Pizza Parties + Meal Prep in One
It’s been awhile since I’ve had time for a What’s Cooking blog!
We got our Ooni pizza oven last spring and having pizza parties for guests has become our main party trick. Because of the shop hours, we tend to have friends over on Sunday nights, so I have been perfecting my strategies for having a good variety of toppings for the pizzas and meal prepping for the upcoming week at the same time.
A pizza with shredded meat, Korean barbecue sauce, mozzarella and gouda cheeses and then sometimes another veggie, like summer squash or red onions or pickled peppers, has become an absolute go-to as part of our usual pizza party menu.
But you don’t need all that much protein for one pizza!
Sometimes I strategically try to save pulled pork or beef or chicken from earlier in the week for pizza toppings or even freeze some for future pizzas, but lately I have just been making the shreddy meat a part of the pizza party prep.
This time, I cut two smallish picnic shoulder roasts in half, seared them on all sides, then seasoned with sea salt, garlic powder, onion flakes, smoked paprika, black garlic and a drizzle of Korean barbecue sauce and cooked on high pressure in the Instant Pot for 90 minutes.
I let the meat cool enough to handle, shredded it and stored the broth in a separate container.
I also made a weekly batch of my favorite almond-cashew sauce with some pumpkin seeds added this time, along with the typical avocado oil, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, soy sauce and seasonings. It made a great salad dressing and a sauce for the shrimp and zephyr squash pizza.
I also made a batch of beef meatballs, seasoned with Italian seasoning and a bunch of herbs from my garden (basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme and sage).
I had some tomato sauce I had cooked with fresh tomatoes in the freezer, so I browned the meatballs in cast iron pans on the stove top, then combined them into one pan and simmered in the sauce.
So for this group, the final menu was:
The pulled pork pizza with Korean barbecue sauce, mozzarella and gouda cheeses
A beef meatball pizza with fresh mozzarella, finished with basil and dollops of homemade goat ricotta our friend brought
A jalapeño popper inspired pizza with red and green jalapeños, bacon, mozzarella, gouda and cheddar cheeses
And maybe the best one of the night: the shrimp, squash and basil pizza. I tossed the shrimp with a little olive oil, minced garlic and onion salt and since the pizza oven gets so hot (850-900 degrees!), we just put them on the pizza raw. In the past I had lightly pre cooked them. This was the way, though, they were perfectly cooked and not at all rubbery from being overcooked.
I also made a batch of vanilla ice cream for this party with some half & half that needed to be used up and of course lots of egg yolks. Somehow I didn’t get a photo of the ice cream in the churner, just videos.
And with roselle hibiscus season fast approaching, I used the last of from frozen roselle to make a strawberry roselle crisp with oats and pecan meal and of course freshly stone-milled flour in the topping. We finished the crisp leftovers that week, but the ice cream made enough to last a few weeks!
The next night, I made some other veggies to go with the leftovers meatballs and pulled for for the rest of the week!
I baked some homegrown potatoes, roasted the rest of the zephyr squash and zucchini and also roasted red cabbage and hakurei turnips. I steamed some gold beets in the Instant Pot and peeled and sliced those and added them to the cabbage and turnips at the end. The cabbage mix was dressed with a lemon-caper-mustard vinaigrette that is SO good. I threw on some basil for good measure, too.
I also cooked the rest of the shrimp we didn’t use for pizza. So we had pulled pork stuffed potatoes, the zucchini and squash combo topped with a few sautéed shrimp and the cabbage, turnip and beet mix.
For lunches, the meatballs were really good with the baked potatoes and ricotta, alongside the veggies.
And there were a few rounds of tacos dinner that week, too. One night we did the last of the shrimp, goat feta, fermented radishes and lettuce on one and sharp aged cheddar, pulled pork and fermented peppers on the other.
By the end of the week we used the last of the pork off in more tacos with similar toppings, plus red cabbage microgreens and a side salad with peanut dressing.
For another party a few weeks later, I did have time to make my own dough! It’s my preference if I can make it the morning before so it can do a little longer ferment, but I use Bellegarde’s dough if I don’t have time.
And this time, the shredded meat of choice was beef osso bucco shanks. They got a similar treatment — seared on all sides first, seasoned and cooked in the Instant Pot until falling apart. We were having some black garlic pork liver pate with country loaf toast for an appetizer and were able to pull out the bone marrow from each of the three shanks to serve as an appetizer, too!
We had two types of deviled eggs for appetizers, too! And since I made a large quantity, I reserved about half of each for other friends coming during the day the next day.
The first one was a jalapeño popper version with a little cream cheese, diced and sautéed andouille, jalapeños and garlic blended into the yolk mixture. They came out really good, but even without seeds, the thinly sliced raw jalapeño on the top of some of them was a little too spicy!
The other was a Bloody Mary version with horseradish, tomato paste, mustard and Worcestershire sauce, topped with a homemade version of Old Bay seasoning and sliced of dill pickles and pickled okra. They were both super tasty and more fun than traditional deviled eggs!
The pizza menu this time was:
Another of our go to’s that we skipped on the previous party: olive salad and tomato sauce with our Andouille sausage. I added some rosemary and oregano to the sauce mixed this time, too and it really was one of the best versions of this pizza yet!
The shredded beef with Korean barbecue sauce, mozzarella, provolone, gouda and blue cheeses, topped with pickled peppers and green onion microgreens. Very good!
Roasted eggplant, sun-dried tomato and basil-arugula pesto pizza with mozzarella and goat feta, topped with fresh basil. The eggplant got a little charred, so I noted to pre cook them a little less the next time!
And the last one we’ve done variations on many times, too. This time it was caramelized onions, breakfast sausage and sautéed oyster mushrooms with lots of fresh sage and a little truffle oil. We also do this one with pureed roasted squash or pumpkin as the sauce sometimes, as well. This time, the travesty is that it was under salted, so the flavors didn’t pop as much as they could. Salt makes food taste more like itself when used at the right times in the right amounts, after all!
The night before the pizza party, I made some gnocchi with our homegrown potatoes! It was fun and easier and less messy than I expected it would be.
I had already defrosted the breakfast sausage for pizza the next day, so we had the fresh gnocchi with sausage, sage and finished with a little cream from the top of a gallon of milk! They came out really good and we had it with a salad with steamed beets and mixed greens.
The leftover gnocchi the night after the pizza party with leftover osso bucco beef and tomato sauce and basil was even better though! I didn’t plunge the gnocchi in ice water and I will do that moving forward because the cooled and then reheated gnocchi had a way better and less gummy texture.
There was a lot of beef and broth left that we ate the rest of the week with various combinations, mainly with broth the broth and rice noodles and hearts of palm.
The very last of the shredded beef got used at the end of the week on some at home date night pizzas for just Grant and me. I had one dough ball left in the fridge from the party and cut it in half for two smaller pizzas.
I’ve found that when it slow ferments in the fridge all week, it’s very easy to roll out very thin and it ends up crispier versus doughier. I had more eggplant to use up, so I roasted some in slices for a smaller pizza and then rest in wedges to make a batch of baba ganoush.
The roasted eggplant went with a smaller amount of leftover sun-dried tomatoes and Andouille, plus castelvetrano olives and fresh mozzarella. We pretty much did another version of the beef pizza, this time with fresh mozzarella and goat feta cheeses. There was another fresh batch of cashew-almond sauce, blistered okra in the pizza oven and salad, too!
And then the very final use of the beef was for lunch the next day, when we did some roasted potato nachos! I had some refried black beans to use up, too, so we did those, the beef, sharp cheddar cheese and topped with fermented peppers and the last of the green onion microgreens!