Pizza With Hummus!

Tonight I made a pineapple and mushroom pizza, with hummus as a layer under the tomato sauce. Yummy! It was the last of the sun-dried tomato and basil hummus in the fridge, and it needed to be used up. It also tasted delicious on homemade pizza dough with fresh pineapple!

Dough:
[Water - 1/4 cup
Sugar - 1 tbsp
Yeast - 1 tbsp] - set aside 5 mins to check if yeast is active
[Olive Oil
Tomato Sauce
1/2 cup water
Honey
Italian spices
Garlic salt] - about 1 cup total liquids
Flour - as much as needed for good consistency


Use your favorite bread recipe for the dough, if you're making it yourself. I love experimenting with breads, so I always cook them a little different! http://www.justpeace.org/bread.htm#Making%20Bread%20is%20Easy%20as%20One-Two-Three-Four! is a great site if you need directions. I put a little tomato sauce in my pizza doughs, as well as Italian spices. The dough is quite sweet, and the crust of your slice of pizza tastes excellent with some garlic butter, if you so desire..
Toppings:
Sundried Tomato Basil Hummus
Tomato Sauce
Fresh Pineapple
Sliced Mushrooms
Cheese

When the dough was ready (risen, punched, and spread on a pizza pan), I baked it for 5 or 10 minutes while the oven pre-heated. While that was cooking, I sliced up mushrooms and fresh pineapple, as well as cheese since I had no grated cheese, unfortunately. After taking the crust out of the oven, I spread a thin layer of the sun-dried tomato and basil hummus over the whole thing. I covered it with plain tomato sauce from a jar, and sprinkled the fruit, veggies and cheese on top. Bake for 15 mintutes at 425, you have a perfect pizza! It was delicious, but not very filling. The two of us ate the whole thing quite easily :-)

Travis' rating: "yumm, it was good!"

Sweet Potato and Spinach Ravioli

Noodles:
3 Cups Flour
1 Egg
Warm water -- about 1/2 cup?

Put the flour in a mixing bowl, make a little hollow for the egg. Mix the egg in as much as you can, then start adding the water slowly until the dough is knead-able and knead it to make it smooth. I put too much water in and the dough was very sticky, but to fix it I added a little more flour and it worked out great. When it's mixed together thoroughly, put it back in the bowl and set aside while you work on the filling.

For the filling, I chose a sweet potato and spinach base because that's what I had in the kitchen. It would have been delicious if I had added some cheese (ricotta or feta seem the most fitting) but I had none on hand.

Filling:
1 Medium sweet potato
1/2 cup frozen spinach (or fresh if you have it)
2 tbsp hummus (mine was sun-dried tomato and basil! yum!)

Cook the potato, my preference is by poking some holes with a fork and putting it in my microwave on "potato." Boiling it works, but I like the shortcut. Peel and mash the potato into a small skillet with the spinach and the hummus, cooking it at medium low 'til it is mixed together well.

Making the Ravioli:
Roll out the dough on a floured board, as thin as you can get it. Cut the dough into the shape you want your pasta, I used a drinking glass to make circles for mine. Fill a large pot with water and set it on high to boil it. Then, take a small spoonful of the filling and put it between two pieces of noodle, crimping the edges with a fork. Repeat til you've filled up all the ravioli. I made ten large raviolis, and had a little filling and a little noodle-dough left over. Boil the finished ravioli's in the water (with a little oil) til done, for me this was about ten minutes.

I heated up some tomato sauce with the leftover spinach and potato filling to serve on top, which was delicious. We also had a salad with Italian dressing and crunchy onion salad-toppings to finish off the meal. Yum!

For the next time: use cheese. roll dough thinner for pasta. make garlic bread to go with it.

Travis' rating: 5 stars! Yay!

A Few Photos from the Past....

White bread, drizzled in honey



White bread again, shaped like a snail :-)



Aly helping me with a home-made pizza (mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, plain organic tomato sauce, white bread dough with italian spices in it)



Dinner rolls (again, plain white bread, this time with lots of honey in it, if I remember correctly)

Alright, those are all the photos I can find for now! From now on, however, I'm going to photograph the meals I make as I go, and share them with you as often as I can! Thanks for reading,

Sophi