Red, White, and Green Pizzas & Bellini-tini

RED, WHITE, AND GREEN PIZZAS

Adapted from The Everything Pizza Book by Brenda Hulin

29 ounces whole tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

6 ounces tomato paste

4 tablespoons chopped garlic

4 ounces finely chopped onion

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried basil

Pinch of thyme

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 cups of water

1¼ teaspoons active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

½ teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon salt    

3¼ cups bread flour

2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

6 ounces shredded Provolone cheese

6 ounces shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

12 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese

2 cups roasted red pepper strips

2 cups thinly sliced boiled potatoes (about two medium Russet potatoes)

2 cups chopped blanched broccoli

Puree the tomatoes in a Vita Mix or high powered blender until smooth.  In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, combine one tablespoon of olive oil and the tomato paste.  Cook and stir for about two minutes until well-combined and a little darkened.  Add tomato puree, stirring to break up any clumps of the tomato paste mixture.  Add the next 8 ingredients (garlic through water).  Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and simmer for two to three hours, stirring often.  Sauce should be reduced and thick.

Combine the yeast, water, and sugar in a bowl and set aside for at least five minutes.  Stir the salt and flour together in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook.  Add the yeast mixture and one tablespoon of olive oil and stir on a low speed until the mixture forms a ball around the hook.  Continue mixing a little longer  until the dough becomes smooth and elastic.  Let rest for an hour in a greased bowl in a warm, dry place.  Punch dough down, and divide into three pieces.  

Preheat oven to 400º with three pizza stone inside, if using (if available, use the convection setting on your oven).  Roll or stretch each piece out to a 13 inch circle on a cornmeal dusted board or pizza peel. Distribute one cup of sauce over each of the three dough circles.  Combine the cheeses in a bowl and toss well to combine thoroughly.  Evenly distribute the cheese among the three dough circles.  Arrange the pepper slices over one pizza, the potato slices over another, and the broccoli florets over the third.  Slide each pizza onto its respective pizza stone and bake for 15-20 minutes (can be baked separately) until cheese is golden brown.

     After all of the exotic ingredients we have used over the years and the strange combinations of myriad toppings, I wondered how a simple pizza, featuring only one topping was going to go over with me.  As I had said before, we have had so many fantastic flavors and combinations of toppings, that the simple somehow just doesn't thrill me any more.  I had to fight the urge to add things to the recipe to "take it up a notch".   I had even thought about combining all three of the featured ingredients on one pizza, but in the spirit of the mission, I refrained.
   I had a job interview on Thursday afternoon (finally!), so Thursday morning I was working frantically to get as much done by way of pizza preparations as possible before I had to change and get ready for my interview.  Also, it was a good way to take my mind off of the anxiety of interviewing.
    A quick glance at the recipe told me there were several steps I could do in advance.  There was dough to be made, sauce to be made, provolone that needed shredding, potatoes that needed boiling, and broccoli that needed blanching.
    I decided to start with the potatoes.  I cleaned the potatoes, threw them in a pot, and covered them with water.  I have learned that it is a good idea to start potatoes in the pot with the cold water and get the water boiling with the potatoes already in it.  This way, the potatoes heat up with the water and cook more evenly, whereas, if you put the whole potato in the boiling water, the outside starts to cook long before the inside.  The outside then tends to get mushy long before the inside is cooked.

     While the water was heating up, I started thinking about the sauce.  The directions said to cook it for two hours to three hours.  I didn't think I would be able to do that, but I could get a rough start on it.  I had considered using a regular jar of sauce to save time, but then I remembered all of the green tomatoes I had picked a month ago and set inside the greenhouse to ripen.  There was a whole grocery bag of them out there, and it seemed like a good use for some of them, and I would think that some would be ripe by now.
     I made the walk out there, and found that half of the bag was ripe.  I filled up my tomato bowl with the ripe ones and brought them inside.  I wasn't sure what to do about the rest.  Will they ripen before they freeze?  Should I find some recipe to use them as green tomatoes?   Those were thoughts I needed to put off for another day.
     After I washed a few and cut the cores out, I weighed out 29 ounces worth of pieces and tossed them into my Vita Mix.  In less than a minute,  I had tomato sauce.  Have I mentioned that I love my Vita Mix?

     The potatoes weren't quite done yet (I was unable to get my fork into the potatoes without exerting a fair amount of pressure).  I decided cut the broccoli up into florets.  I was going to actually measure out the two cups that the recipe called for, but I thought better of it.  Neither my husband nor I are broccoli fans, and I knew that if I didn't blanch it all, it was unlikely that we would eat the extras.  We may not anyway, but at least it was already chopped and blanched, so it gave it a chance to be eaten.
     I loaded the florets into my pod, and they fit perfectly.  My potatoes were done at this point, so I plopped them into an ice bath to stop them from cooking any further and cool them down, so I could hand on to them while slicing them.  Since the pot of hot water was already there and already boiling, I dunked my pod of broccoli into it for about a minute - long enough for me to pull the potatoes out of the ice batch and make room for the pod.

