Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Homemade "Mexican Pizza": A Taco Night Twist

(Recipe designed to feed 2)
Crust:
-1C Corn Flour (find it on the international row in your local grocery)
-1 TB butter, softened
-A little under 2/3 C water
-1 tsp salt

Toppings:
-2 Chicken tenderloins (or one chicken breast)
-1/4 C corn
-Pizza sauce to taste or salsa
-1/2 tomato, diced
-Mozzarella, pepperjack, and asiago cheese
-1/2 TB taco seasoning
-Salt, pepper

Plop your chicken in a pot of salted water and let boil for about 30 minutes or so, until it is tender enough to shred with two forks.

Meanwhile, mix the crust ingredients and knead, adding the first 1/3 C of water and then increasing slowly until it comes together.  You want it to be just moist enough that it holds in a ball but still can be pressed out without crumbling apart.

Put the dough between two sheets of saran wrap and use a plate to press it out.  Finish rolling it out thin with a rolling pin. The plate saves a lot of time. 

Spray a pizza pan with holes in it with cooking spray and peel the top layer of saran wrap off.  You can use your hands to press out the dough more if needed.  Flip the crust onto the pizza pan and bake at 400F for ten minutes.

Pull it out of the oven, top with the above ingredients and sprinkle with taco seasoning, salt, and pepper on top the cheese.  Pop it back in the oven for 10 minutes, then switch over to broil until the cheese just starts to brown, watching carefully.  Your crust may get a little tiny bit dark but it turns out being crispy and fantastic, so don't worry.

The crust really does taste like a tortilla chip or similar and makes a delicious thin and crispy pizza.  You could put some sour cream in a baggie and cut the tip off to pipe a little over the top of the pizza.  I used to really like Taco Bell's Mexican Pizzas before I pulled away from eating fast food all that often. 

This fed the both of us with a couple of pieces left over (we cut smaller pieces similar to a flatbread due to the oval shape I had pressed it into).  For anything over two, I would double the recipe or have a lot of sides to go with it. 

This meal is really inexpensive because it does not require a lot of meat.  The two chicken tenderloins were actually a little more than I needed for the pizza size, and I used probably a third to half a cup of it for a pasta salad recipe that will be featured tomorrow.

There are a LOT of ways to cut back on grocery bills, and finding ways to stretch meat farther is a great one in my opinion.  Even the crust in this pizza has a lot of great flavor being made from corn flour, and you will absolutely not sacrifice any flavor using such a small amount of meat.

Happy crafting!

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