Monday recipe: Pizza
Monday it may not be but why let the facts stand in the way of tradition? That’s what my grandmother taught me as we skipped school and pretended it was a Saturday. Well that tradition has survived and I still don’t know one day from the next and I still didn’t get no education. But one thing I did learn at my nanny’s knee was how to cook.
But today we’re making pizza and you don’t need to know shit for that.
All you do need is some idea of what you like to eat. For me I tend to switch between something meaty and something green – but not in a bad way.
Today we will be serving up spinach, ricotta, goat cheese, mushroom, egg and mozzerella pizza. And that there is pretty much your shopping list. Throw in some flour, yeast, salt, passata and sun dried tomato paste and you have yourself a feast in the buff.
The first thing to “learn” is how to make pizza dough (mound some plain flour on a board, add a teaspoon of salt, a sachet of yeast, a tablespoon of sugar and a very good glug of olive oil then add lukewarm water bit by bit and mixe it all in to form the dough – you’ll feel when the dough is ready because it will be soft and kneadable). When this is done, roll it out.
The second thing is the tomato topping. I just mix passata with sun dried tomato paste and add oregano. As long as it is all nice and thick you can vary that as you like. Spread it on the pizza base.
Decoration is the fun bit. For this pizza I added sliced tomatoes, sliced mushrooms, a huge handful of spinach (and I mean huge – it shrinks a lot in the cooking so look up the word “mound”). Then I added ricotta and goat cheese and mozzerella before slamming it all in the oven.
About five minutes before it is due to finish cooking I dropped two eggs on the top of the pizza. That should leave the eggs soft in the centre so it all oozes out when sliced.
It really is all about using ingredients to please yourself. I’ll leave you with a photo session of the making of my pizza.
That looks scrummy yummy!