Fennel, Fontina and Sausage Pizza

We thawed out a pizza dough last night from Trader Joe's which got me thinking as to what sort of pizza we should make. So as I sat down today to pick a post to publish, I already had pizza on the mind, which is probably why I selected this recipe. We used to have this problem when we made pizzas. We would ransack the fridge and literally grab as many things that could be used as toppings as possible. The pizzas were always way overloaded. Now, we try to limit to just a few toppings and they always seem to turn out much better (classic case of less is more). In this one, we used fennel, which is the first time we've ever put it on a pizza and one of the few times we actually cook with it. Fennel is such a weird vegetable —it looks strange, you only use the bottom portion and it's flavor is pretty over-powering. It's usually so over-powering that we are typically skeptical of dishes with fennel. Well, we stand corrected because it's fantastic on this pizza. The sharp distinct flavor of the fennel combined with the rich, spicy flavor of the sausage pairs wonderfully.  This is an excellent pizza that we have made numerous times since. I even made it for my sister and her husband who also loved it while we were visiting them out in Montana this past summer. Modified from Eating Well.

Ingredients

• 1 package pizza dough
• 1/2 cup pizza sauce
• 3 hot Italian pork sausages, casing removed, cooked, and crumbled
• 1/2  fennel bulb, cored and very thinly sliced
• 1-2 cups shredded fontina cheese (depending on what balance between tasty and healthy you'd like to choose :)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Roll out pizza dough. Bake dough alone for about 10 minutes, or until it begins to very lightly brown (you can skip this step, it just provides extra crispness).
2. Meanwhile, prepare the sausage and fennel.
3. Once the dough is done, take it out of the oven and cover with sauce. Scatter sausage and fennel on top. Sprinkle with cheese.
4. Bake until the crust is crispy and the cheese is melted and starting to brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Garnish with leftover pieces of fennel sprigs, if desired. Enjoy!