Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Thai-riffic Dish

Before venturing out on my weekly grocery shopping duties, I decided I would look at the Trader Joe's website for some inspiring ideas for new dishes to make. They have quite a few great recipes on their website that are quick, easy and great for your wallet. I had a craving for pizza and luckily I stumbled upon a recipe for Thai Chicken pizza. This made me think about CPK - one of my favorite pizza places - and their Thai Chicken pizza dish. After looking at the ingredients, I thought "Hey maybe this will taste just like that!". It did! Now you can have a restaurant style pizza in the comfort of your own home :). Plus spinning pizza dough in your own kitchen is lots of fun. I wish I could twirl it and do all this fancy stuff with pizza dough but I'd rather not scrape anything off my kitchen ceiling. We'll leave that to the professionals.

Ingredients:
1 cup TJ’s Just Chicken - I used one chicken breast that I already had at home. Just grill it and chop it up.
1 jar TJ’s Peanut Satay Sauce
1 package TJ’s Pizza Dough - Leave it out for 45 minutes before making pizza.
½ cup TJ’s Carrots, shredded - I used one whole carrot and shredded it myself.
2 tbsp TJ’s Unsalted Peanuts, chopped - If you have trail mix, just pick out a few peanuts. :p
4 TJ’s Green Onions, cut lengthwise - You can get this at another grocery store. It's cheaper.
1 cup TJ’s Shredded Mozzarella

Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 425°. Combine the chicken and a ½ jar of the satay sauce and place in fridge. While the chicken chills, take out pizza dough and allow it to rise for 45 minutes to an hour.
- Begin to shape the dough by lightly dusting a flat surface with flour, form the dough into a ball, and begin to push from the center out (use a rolling pin). When the dough is in a rough (ROUGH because it's difficult to make a nice circle) circular shape, spread the remaining satay sauce on top of the dough. (You don't have to use all the remaining sauce. I used only 1/4 of the jar. You also might want to put the pizza on top of a baking sheet or pizza stone before you start layering the toppings).
- Sprinkle the mozzarella over the sauce and layer the marinated chicken on top of that.
- Complete by sprinkling with the shredded carrots, green onions and peanuts. Place
carefully into the oven.
- Bake for 10 – 15 min until the cheese bubbles and the crust turns golden brown.

Unfortunately my camera was unavailable at the time and my hands were full of dough so here's the best image I can get of it from the TJ website:
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Review: YUM! If you want a pizza that is peanuty in flavor and different from your average pepperoni, sausage, bacon and cheese pizza, this is the one. I would suggest making your own dough if you have time to make this pizza a little better. I like the Trader Joe's pizza dough but sometimes it's a little too spongey or chewy. It could be that I'm not allowing it to rise enough but I still think it's great to make your own dough.

COMING UP next...
- Tomato recipes galore
- Soup recipes from my new book that I haven't blogged about yet.
- French recipes from my new book "The Sharper the Knife, The Less you Cry".

Have a great weekend!