Wholewheat pizza!

You might remember my excited experiments with pizza in the past. Recently I discovered how easy it is to get fresh yeast in Delhi and since then my pizza making has gone to a whole new level. For starters, please ditch the false lore that states pizzas require sauce and cheese. They don't. No, really. Second, also toss out the idea that they need to be round. Ever since my pizza revolution, as I like to call it, I've been making them all the time in my rectangular baking pans and putting all sorts of things on them. I've done potatoes+cheese+onions, random pasta sauce+cheese, potatoes+sausage+cheese, random veggies+cheese and my most recent favourite, blanched spinach, potatoes, onions and eggs. That's right, no sauce, no cheese. Of course all these things get eaten so fast I rarely get pictures, so here's one I took this morning of reheated lunch, terribly lit in the direct sunlight from my kitchen window and gently speckled by the shadow of the mesh.

MinCat's favourite pasta sauce

Somewhere in my time in the US, I realised that tomato sauce is REALLY easy to make - it just takes time. I usually make a huge batch that lasts for about four meals of two people each. It freezes very well, and lasts in the fridge up to a week (I've never been able to resist it longer.)

The basis is tomatoes and onions, with a ton of garlic. After that, toss in whatever you want. Obviously, the more veggies you put in, the more texture it will have; but that's not a bad thing, especially for vegetarian pasta. For pizza I recommend slicing things thinly or sticking to leaves and minced peppers, because that way it doesn't mound up on the pizza, ans leaves you free to add other toppings.

Pizza from scratch!

It took two tries to get this right, and I'd say it still needs work, but I'm SO EXCITED! =) I've been wanting to try pizza dough forever, especially since people tell me it's easy. (Apparently not for me.) So I scooted over to, yup, you guessed it, smitten kitchen, and dug this one out. The first time I tried it I made my usual overestimating-the-power-of-ingredient-mapping error, and tried to have a slow rise in the fridge. Guess what happened? I came home and it was a rock hard, ice-cold ball. Took me over two hours to get it pliable, and of course it didn't rise at all.

The second time I left the dough to rise outside, after activating the yeast. It worked much better, only it took a good 2 and a half hours. The dough was not very pliable; in fact I think it might need more water here in Hyderabad. I don't know how it is supposed to turn out relative to bread dough, but it was a lot harder and tougher.

My second big problem was that I neither have a pizza stone nor a big oven. Never fear, I improvised a pizza stone by using the back a steel plate (good South Indian kitchen) that I heated in the oven, and then oiled with caution to prevent sticking. I needed to roll the dough out really thin though, but the end result was fabulous!

Goat Cheese Pizzettes

So this is a recipe I concocted based on the amount of peppers and goat cheese in my fridge that could go to waste...

You need:

Baby spinach
Goat cheese, crumbled
Onion, sliced fine, can use green onions too
Bell pepper, I used red, you can use any, sliced fine
Olive oil
Garlic cloves
Salt
Bread

Preheat toaster oven to 400F.

Crush two or three cloves of garlic into the olive oil. I used three cloves for 1/3 cup of oil.

Brush the bread with garlic oil. I used about 2 tsps for one slice. Put a handful of baby spinach leaves on the bread. Add sliced onions and peppers. Drizzle another spoonful of garlic oil on the veggies. Pile on as much goat cheese as you would like. Sprinkle salt to taste.

Bake in toaster oven for 10-15 minutes depending on how crispy you'd like the "crust".

Eat up! Preferably with nice red wine.

This is really easy, you can go wild with this. Add mushrooms, whatever. The only thing is that veggies have to be sliced fine otherwise they won't cook in time. You can also use pizza dough to make pizzas, in that case I woudl pre-bake the crust for about five minutes otherwise the spinach will die. I like the bread version because it uses up leftover bread and I don't risk contaminating my cultures the next day with any lurking yeast from the pizza dough (Yes, it happens, despite gloves!).