Cinco de mayo! Weeeeoooooo! Chips! Salsa! Tacos! Dos Equis! You ever get a pound of ground beef for making tacos, eat a few tacos and then resume with the margaritas and suddenly your left with half your taco meat and fixins sitting there on the cutting board? Don't throw them out and let's think about something else besides next day burritos.
Taco Pizza.
Ingredients:
1/4 pound seasoned, cooked ground beef
(if you cooked some onion or pepper into the beef, all the better)
1/4 Can of Goya red refried beans
1 green onion - chopped
1 clove of garlic - minced
Handful of grape tomatoes - quartered or halved
1/2 cup of pepper jack cheese - grated
Few spoon fulls of salsa - optional
One Boboli pizza crust
Okay, so everything's been sitting in the fridge for a couple days and you've sobered up. You're ready to erase any lingering memories of cinco de mayo and throw those leftovers away. But with the purchase of a good pizza crust you can make those leftovers into one of the best pizzas you've ever had. If you have a good pizza stone thing for your oven you can use one of those, fancypants.
[So with your pizza crust or dough out you can get your salsa and splash some of that around. This is a totally optional move - I've done it in the past and it's been pretty tasty. It gives the dough or crust a bit of spice. But the last time I did Taco Pizza it was without the salsa and I didn't miss it a bit. But if you use a couple splashes of your favorite salsa, you should be in good shape.]
Pre-heat the oven to 450. This is standard pizza temp.
Next, open up that can of refried beans -- this is key, it is the glue that holds the Taco Pizza together. We don't have any typical pizza sauce going on here so the refried beans is critical. Don't get any white-boy crapola either, go for the good stuff (Goya). Take a spoon and flick the refried beans at the pizza crust, making dollops here and there. You don't want to cover the pizza in the stuff but you want a good amount -- a half dozen or so dollops.
Now throw the meat around. Use whatever leftovers you got. If you didn't cook onions in your taco meat, maybe put in some chopped yellow onion for flavor and texture. If you like it hot, throw some chopped jalapeno or some sort of pepper in there.
Cheese time. Grate up the pepper jack and sprinkle it around. Don't use too much cheese on this -- less than you would a normal pizza. You want small pools of cheese, not a blanket of cheese. Just as you wouldn't want your taco swimming in cheese, you want just enough cheese on your slice of taco pizza to give you that layer of flavor.
Chop up your garlic into little bits. Then sprinkle those bits around the pizza. I like to get a good amount just on to the rim of the crust.
Let's get some veg in here, eh? Grape tomatoes are perfect for taco pizza (cherry tomatoes would work fine as well), just cut them in half or quarters so that they'll cook well in a short time. Spread them around so that each slice will get a coupe pieces or more.
Finally, the green onion, or scallion. Take one, chop it up, and sprinkle it over the pizza. It's like a garnish that will not only make the pizza look more attractive, but also add a nice bit of flavor.
[Additional topping suggestions could include - avocado, black olives, hot sauce, queso fresco - anything that you might put on your beef taco you can try here. Have fun with it.]
