I love pizza night! At my house it's a casual affair, one pizza is sliced and eaten while another one heads into the oven...all over a good beer or red wine, of course!
Place a rack topped with a pizza stone in the upper ⅓ of your oven. Preheat your oven to 550° (or as hot as it will go) for an hour. Don't skimp on the preheat--your pizza will thank you for it! Allow the pizza dough to rest at room temperature while the oven preheats and you prep the toppings.
Remove the sausages from their casings and brown in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Break the sausage up into bite-sized pieces as you cook it and make sure all sides are evenly browned, 8-10 minutes. Transfer the sausage to a small plate or bowl, leaving the fat behind in the pan (you'll use the same pan to sauté the garlic and broccoli rabe).
Roughly chop the leafy green parts and the thinner stems of your bunch of broccoli rape. I save the thicker stalks for later use--they're fine if you blanch and sauté them, but they're a little much for use as a pizza topping.
If there is more than just a thin coating of fat in the pan from the garlic, pour some of it off. Conversely, if the pan is on the dry side, you might need to add a little olive oil. Return to medium-high heat and add the garlic and red pepper flakes. How many red pepper flakes? Well, how spicy is your sausage and how much heat do you like? My sausage was pretty hot, so I went pretty light, figuring we could always add more to the finished pizza, as needed. Sauté until the garlic is fragrant and just beginning to take on a little color, 1-2 minutes. Add the broccoli rabe. It will look like a lot, but it will quickly shrink down. Season with a pinch of salt and toss until wilted, about 2 minutes.
Have all of your ingredients organized so you can top the pizza quickly. Pull the hot pizza stone out of the oven and dust with cornmeal. Stretch the pizza dough into a circle and set on the stone. Drizzle with a little olive oil, scatter pieces of sausage and broccoli rabe on top, and finish with small dollops of ricotta. Work very quickly, as the dough will start cooking as soon as it hits the hot stone (I find it much easier to assemble the pizza this way, rather than assembling it on another board and transferring--though in the interest of taking pictures for this post, I contradicted myself). Transfer the pizza to oven and turn the broiler on high.
Bake the pizza under the broiler until the crust is cooked through and golden, 5-6 minutes. Transfer it to a cutting board, grate a little Parmesan over the top, and slice it up.
Recipe by strawberryplum at http://www.strawberryplum.com/broccoli-rabe-italian-sausage-ricotta-pizza/