balsamic onion, mushroom, and goat cheese pizza

This meal is inspired by a recipe from the Vegetarian Times magazine. If you're not familiar with the magazine and you're interested in eating more vegetarian meals, I highly recommend you take a look. The recipes are low maintenance and easy to follow, and the results are good. Drew and I used to be subscribers, but we stopped only because I began checking the magazine out from the library. 

Last week, we made a balsamic onion, mushroom, and goat cheese pizza. The original comes from Mario Batali (he was doing a pizza special for the magazine) and doesn't contain mushrooms. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the recipe on VT's website but a quick google search took me to the recipe posted on this food blog, if you're interested.

But really, no recipe is necessary. I caramelized 2 sliced onions, and when those were almost finished, I added 8 ounces of sliced mushrooms. When the mushrooms were cooked through, I dumped in a couple glugs of balsamic vinegar and let the onion-mushroom mixture simmer for a few minutes until the liquid evaporated (I repeated this a second time because I decided that the mixture was not sufficiently balsamic-y, but do whatever you'd like).

The pizza crust recipe is from the Pioneer Woman. A couple years ago, Drew really got into pizza making (and bread making) which means that we got a pizza peel and a pizza stone. It's not terribly high maintenance to make "real" pizza, but lately, we haven't been feeling it (okay, the truth might be that when you make "real" pizza you can't use a lot of toppings or else the pizza won't slide on or off the pizza peel easily, and I fail to understand this because I like to have lots of toppings on my pizza, and I got tired of having Drew admonish me for overloading the pizzas), so we use PW's recipe and make it in a pan. We always double the recipe so we have an extra crust in the freezer, and besides, what else would we do with half a yeast packet?

We par baked the crust for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees. Then I sprinkled on some olive oil and covered the pizza with the balsamic mushroom and onions, and then Drew dabbed gobs of goat cheese over the top. Then we put it back in the oven for about 8 minutes or so until the cheese was sufficiently melty. As was the case the last time we made this pizza, we were really satisfied. And the best part is that there is another crust in the freezer, waiting until the next time we do it all over again.