Zucchini-Crusted Mexican Pizza

Zucchini is almost always a sure-fire garden vegetable, often to the point of ridiculous returns on the investment of a few seeds. We even planted ours in semi-shade this year to slow it down, and we’ve still managed to pick more than we can typically eat as a side dish. In addition to baking and freezing our favorite zucchini bread for the winter, we’ve had plenty of zucchini pizzas on the grill, along with zucchini salads and sides. 

There’s still always more to eat, so Kirk dug into one of our favorite summer reference books, the Moosewood Cookbook. This is full of excellent vegetarian recipes, and Kirk decided to try making a zucchini-crusted pizza. This is basically a grated zucchini fritter held together with egg and cheese, but you make it big enough to use as the crust of a pizza. You can find the recipe here. Kirk tweaked the recipe by making it on a flat pizza pan with browning holes instead of in a pie plate, which made it much crispier. 

Instead of the suggested Mediterranean-style pizza toppings, he used some leftover refried beans as the "sauce" before topping with cheddar cheese, diced tomatoes, scallions, cilantro and some green Cholula sauce.   

This was a really nice change of pace, both as a way to eat zucchini and to change up our pizza habit. 

We also discovered that you can make a much larger crust on a cookie sheet and cut it into individual squares. We froze these for later — that works great as long as you defrost and pre-cook the crust before adding toppings so it’s not soggy.