Pizzas

The best dinner I've had all month!

You know when you just get sick of eating the same thing for dinner every night but it seems like way too much effort to come up with something new to cook? That's me. I've been living off brown pasta, brown rice, vegetables, omelets, quorn, and kidney beans for the past I don't know how long. I was getting so sick of eating dinner and that's just not right. Food is supposed to taste GOOD. So I finally worked up some enthusiasm and made fresh pizza, and let me tell you it was the nicest, and unhealthiest, thing I have had for dinner in quite some time. I was very, very happy last night.

Onions!

When I say I, I do in fact mean my sister, Emily, and myself. She deserves credit too, especially 'cause I don't think she'd be too happy with me if I didn't give it to her. We got the recipe for the dough from a bread making bread book called 'The Complete Book of Bread and Bread Machines' (yup, I bought another new one! But it was only seven euro so I couldn't resist). I'm pretty impressed by this book, not so much because of the results, which were pretty damn good, but because of the sheer quantity of recipes in it. This is the first thing I've tried from it but there's enough in there to keep me going for the rest of my baking days. It won't stop me from buying more but I certainly don't need any. No kidding, there is every type of bread that could possibly exist, hundreds of them and they're all so different, I can't wait to try more.

We didn't really do anything to the dough recipe. The quantity was enough to make two 30 cm pizzas (we thought my brother wanted one too, but his friend had already stuffed him!). I was going to be good and make it with whole wheat flour, but we weren't sure if it would go with the topping so we said screw it and just made it like the book said.

The topping was mostly Emily's creation, and I think it was pretty amazing. Caramelised onions have to be one of the nicest foods in the world, I just love onions anyway, but these things are seriously amazing. Who ever thought that cooking onion in vinegar, sugar, and olive oil would taste so good? For the cheese we used blue cheese which has a really distinctive flavour, so much better than mozzarella which tends to taste of not a whole lot. And then we put some spinach on because it's just really good on pizza.

Blue Cheese!

Recipe: Basic Pizza Dough

Ingredients:

• 280ml/ 1 1/4 cups warm water
• 30ml/ 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 450g/ 4 cups white bread flour
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp granulated sugar
• 1 tsp easy-blend dried yeast

Method:

1. Pour the water and olive oil into the bread pan
2. sprinkle over the flour to cover the liquid. Add the sugar and salt in separate corners of the pan. Make an indent in the flour without exposing the liquid and add the yeast.
3. Set the bread machine to the dough or pizza dough setting and press start. Lightly oil two baking sheets.
4. When the cycle has finished remove the dough and place it on a lightly floured surface. Knock back gently and divide into two equal pieces. Preheat the oven to 220 d
   

As for the topping, that's really up to you. We used pissata mixed with a bit of sun dried tomato paste for the sauce, blue cheese, spinach, and caramelised onions. I really do recommend it, and the smell that fills the kitchen is amazing ;)

To caramelise onions:

1. Chop up a good load of onions (they shrink a lot during cooking).
   
2. Heat 25g of butter in a frying pan and sprinkle over 1 tablespoon of caster sugar and a tablespoon of vinegar.
   
3. Add the onions and cook over a medium heat for one hour, stirring frequently, until they are transparent and golden.

Everything that's good in life (and on pizza)

As you've probably guessed, this was super pizza. Okay, it wasn't the best I've ever had, but I really liked it. I think I'm probably being won over so easily because its been ages since I last has pizza. The base was good, thin but not invisible, and it had that wonderful squishy quality even though it was well cooked, not burned and dried out. The fact that it was freshly baked is what made it so good - I'm sure there are better dough recipes out there, but this one is good for me - It's so easy to make and it gives good results. The topping is what made it, I can't say good enough things about onions and blue cheese. The only thing I would do differently next time (Emily suggested this) would be to leave the caramelised onions off 'til after the pizza had been baked, we think the oven burned some of them as they'd already been cooked for about an hour.
After this I'm keen to get more interested in cooking as well as baking. Who knows, this could be the start of a new obsession!

Meaty!

We put the leftover base in the fridge, covered in plastic wrap, and it kept fine 'til the next day. I was a bit nervous about it but there weren't really any problems (I forgot to grease the baking sheet that it was on so there were some 'issues' with getting it off). We used it to make a pizza for my brother the next night.

Mmmm, pizza

His was pretty much the same as ours, but with meat (chicken), mozzarella and Cheddar cheese, onions, peppers, mushrooms, and spinach. He seemed to like it, and managed to eat all but one slice! I think a nearly a whole 30cm pizza with that much topping is pretty impressive for a fourteen year old.

This time it had a big crust