Pita Pizzas

Wednesday 20 June

Though it's officially the first day of summer, Cincinnati's deep heat has already been beating down on us for a while.  So simple, fresh, and cold dinners (and white wine) are what we crave as we crawl in the door. 

Pita pizzas are really lunch items, but if you slut them up enough, you can fool yourself that you're actually cooking dinner even when you're only spreading bought pitas with comestibles and toasting them in the toaster oven (since only a masochist would run a regular oven these days, despite the air conditioner being on high). 

As we snacked on a slice of canteloupe with Schad's ham, we started by draining about a cupful of plain yogurt to make the first topping for each pita.  You need something to interact between pita and cheese; some pizzaioli use crème fraîche, we're told. 

When the yogurt was drained, we spread a thin layer on the first pita, then topped it with sliced fresh tomato, crumbled goat cheese, moroccan olives, and a few torn basil leaves; each pita gets drizzled with olive oil and broiled in the toaster oven for 10 minutes until its top is beginning to brown. 

While the first one browned for the last few minutes, we prepared the next pita: on the pita and yogurt base, we smeared taramasalata, then topped it with caramelized onion. 

The third one's toppings were more tomato, slivered artichokes in oil, and goat cheese.

As they came out of the broiler, we cut them into unequal halves, as Barbara takes the smaller one and Holt the larger.  Though you can ring almost untold changes on the pita pizza, three was about as much as we could handle.