Good Friday Pizza

My husband doesn't eat meat on Good Friday, so I tried to be a good wife and make some meatless meals today. Now normally I would whip out the PB&J for lunch, and maybe make some pasta for supper, but we have company this week (my husband's aunt came to visit us from Quebec) so I wanted to make something a little nicer.

For lunch I made a quiche using this recipe, but without any bacon in it. I used 1 c. whipping cream (leftover from the crêpes yesterday) instead of milk, so that sort of made up for the fact that it was baconless. And actually, I did cook up 4 slices of bacon and my intent was to crumble them over half the quiche, but then I just ate them instead and used some Cheese, Chives & (soy) Bacon Dip Mix to add flavour. What can I say - just cuz my husband doesn't eat meat on Good Friday doesn't mean I should have to suffer, right?

Anyway, the quiche was delicious, with lots of spinach, tomato, and mushrooms in it. Then for supper, I sort of took the same essential ingredients and threw it all on a pizza, along with lots of other fabulous toppings. First, here's the new pizza crust recipe I tried out, courtesy of a french cookbook for kids' that my husband won on Radio-Canada yesterday.

MULTIGRAIN PIZZA CRUST (can you tell I bought a bag of multigrain flour this week??)

2 tsp. quick-rising yeast

1 tsp. sugar

1 1/2 c. hot water

2 c. multigrain flour + 1 c. all-purpose flour (I added an extra 1/2 c. multigrain flour as well)

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. oil

cornmeal

Mix together yeast and sugar, and pour in hot water. Let it sit for 10 minutes until it gets foamy. Combine flour and salt, and pour in yeast mixture and oil. (This is when I added the extra flour.) Knead for a few minutes to form a ball, then cover and place in a warm oven for 30-45 minutes. Punch down the dough on a floured surface and roll it out. (I made one 9x13" pizza and one 6-8"round pizza for the kids.) Sprinkle cornmeal on the pans before you put the dough down, and then add your favourite toppings. Bake at 400 F for 15-17 minutes.

For the kids' pizza, we just put pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese. (I added the fresh basil to make it more photogenic, and then I picked it all off before William saw it.)

For the adults' pizza (which my daughter also tried, and loved) we put tons of toppings - lots of whole-leaf baby spinach, sliced mushrooms, canned artichokes (cut into large pieces), onion slices, sundried tomatoes (blanced in boiling water, and then chopped into small pieces), crumbled feta cheese, mozzarella cheese, and then after it came out of the oven we added fresh tomatoes and basil.

This crust really turned out well (I don't always have the best luck with yeasty things, but once I gave the dough a little extra time to rise, it worked out fine.) And I absolutely love homemade pizza, especially with all those veggies (although I was pretty choked when I opened my jar of roasted red peppers from the fridge and found they were mouldy. Luckily there were enough of the other veggies to make up for it.)

Have a wonderful Easter weekend! We're not having our Easter family meal until later next week, so I will have some new recipes for you then.