Pizza pizza!

You people must think all I make is pizza. The reality is that I probably make it once a month or so but it holds still so well for photos, it gets documented more often than anything else.

But this pizza–this was easily one of the tastiest pizzas I’ve ever made. Ever. Even Mr. Pea thought so, and he’s not just saying that. It’s a standard whole-wheat pizza crust covered with some pesto I made last summer and froze, forgetting about it until recently. You smear it all over the dough. You then slice and onion and get it started in a tablespoon of olive oil. After they start to soften, add 3 sliced portabella caps and saute them until they’re soft and brown. Top pesto with a good 6-8 ounces of shredded mozzarella (I highly prefer the brick of cheese to the sacks, but that’s a new thing for me), and then add veg. Then–and this is what did it for us–add a couple of tablespoons of crumbled feta all over the top.

Bake in a 450 oven for 12 minutes or until bottom is browned and all seems cooked.

To die for, I swear.

Tasty Cake

This cake was, for me, something of a use-what-you’ve-got pantry cake. Oddly enough, I had some frozen raspberries sitting long neglected and some cream cheese that was on its last legs. I found this recipe on allrecipes and it was delicious. It requires very little butter, getting most of its moisture from buttermilk (or, in my case, milk with vinegar added) and the cream cheese on the top. The batter is pretty standard coffeecake batter, and on top of that you add your fruit. On top of that, you mix an egg white with sugar and cream cheese. This did not blend terribly well for me, though I ultimately set the mixer on high and did what I could. In the long run, this was a delicious cake, somewhere between a coffee cake and a cheesecake, and it totally hit the spot. We kept it in the fridge and would nuke slices for 20 seconds or so to warm them up a bit before eating.

So here we go. This is from Better Homes and Gardens, initially. You’ll need:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon finely shredded lemon or orange peel (which I didn’t have, so went without.)
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons butter, softened
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup buttermilk (or 1/2 c milk with a 1/2 T of white vinegar, allowed to sit a few minutes)
2 ounces reduced-fat cream cheese (Neufchatel)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg white
1 cup raspberries (I used frozen)

Prep a 9″ circular pan.

Mix dry ingredients in one bowl.

In your mixer, cream 3/4 c sugar with the butter until well blended. Add egg and vanilla, and beat on medium for a minute. Add milk and flour alternately, mixing just to mix, not over-mixing. Pour into prepared pan.

Wash your bowl. Add cream cheese and the remaining sugar and mix until combined on high. Add egg white. Mix, mix.

Arrange berries all over batter. Pour cheese mix over.

Bake in a 375 oven for 30-35 minutes. You’ll want to test for doneness, but it’s a little hard to tell, as the cream cheese never fully sets, especially in the middle. I overcooked mine (40 minutes) and the crust was a little too thick and a little too brown, but just fine. When I make this again, I’ll stick to 35 minutes.

Drastic Changes underway

My long silence (yet another) can be explained by an unforseen series of events. I finished grad school last summer, and so this fall went on the job market. This actually went well, and me and Mr. Pea are moving out of state in just a couple of months! Our lives are a little chaotic right now. The combination of new job + moving away means I’m closing down Sweet Pea, at least for a while though it could be a lot longer, starting June 1. Yep, that’s it for the Pea. And I’m ok with that. At first I was a little freaked, but then I remembered that all the changes coming up are what I worked really hard for, so off I go.

Now I do plan on keeping up with Sweet Pea Cooks and making it a far more functional place. Eventually, if Sweet Pea the company doesn’t come back, I’ll move it to another server, but I’m not concerned about that yet.

I’m going to post about a cake I made last weekend shortly; in the meantime, I’ll leave you with one of a series of little gems I’ll be sharing over the coming weeks. On one of our last trips home, my mother-in-law gave me a copy of her church cookbook (one of those spiral-bound dealies everyone has from school or church fundraisers), c. 1984. Some of the recipes are hilarious, and certainly date the cooks who submitted them to sometime mid-century! It amazes me how little fresh stuff, and how much canned, makes up these recipes. I grew up with (though at about 10 launched a staunch protest against) things like tuna noodle casserole, but that can’t compare to what follows. Ready?

Scalloped Tuna

1 10-oz package Cheese Nips

2 cans white tuna

2 cans mushroom soup

2-3 T milk

1/4 c chopped celery

1 1/4 c mustard

Oh my. I won’t even grace you with the instructions. What kind of recipe needs half a bottle of mustard? And a box of cheese-nips? Oh my goodness. As my husband said, what makes these kinds of recipes even greater is that if someone submitted them, they must have been proud of them, or they were a family favorite. That family must not have had much left for taste buds after all that mustard. Yikes.