Ja cię kocham…

If someone told me that I was only allowed to eat one type of cheese for the rest of my life, as painstakingly awful as this would be, I would definitely choose goat cheese.  When I go out to dinner, if I see something with goat cheese on it – a burger, a salad, a veggie sandwich – I order it.  No questions asked.  Goat cheese is the bomb.

See my Grilled Vegetable, Herb and Goat Cheese Sandwich or my Roasted Rainbow Pepper Sub for other fun things to do with goat cheese.

What I didn’t realize about goat cheese is its low calorie and fat content in comparison to other cheeses – 70 calories per ounce as opposed to 100+ calories per ounce.  Gotta like that!  Another thing that I didn’t realize about goat cheese is that you can put it on PIZZA.  So yummy.  FYI – if you aren’t a goat cheese fan, by all means use YOUR favorite cheese on this pizza.  It doesn’t have to be spreadable; it just needs to be delicious to eat.

If you are going to use goat cheese the only recommendation that I have for this pizza is to spread A LOT of it on the dough.  I don’t think that I had enough because the cheese cracked a lot in some places by the time it was done baking.  It still tasted good, but it could have looked better.  That’s just me.

At first, you may be put off by using a large quantity of goat cheese because of its expense.  If you’re fortunate enough to have a local Trader Joe’s (I know… I’m giving them yet another shout out), you can buy 11 ounces of goat cheese for a few bucks.  In a typical grocery store 4 ounces costs $7!!  I can get almost three times that at Trader Joe’s.   This is also where I get my pizza dough.  For $0.99 I get a big ball of dough!!  Although, I recently discovered a recipe on Oven Love (a food blog of one of my sister’s best friends…) for a quick and easy pizza dough that doesn’t take hours.  I’ll have to try it one of these days!

Lemony Zucchini Goat Cheese Pizza

Source: Smitten Kitchen

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 batch  store-bought pizza dough that will yield one small (approx. 11 to 12 inches across), thin pizza
1 lemon
4 ounces goat cheese, at room temperature
Few leaves of fresh basil, cut into thin slivers
1/2 medium yellow zucchini, sliced as thinly as you can pull off with a knife or your mandoline
1/2 medium green zucchini, sliced as the same as above
Drizzle of olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Roll your pizza dough into a thin 12-inch circle and lay it on a tray or stone that has been dusted lightly with cornmeal.

In a small bowl, stir together the goat cheese with the juice of half your lemon. Season it with salt and freshly ground pepper, and spread it over your pizza dough. Scatter fresh basil slivers over the cheese.

Arrange your zucchini coins in concentric circles over the goat cheese spread, overlapping them slightly.  Squeeze the juice of the second half of your lemon on top of you zucchini, then drizzle with olive oil and finish with more salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes (your baking time will vary, so please watch carefully), or until the edges of your pizza are golden brown and the zucchini looks roasted and a little curled up at the edges.