Swingin' Ciabatta Pizza Snack
Snack itself:
1 loaf of ciabatta bread
3/4 cup of shredded ham (or approximately 4-5 pieces of pre-packaged ham)
1 tomato
3/4 cup mushrooms (or about 1/2 can or about 4-6 mushrooms, depending on your love of fun guys, I mean, fungi. Don't cook fun-loving men in the oven. Everyone knows the Silence of the Lambs was only a good movie because of Jack Nicholson, not because of the subject matter. Er, literally.)
1 and 1/2-2 cups of shredded cheese (I used Gouda because the Gouda I had was turning out to be...on the edge of passing from the state where I could eat it--because I don't believe in eating moldy cheese. Although one time I accidentally ate a cheese that had mold on it. This made me unhappy.)
Pizza sauce (recipe below)
Olive oil (because everything that even remotely has to do with pizza in Europe has olive oil. Seemed like a good idea at the time.)
Zippy Pizza Sauce (No, really, it has a lot of spice. You might want to tone it down a bit.)
500ml of tomato sauce
1 tblspn of mayo
3 tspns of oregano
2 tspns of spaghetti seasoning (or thyme, rosemary, garlic and basil each in small amounts,. about half a tsp each)
1 tspn of cumin
pinch of chili powder
The first step is the sauce, because this part actually takes a bit. You will need about 500ml of tomato sauce, so, in other words, a can or so. Or, if you live where I do, tomato sauce often comes in these cute little boxes. I had to show you because, well, you know. I think everything is novel.
Next, pour the sauce into a small pot, and add a table spoon of mayo. You can use miracle whip, but the mayo I have here is really good (one of the many food perks of Belgium) so do the best you can, but something to make it creamy. I don't recommend cream. Really, use something like, well, anything, but you don't want to thin out the sauce, you want it thick. Yay for super-fattening products produced from eggs. (You know, Belgians produce really rich foods, but hardly any of them are overweight. Can you say....strange?)
Now you need to take your crazy looking mayo and tomato sauce mixture, and produce something tasty. We do this by adding the appropriate amount of spice to make it taste pizza-esque. Basically, garlic and some oregano will be fine, but if you're like me, you realize that you have fourteen million spice bottles, that you'll never use all of them, and so the easy solution to this problem is for you to pour as many spices as possible into every single meal. You can follow my choice in spices, which include a spaghetti mix of spices (because I didn't have any rosemary or thyme on hand. I feel like singing Simon and Garfunkel now, but I digress.) garlic, oregano, cumin and chili powder. You need to cook this for about 15 mins or until flavours mix. Make sure it's on low heat, unless you like red stains on your clothes. (Again, this could be yet another good time to reference Silence of the Lambs, but, let's say we did, and not.)
While your sauce is a-cookin', you can now make your toppings as you desire. I was originally going to use some salami I had, but I decided that I didn't really want to use up all my meat in one sitting, and so I stuck with the ham, which turned out to be a good idea, since the toppings all hardly fit on the pizza as is. As you can see, it doesn't look like much, but my loaf of bread wasn't that big. Also, I really should have used more mushrooms, since because of a milk accident with the box of fresh mushrooms I had, they went a little, uh, bad. To say the least. (Don't ask.)
Now we take out bread, like so, cut it length-wise, and apply the olive oil on first and then a layer of pizza sauce (generous or stingy, depending on your sauce-preference.) which should be ready by now, unless you cut things slower than I do. Which should be nearly impossible, I'd say. Now that I think of it, you could probably use any long bread to make this thing, and actually, on a baguette wouldn't be half bad. Something grainy would have also have been nice. So, anything goes, really, no rules here. Not that I cook with rules. That much is certainly obvious.
So sauces and oils applied like so. Do not be alarmed by the view from the side. Your head is attached right. Mine isn't because I forgot to add in the picture at the right view. 'Nuff said.
This is what they looked like as they went in the oven. Again, I would like to point out that the oven that is in the house I now live in (I could cry that's how happy I am. AN OVEN.) is not sideways, like some bad Coca-cola commercial, but instead, I really should re-orient all my photos. Later.
This is what they will look like when finished. I cut them in half, and it makes 4 rather generous pieces. I couldn't eat more than three of them, and saved a fourth for lunch the next day. (And burnt the roof of my mouth because I thought I could get away with eating it while it was still burning hot. I was hungry.)
So, that's all for this episode! I also managed to make a pizza dough, but I haven't perfected it yet *in other words, I got too hungry and ate it before it was fully cooked because I'm a genius* so I will give out a recipe when I have it down pat. (I hate making dough, by the way, and I'm very bad at it. Currently a skill I need to learn.)'
This would have been up sooner, but thanks to Blogger which eats my photos 75% of the time, I nearly cried trying to put this up. I'll post more later, probably in the next day or three. I have lots to say, but it's 2:30 in the morning, and...I need sleep. =D
