Cast-iron pan tomato, onion marmalade, walnut and blue cheese pizza

There's this Canadian celebrity chef called Bob Blumer. Bob's a bit of an excentric. But in a good way. He makes recipes like "coconut-crusted pork tenderloin lollipops" which are actually balls stuck on the tip of bamboo squewers which are themselves held in place by a watermelon. If you've ever seen his show The Surreal Gourmet you know that it gets ever crazier than that. So when I found a cookbook Bob cowrote called Pizza on the Grill it didn't strike me as odd.

I did a few pizzas on the grill this past summer but right now my grill is stuck behind a mound of snow. So the cast-iron pan was called in.

I started by preparing the ingredients. The most time consuming was the onion marmalade. For this you need to fry a mound of yellow onions in olive oil, butter and salt. You cook covered for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. You then cook another 20 minutes uncovered till the onions are golden and sweet. This is really good stuff. Almost good enough to eat on toast in the morning....almost.

I then made my basic pizza dough (see earlier posts), rolled it out, sprinkled with cornmeal and friend in some oil in the cast-iron pan. I think I was afraid of burning it but I really should have 1) let it cook a bit longer before flipping and 2) used a bit more oil. However, it worked. I cooked one side, placed the onion marmalade, halved cherry tomatoes (which were supposed to be roasted but I really didn't feel like roasting a handful of tomatoes for 2 hours in an oven...not very energy-efficient), and crumbled market bought goat blue cheese on this cooked side.

For the second side of the dough, I popped the whole thing in the oven for 15 minutes or so till the crust was golden, the cheese had melted and the tomatoes had cooked. You then sprinkle on some lightly toasted walnuts or pecans and enjoy. This is a really great combination for a pizza. Like the section in the cookbook it comes from, it's "Marvelous & Meatless".

Thanks Bob...and cowriter Elizabeth Karmel...