Spinach and Roasted Red Pepper Pizza

Tonight I decided to make pizza. I’m always trying out new pizza dough recipes, but I think I’ve finally settled on one. I followed a link to it from another blog–it’s a Giada Delaurentis recipe on Epicurious. It bakes up beautifully. I usually make a double batch for two pizzas.

You’ll need:
pizza dough
(http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/237338)
1/2 of a ten-ounce sack of spinach, or half a box of frozen, thawed
Olive oil
3 minced cloves of garlic
red pepper flakes
couple of roasted red peppers (I buy a jar)
parmesan cheese
half a sack of mozzerella cheese

Make your dough. It’ll need an hour’s rise.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Wash and stem your spinach. In a big, deep skillet, at a tablespoon of olive oil. When it’s warm, add garlic. Saute a minute. Add the red pepper flakes, saute a few seconds, and add your spinach (watch out for splatter–hot oil and water aren’t friends). Cover, and let wilt. This takes about a minute. Then take the lid off and let the spinach cook down, evaporating most of the water. Take out of the pan and chop roughly. Chop up a couple of drained peppers, too.

Press the dough onto a cookie sheet that’s been oiled and sprinkled with cornmeal. Drizzle some olive oil onto it. Place spinach, garlic, and peppers onto the pizza. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and a tablespoon or two of parmesan. Sprinkle with mozzerella.

Bake in the lower third (next-to-last rack) of your oven for about 20 minutes, checking it at 15.

It’s very tasty, and could be modified with a number of other cheeses or veggies. Yum!

Oops!

Sometimes things don’t go as well as planned. Take this coffee cake, for instance. It’s one of my favorite all-time coffee cakes. It has a layer of streusel on the bottom, and one of streusel and blueberries in the middle. Ridiculously tasty. But today it didn’t want to come out of the bundt pan. I wiggled a knife around the edge, around the middle, and lo, when it fell out, part of the bottom (now top) layer of cake stayed in the pan. Arrrgh! I know it all will taste the same (and you wouldn’t have been the wiser if I’d only shown you a slice!) but I’m supposed to bring this to my grandmother’s tomorrow. Oh well. I’ve made this probably six or seven times, and this is the first time it’s ever happened. As such, I highly recommend you try it out. It’s a recipe I found on allrecipes a long time ago–I like allrecipes because you can tell by the comments what works and what doesn’t–and I’ve tweaked it a bit over time. I add more blueberries, less streusel, more milk than the original recipe, based on reading all the comments a couple times over, and a few trial runs. Trial runs where, in fact, the cake came out of the darn pan.

Here’s the recipe:
Blueberry Coffee Cake

Streusel:
2/3 c. packed brown sugar
1/2 c. flour
a scant tsp cinnamon
1/4 c. butter (the recipe calls for a half cup, but I never use that much)

Cake:
2 c. flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c butter, softened (one stick)
1 c. white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 c milk mixed with 1 T vinegar for a few minutes (curdles it so it’s like buttermilk)
1 1/2 c. fresh or frozen (unthawed) blueberries

Heat oven to 350. Grease the pants out of a bundt pan, and flour it to death, too.

Make the streusel by mixing brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon, and cutting butter in. I use my fingers for this.

Beat 1/2 c. butter in bowl of your mixer until creamy; add white sugar, and beat until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, and beat in. Whisk together your dry ingredients and add them alternately with the curdled milk, mixing well after each one. Put half the batter (it’s thick, don’t worry about it being a pretty perfect layer) in the pan. Place blueberries and half your streusel on top. Add the rest of the batter, and cover with the rest of the streusel. Bake 55-60 minutes.

Let it cool thoroughly before trying to get it out of the pan. Then, putting a plate on the top of the pan and holding the two together, invert and hope for the best!

Eggplant and Tomato Rotini

I buy an eggplant whenever they go on sale at the market, and then I spend a few days wondering what the heck to do with it. Eggplant parmesan is pretty time consuming, so it’s a special treat; occasionally, I’ll make eggplant rollatini, should ricotta also be on sale. Most often I just slice the plant up and coat it in egg and breadcrumbs, pop them in the oven, and serve with pasta and red sauce.

But the last time I bought an eggplant, I was feeling pretty clever. Voila! Eggplant and Tomato Rotini.

You will need:

1 medium eggplant, chopped into 1/2″ or so cubes
1 28 oz. can of tomatoes (whole, crushed, whatever)
1 onion, diced
1 or 2 minced gloves of garlic
olive oil
s & p
miscellaneous Italian herbs

In a medium saucepan, warm oil over medium heat. Add onion and a little salt; saute until transluscent. Add garlic, saute a minute or so. Add eggplant, and saute 5-10 minutes, until the eggplant starts to soften and wilt up a bit. Add tomatoes and miscellaneous herbs (whatever you’ve got–parsley, oregano, basil, and so forth); bring to a simmer, and reduce heat a bit. Simmer away for at least half an hour. This will be enough sauce for a pound of pasta.

