There are lots of cooks out there who actually know what they are doing. I pretty much taught myself to cook, out of necessity. I haven’t a clue most of the time, but I do love to eat. Of course, take and bake pizza is a cheat but this is, after all, Cooking For Guys. Besides, this post is as much a brag about a successful mushroom hunt as it is about pizza.
Amy, Andy and I took the sidecars up the ridge to look for morels. Amy has an eagle’s eyes, and spotted the first patch in the middle of the road after my brother had already driven past them. She repeated this trick numerous times throughout the afternoon.
It has been warm and rainy; much of what we found was past its prime, buggy and rotten. The best specimens seemed to be right in the road.
Ingredients
- 1 plain cheese take and bake pizza
- 1/2# (more or less) ground sausage
- A double handful of wild mushrooms ( we used fresh morels this time, but we have done this with chanterelles and boletes, too)
- sliced olives
- onion
- garlic
- zucchini
- tomato
- salt, pepper, tarragon, to taste
- a splash of red wine
Take & Bake Wild Mushroom Pizza
When we got home, Amy took a Papa Murphy’s plain cheese pizza out of the freezer. While she was browning some sausage, I cut up and sautéed morels in butter with onion, garlic and a splash of red wine. I seasoned the mushrooms to taste with salt, pepper, and tarragon. It would be even better to cook these with the sausage, but my wife doesn’t like mushrooms so we were keeping them separate and made the pizza half with morels and half without.
When the morels were done and the sausage brown and crumbled, Amy spread the fixings across the pizza, adding sliced zucchini, olives, and tomatoes to the mix. She popped it in the oven and twenty minutes later, dinner was served.
