Oven Roasted Garlic

There are many ways to oven-roast garlic but this is my favorite. Use:

As many garlic cloves as you'd like, peeled
Olive oil to cover them

Bake the garlic cloves and olive oil in a small dish for about 20 minutes at 325 degrees F. They should not be browned but they will start to be translucent around the edges.

Use on anything that you want to taste heavenly. I used it on my gluten-free pizza recipe and my friends just put it as a topping on store-bought pizza. The oil that it's cooked in is great to use for cooking, salads, sauces - I use it on popcorn! To give this dish a little kick, add red pepper flakes to the mix!

Gluten-Free Pizza Crust

So I'm going to be upfront and say this is not your same old pizza dough. I like to think of this as a variation on a theme, like I view most creation, and as a melting orgy of cross-cultural sensations.

For much of Native American history wheat flour was not a staple in the people's diets. They ground corn into flour and this tradition has stayed alive in Southwestern cuisine in the form of cornbread, leavened with baking soda rather than yeast. Recently I was tested as having a serious allergy to yeast and though I am exploring alternate opinions on my health, I'm still trying to go yeast-free until I've discovered more of my own body's rules. Gluten is another common allergen and I recently went gluten-free in the hopes that it would alleviate my unexplainable-in-western-medicine plethora of poly-systemic problems. So my yeast-free and gluten-free search led me to soda breads, which are a large break in texture from traditional pizza dough.

While we generally interpret dough to be elastic I was inspired by Southwestern cooking to give this dough a more corn-bread like texture. I feel it excels is in its ability to be cohesive and not fall apart as easily as cornbread, yet keep that light and slightly crumbly sensation. The recipe that inspired the soda bread angle of my dish was not gluten free, but some quick changes in types of flours rendered it sublimely sans-gluten in no time.

1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp quinoa flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
2 and 3/4 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp walnut oil
1/4 cup milk

Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl. In a separate bowl mix the egg, vinegar, and milk.

Combine the two until homogenous (it will be chunky) and spread it on a greased cookie sheet about a half inch thick.

Drizzle the walnut oil over the top and bake for 10 minutes at 325 degrees F.

To make pizza, add sauce and toppings of choice and bake again at a higher temperature, enough to melt cheese, or until desired.

Makes a personal size pizza. If you want to make a whole pie, try increasing the milk (or alternative liquid) more than the eggs. So if you double it, keep one egg but add a egg's volume of liquid and so forth. 

Some More Variations

• If you DO want to eat gluten, nothing's stopping you from making this recipe glutilicious - just use wheat flour in place of the alternative flours. 
• Experiment with different vinegars to see if they give you a noticeable or preferential taste difference
• Any oil can be used, I just love the flavor of walnut oil!
• If you'd like a dairy-free version of this recipe, the milk can be replaced with any liquid of choosing. Some ideas are chicken/vegetable broth, soy milk, or goat milk. 
• If you'd like to make this recipe vegan, follow the above tip and use a flax-based egg-replacer or any other vegan egg-replacers.

For my toppings in the picture above I used some Sun-Dried Tomato Alfredo sauce topped with Roquefort , chopped fresh dill (stems and all!), cracked pepper, diced onions and jalpenos, grated parmesan cheese, and roasted garlic cloves. It tasted so good I found myself completely ignoring my friend's "normal" pizza and ravenously savoring my variation on pizza.