You can also add a little wine to the sauce with the tomatoes, if you’d like.

Serve with lots of grated cheese.

Oh how I love my Kitchenaid mixer!

Once I read a blog review of my towels, and the writer lamented that the mixer didn’t come with them. I got this puppy as a wedding gift last year, and it’s been in constant use ever since. Partly this is because it’s so heavy, it stays on the counter–I never have to dig it out of storage, since I pretty much couldn’t. It creams butter and sugar like nobody’s business, and has a fancy dough hook to knead bread for me. My old mixer was an inexpensive Kenmore model that I actually lugged home on the subway (I don’t know what I was thinking). It worked, but never that well. It didn’t cream anything. But the Kitchenaid is a champ. If you’re in the market for a new mixer, and you know you’ll use it all the time, and you know you’ll want it for at least ten years, I’d highly suggest investing in one. You’ll swoon over its fabulousness.

Orange Breakfast Bread

A few weeks ago, Cream Puffs in Venice gushed about a recipe for an orange breakfast bread that looked just marvelous. She didn’t give the recipe, so I did a bit of digging to find it. Then in my eagerness, I laughed that it would take only five minutes to get it together for the first rise. I’m not a breadmaking novice, but, um, I am prone to accidents. And that’s what happened here as I started the loaves. Me, butter, paring knife. I’ll leave it at that. Half an hour later, I tried it again. And though I did some kneading of this bread with only one hand, it was totally worth it. It’s delicious toasted, with a little butter or raspberry jam. Yum.

This recipe is from Beth Hensperger’s Bread for Breakfast. I found part of the recipe in google books, but had to guesstimate the baking times. Here you go, and be careful with the paring knives:

Orange Bread
Makes 2 round loaves

1/4 c. warm water (105 to 115 degrees)
1 T active dry yeast
Pinch of sugar
1/2 c. warm milk (105 to 115 degrees)
1 1/4 c. orange juice
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 c. sugar
4 T melted butter
1 egg
Orange zest (I left this out, since I had bottled OJ, but it would be delicious with it)
5 1/2-6 c. bread flour
2 tsp. salt

Place the yeast and sugar in a bowl, and pour the water over it. Allow it to get foamy, 5-10 minutes.
Combine milk, OJ, vanilla, sugar, butter, egg, zest if you’re using, and 1 1/2 c. of flour in a large bowl. Either whisk together or use a mixer on low speed to combine, about 1 minute. Add yeast mixture, salt, and another cup of flour. Beat 1 more minute. Add the rest of the flour by half-cups, forming a soft and slightly sticky dough that just clears the sides of the bowl. Don’t use the whisk for this–a wooden spoon is better.

Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface and knead (or, if lazy, make your mixer do it), about 1-3 minutes, until the dough is smooth and springy. Grease a bowl, place the dough in it, and turn over to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 1/2 hours at room temperature, or until doubled in bulk. That is, if you live in a temperate area! When I made this a week or two ago, it wasn’t warm yet, and I instead heated my oven to just barely 100 degrees, turned it off, and put the bowl in there with the oven door ajar.

Once it’s risen, take the dough out, punch it down a bit, and divide in half. Shape each half into a ball. Put these balls on a cookie sheet with a bit of cornmeal down if you have it, and let rise, covered in plastic wrap, another 45 minutes. If you’re smart, don’t put this one in the oven. Hensperger prefers to get her oven good and hot before baking, turning it on a half-hour before it’s needed. So turn your oven on to 350 degrees, and pop the breads in (sans plastic wrap) after their second rise. 40 minutes later, you’ll have two fragrant brown orbs. Allow to cool a bit so you don’t burn yourself digging in.

Hello!

Welcome to Sweet Pea Cooks. Some of you might know me from my online shop, Sweet Pea Handcrafts. When I began handing out shop postcards with recipes on them, it got me thinking. I read a lot of cooking blogs, and cook at least five days a week. I also love to bake. Why not share my experiments with others who might be looking for tasty recipes? So here we go. I’ll try to update regularly, but since I currently have, um, 1…2…3…4…5 jobs, it might be sparser than I hope! I’m a graduate student full-time (I should be Dr. Sweet Pea by the end of the summer), and I teach history at two different universities, freelance for a textbook company, and then there’s Sweet Pea itself. Golly. Anyway, in the coming months, I’ll be sharing recipes, product reviews, and shop updates. Hope to see you around!