Blackbird Knob Pizza

During our honeymoon, Emily and I went on a short backpacking trip to Blackbird Knob in the Dolly Sods Wilderness. For one of our lunches, we had brought some of Dad's deer bologna and muenster cheese to be wrapped in corn tortillas. While we were eating, I took a dried apricot and an almond from my trail mix and put it in the wrap with the muenster cheese (no bologna on this one), and it was amazing! We soon began dreaming up other things we could combine with this amazing cheese (which is so hard to find around Beckley!), and Blackbird Knob Pizza was conceived!

Ingredients:

• For the sauce:
• 1 clove of garlic, freshly minced (not the canned kind)
• 1/2 Tbsp butter
• 1 1/2 Tbsp flour
• 1/2 c milk
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1/4 leaf of kale, torn into small pieces (optional)
• 12" pizza crust
• 10 oz Muenster cheese, shredded
• 10-14 baby spinach leaves
• 7 oz dried apricots
• 12-14 grape tomatoes, halved
• 1/3 c sliced almonds
• 1 Tbsp unsalted sunflower kernels
• 3 1/2 Tbsp crumbled feta cheese

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450˚ F.

To make the pizza sauce, melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the garlic and sautė until garlic is translucent. This won't take very long at all. Next, add the flour and cook over medium heat, stirring continually until it looks crumbly. This won't take very long, so be ready for it so that you don't burn it. Slowly whisk in the milk. Add the salt and kale. Simmer and cook the mixture, whisking continually, until sauce is creamy and thick. Remove from heat and set aside.

If you're not too keen on the creamy garlic sauce, it will still work if you just spread some olive oil on the crust. The cheese is so soft that when it melts, it can be sauce-like.

Spread sauce evenly over crust, then add MOST of your Muenster cheese. Add the spinach, then sprinkle the rest of the Muenster on top of the spinach leaves. Add the rest of the toppings in order.

Bake for 15 minutes at 450˚ F. We used a pre-made pizza crust, so our baking time was probably shorter than if we had used uncooked dough. If you decided to use fresh dough, adjust your baking time and temperature according to the instructions on the dough packaging.

Take out of the oven and let it cool. 

Eat it.

**Note: for a crunchier twist, try it with unsliced almonds.