     I still had a few minutes before I wanted to start getting ready for the interview, so I thought I would get the sauce actually cooking.  If it wasn't done before I had to leave, I could always turn it off and start cooking it again when I got home.  The oil and tomato paste went in (I do love a recipe that calls for the entire can of tomato paste!).  I stirred in the tomato sauce, breaking up the paste clumps that were floating around in the pan.  Once it came to a boil, I covered it with a splatter screen and let it go.

     Just a quick side bar here about splatter screens - they are an absolute must when reducing tomato products.  Tomato sauces "burp" large heavy blobs of goo when they boil, aiming for your shirt, your wall, the floor, and anything else that may be in the near vicinity of the pot.  It does no good to put a lid on it, because the idea is to evaporate the moisture and thicken the sauce.  If there is a lid on it, the moisture that gets boiled out condenses on the lid and goes right back in to the mixture.  The splatter screens are definitely worth the investment.
     At this point, my potatoes were cooled enough for me to handle, and I thought I would just cut them up before I put them away.  The nice thing about boiling whole potatoes with their skins on, is that the skins slip right off with a minimal amount of pressure.  I kept some of the skins on, but a lot of it just fell off while I was slicing.

     I turned off the sauce when I left for my interview.  When I came home, it looked pretty thick already, so I didn't put it back on the heat.
     I made a batch of dough.  Every time I make this dough, it seems to turn out differently.  Sometimes, I need to add an extra half a cup of water, sometimes a quarter cup, sometimes none at all.  I think next time, I may have to weigh my flour to see if that is the issue.  The only other thing I can think of is the humidity levels, but I wouldn't think that would make that much of a difference.  It definitely needs more research on my end.
     It was interesting to me that this recipe called for half a batch of dough, the same amount of dough as many of the other recipes in the book that claimed to make two 12 inch pizzas, and this one was claiming to make three 14 inch pizzas.  It seemed like a mathematical impossibility.  I was only able to roll each dough out to a 13 inch circle, and those were pretty thin.

     I divided my sauce up between the three dough circles.  When I finished spreading the third pizza with sauce, I looked back at the first one and realized that I probably didn't cook the sauce long enough.  It looked thick on top, but there was a thin, transparent stream of liquid coming out from underneath the bulk of the sauce and running onto my counter.  I cleaned that one up, and ran to catch the matching streams from the other two pizzas.  Unfortunately, a drawer was open under the third one, catching a puddle's worth of pink liquid in the meantime.
     There was a lot of cheese on these pizzas - two cups or half a pound - per pizza.  There wasn't a chance that these pizzas could taste bad with all of that cheese.  It wouldn't matter what was on top after that.

     I still have an entire grocery bag of peppers from my garden in my refrigerator, but I had to go buy roasted red peppers, because I didn't have any red ones.  Let me rephrase that - I didn't have any red peppers that weren't hot, and I didn't think we were ready for an entire pizza with hot peppers scattered over everything.  Especially since the hot ones I do have are really hot.
     I was trying to pull a pepper out of the jar, and it was proving to be very difficult.  They were a bit slick, and every time I would grab an edge, it would rip off, leaving me with a tiny speck of pepper between my fingers.  When I was finally able to grab a good portion of a pepper, I pulled it out, and it was one giant red pepper.  It looked a little bit like a squid when I laid it out on the counter.

     After cutting that into strips, I sprinkled it over one of the pizzas.  The directions said to arrange them in a spoke pattern, but I didn't want to do that, because I was afraid that when we were ready to cut the pizza for slices, some of the slices wouldn't have any on them, depending on how many pieces we were going to cut out of the thing.  I like randomly placed toppings.   The broccoli was distributed over another of the pizzas, and the potato slices went on the third, and I was ready to work on our drink.

BELLINI-TINI

2 measures vodka

½ measure peach schnapps

2 measures peach puree

Pour all ingredients in an ice filled shaker.  Shake and strain into a chilled martini glass.

   

      I cut one peach in half and removed the pit.  I cut off two small wedges for garnish, and threw what was left of the two halves in my Vita Mix - instant peach puree!  I measured out enough liquor and puree into my cocktail shaker to make two drinks.  I left out the ice for the moment, so that the drink wouldn't get diluted before Pam arrived.  I filled two martini glasses with ice water to chill them down before serving.  Pam arrived and informed me that she was on call and couldn't drink.  I would have to drink them both myself.  Well, I was willing to take one for the team.

     It was smooth.  It had a little bit of a creamy texture, even though it wasn't thick.  It was light and fruity without being overly sweet.  It was really a hardship to have to drink two of those.  It's a good thing I love my family and am willing to make those kinds of sacrifices for them.
     We had put a frozen pizza in the oven to make sure that there would be something that the kids liked.  However, in our (my) drinking and catching up with our events of the week, we had lost track of it.  The cheese got a little brownish (blackish) on top.  The other three were perfect.

     The pepper pizza was the favorite, even with the kids.  The peppers were sweet and tangy and gorgeously nestled in a bed of cheese.  The potato pizza was creamy and gooey - a perfect comfort food.  The broccoli remained al dente, which was nice.  It gave the "green" pizza a little texture and interest.  All three were marvelous, and I was reminded that sometimes simple is better.

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