at 8 p.m. to the fruits of Mark’s unlikely domestic day: fresh pizza dough and Israeli couscous salad for tomorrow’s lunch. Not to mention the new box of wine sitting in my cupboard, happily plump.

Even when it comes to life’s finer things, sometimes I’m not afraid to admit to a cheap streak. Drinking wine with pizza on a cold and rainy Monday night would otherwise seem too indulgent. That’s the short story of how boxed wine became my best friend.

Let me walk you through this creation we’re just on the brink of perfecting. The first time we made it we used too few onions and our blue cheese wasn’t “blue” enough. Add our too-toasty walnuts to the mix and we had ourselves a disappointment. But I wasn’t prepared to give up on such robust ingredients, waiting there as if to beg me to bring them to justice.

This time we ramped up the caramelized onions, spreading them thick over olive-oil brushed dough rounds.

Then we added the walnuts in chunks big enough to be surprising but small enough to blend in. If you’ve never had nuts on a pizza, you’re in for a treat. (Pine nuts could work well here, too.) After about 7 minutes in a very hot oven, we dotted them with cubes of gorgonzola and placed them back in the oven for 5 more minutes.

The result? A crisp, yet chewy pizza dough (we used this month’s Bon Appetit recipe because of its large, freezable yield), teeming with flavors that almost seem to good to be hanging out together on a pizza. I almost felt guilty finishing mine, but then I remembered how stressed I am, and how food tends to make medium-sized sorrows turn to extra-large joys.

Even if for only 30 sweet, candle-lit minutes.

Walnut, Gorgonzola, and Caramelized Onion Pizza

Ingredients

one prepared, rolled-out round of your favorite pizza dough. This one’s easy, and so is this.
olive oil
4 medium-sized white onions, sliced
1/2 tsp salt
a good-sized piece of gorgonzola or blue cheese of your liking. (The former melts better.)
fresh, shelled walnuts, coarsely chopped
Parmesan cheese

Preparation

1. Make your dough and roll it out into the sizes of pizzas you would like. Dust one side with cornmeal or semolina flour and flip onto a baking sheet, cornmeal-side down. Preheat the oven to 450.
2. Sautee the onions in a little bit of butter or olive oil and 1/2 tsp of salt over medium heat until they have begun to brown. It will probably take about 15 minutes for them to get nice and sweet.
3. When the onions are finished, brush olive oil on each pizza and spread the onions overtop.
4. Sprinkle the walnuts on top of the onions, and bake for 7 minutes on middle racks. If you have a pizza stone, you can slide the pizza from a pizza peel/rimless baking sheet right onto the stone to be baked. It just makes removal difficult if you don’t have a pizza peel.
5. Remove from oven, add crumbled gorgonzola cheese and return to the oven for 5 minutes, or until cheese has melted and before walnuts begin to blacken.
6. Remove, cool slightly, cut, and serve with fresh cracked pepper.