Dip and Pizza

I had a great cooking week last week. 

I was rostered on for morning tea, so decided to make the Capsicum and Sundried Tomato Dip from the EDC.  It was really quite straightforward.

I was worried about how much to bring, as some people bring heaps of food to morning tea, and sometimes there is quite a large turnout.  So, I made a double quantity.  Quite a lot of dip!

It was a success, and quite a lot of the dip was eaten.  Everyone said nice things about it (probably because I was a bit overenthusiastic about it, and sat in front of the bowl, inviting everyone to try the dip saying "I made it myself!").  It did taste really good though.

I wasn't sure what to do with the leftovers, as I knew I probably wouldn't heat it, and didn't want it to go bad in the fridge.  Then, I remembered the leftover pizza dough that was still in my freezer from the Varoma demo.

After some thought, and a couple of phone calls to Mum to ask her opinion on some things, I decided to make a pizza with the dough and the dip.

I invited SJ and CJ over to try it out, and give me some encouragement while I made it.  These were the same friends who had tried the fettuccini the previous week.  They said that it wasn't fare that E was the only one who was named in my blog, so I've named them!

I had asked Mum to drop over and get the pizza dough out of the freezer, and it was nicely thawed by the time I got home.  It smelled just the same as it had when E made it - lovely and yeasty.  I had frozen it in Tupperware, so it had retained all its moisture and was slightly sticky.

after some deliberation, I decided to cook the dough on my only pizza tray, even though it was smaller than the one that E had used.  I don't have a thermo mat yet, so put some baking paper on the tray, and placed the dough in the middle.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to flatten it out into a perfect circle.  After much flattening and stretching the dough covered all but a small bit of the tray, and CJ reminded me that it didn't have to be perfect.

Then I spread the dip over the base, and covered this with 100 g of salami I found in the fridge.  CJ wanted cheese, so I put some Cheddar slices over the salami.  It was quite fun arranging the salami and the slices so they were all overlapping, and all the dip was covered.

I wasn't sure how long to cook it, and CJ suggested that I should try 20 minutes at 200 degrees.  Of course, we couldn't remember how long E had cooked the pizza for during the demo.  It came out perfectly!  the base all rose up, and the topping was a really delicious combination.  The lovely pizza smell went all through the house!

The only problem was that when I picked up a slice to eat it (I always eat pizza in my fingers), the topping fell off.  CJ and SJ explained that what I needed was pizza cheese under and over the rest of the filling to bind everything together.  I'll have to try that next time.

CJ said that she wanted lemon custard instead of chocolate to finish the meal.  I decided that this would be a good challenge for me, as I had never used a peeler to peel the rind from a lemon before.  I'm not entirely sure whether I included any pith in the custard, but it tasted really good, so I assume I didn't.  It was easy to feel when I had peeled too deeply, as some juice would come through onto my finger.  I just love the smell of the lemon and sugar mixture after it is ground up!  It reminded me of E's first demo in my pre-thermomix life.