Recipe of the Week: BBQ Chicken Pizza with Carmelized Onions

Hey, hey! I hope you all are having a great week so far. I’m really excited to share this recipe with you today because (shameless self-promotion here) it’s all of my own creation and it was really delicious. Plus, I pulled it together on a night when I wasn’t sure WHAT there was to eat in the house, which made me all the more proud of myself. This post just goes to show ya, if I can pull dinner out of my butt (that doesn’t sound appetizing, sorry)…so can you!

So here’s what I had: some frozen chicken breasts, and some frozen pizza dough. Hmmm…what can be made out of that? Of course, I had pantry and fridge staples like onions, ketchup, and shredded cheese, so that didn’t hurt. If I’ve never mentioned this before, it’s absolutely essential to stock your pantry if you have any hope of cooking at home most nights. (I smell a blog post about this in the near future.) So anyway, here’s what I did:

BBQ Chicken Pizza with Carmelized Onions

1 chicken breast (frozen is fine)
1 tsp. minced garlic
1/4 c. ketchup
2 T. balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
2 T. brown sugar
1 tsp. worcestershire
1/2 tsp. liquid smoke
2 T. unsalted butter
1 large onion
1 to 2 c. shredded mozzarella, depending on how cheesy you like your pizza
1 tube of refridgerated pizza dough or…you can use my recipe for a homemade wheat version. (Since this recipe makes 2 crusts, I often freeze one which makes it nice on nights such as the one that prompted this recipe. And it’s really fun to make pizza dough with your kids, I might add.)
kosher salt

Throw the first 8 ingredients into a crock pot, and turn on high. Cook for 3-4 hours, but watch to make sure it doesn’t dry out. Yours might cook at a faster rate. When the chicken is done, remove it from the crock pot and shred it with 2 forks, then return it to the crock pot and stir it into the sauce. Turn the crock pot on low.

Meanwhile, heat the butter in a large pan on medium heat. Slice the onion and place in the pan. Stir the onions often until they begin to soften, then turn the heat down. The trick to carmelizing onions is to make sure the heat isn’t too high, and to make sure they aren’t crowded in the pan. Once they start to turn a golden color, remove them from the heat.

Roll out your pizza dough and place on a greased sheet or pizza stone. Sprinkle the crust with kosher salt. Spread the cheese in an even layer on top. Sprinkle the chicken, then the onions over the cheese. Drizzle some remaining sauce from the crock pot over all of this in small dollops. Don’t make the mistake I’ve made in the past by spreading BBQ sauce over the whole crust first. It makes things too soggy, in my opinion. If you cook the chicken in the sauce, then just spoon some extra dollops over the whole thing, you’ll get plenty of flavor.

Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the crust is crispy. Bon appetit!