Date, Goat Cheese & Mint Flatbread w/ Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto

 *Post by Mark.

Eager to try out our new camera, my lunch yesterday was more about making something I could take a picture of than it was about putting food into my body.  So I scraped together a 'kitchen sink' flatbread pizza using only the random items I found in our mostly empty refrigerator.  The pictures turned out pretty fantastic, but I was shocked that the flatbread actually came together as well as it did.  Hell, I even popped another one in the oven for lunch today.

 

You can make your own crust, but the store-bought kind worked just fine for me.

 

Flatbread

The main ingredient, as it dominates the taste of the flatbread were a couple of Medjool Dates.  I took the pits out and chopped about four of them into smaller pieces.  If you're looking for a hearty pizza without adding sausage, prosciutto or bacon, I couldn't recommend using dates any more.  While giving the pizza some serious sweetness, they also might make the carnivore in you forget there's no meat.

Medjool Dates

I found a little bit of generic 'Mexican Blend' Cheese and sprinkled it over the flatbread.  Of course, it'd have been really weird if we didn't have goat cheese in the fridge, so I threw some of that on too.

For the base of the flatbread, I used some Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto instead of a traditional sauce.  I didn't have any pine nuts, but killed two birds with one stone as the pesto already contained some.

Sun Dried Tomato Pesto Sauce 

Lastly, I found some fresh mint and chopped a little up to sprinkle over it.  Because it needed something crunchy I crumbled a little bit of crushed pecan on top.  I threw it in the oven for about 8-10 minutes and let it bake.  When it came out, the flatbread was nice and crispy.

I sliced it up and was really happy with how the ingredients came together.  Using the Medjool Dates and goat cheese as a base, I think I have some delicious experiments ahead of me.  What else could be good on this?