Swang Can Cook!

I can’t count the times I’ve called my mom, usually at a relatively late hour (as I’m two hours behind and all) and demanded her help with my latest kitchen experiment, usually in one breath and possibly with the addition of the phrase: “Tell me quick because I think it’s about to burn!”

Luckily for me, she’s always happy to help, or enlist her friends to help. I called her two nights ago when I was planning to make pizza for some friends, and basically said: “They’ll be here in ten minutes! How do I cook pizza?!” Her response was to look in a cookbook, and thankfully she’d given me the perfect one for Christmas.

Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food has an excellent pizza recipe, which I used in conjunction with dough from Whole Foods. Hey, I like to bake. But let’s just say I really don’t have six+ hours to watch dough rise.

If you buy the dough (and Whole Foods has excellent pizza dough) this daylong recipe becomes as simple as a rolling pin and a baking sheet.



Which is why it’s the first ever recipe in my series Swang Can Cook!

A few weeks ago my friend Sarah visited me, and we discussed in detail the fact that she almost never cooks in her tiny New York kitchen. It’s understandable – her kitchen is essentially the size of my kitchen table. But, as I told her, cooking is enjoyable and rewarding and a heck of a lot more interesting than eating mac ‘n cheese from a box.

So I promised to suggest easy recipes that didn’t require hours of preparation, and thus this series was born!

Back to the pizza. This recipe could not be simpler. You can make any variety of pizza you might like, from prosciutto and goat cheese to ham and pineapple. (For the record, ham and pineapple grosses me out. But to each their own)

Some ingredient suggestions:

Tomato sauce (I’m partial to roasted red pepper sauce on pizza)
Mozzarella cheese
Goat cheese
Blue cheese
Black olives
Green olives
Garlic
Roasted red peppers
Caramelized onions
Spinach
Prosciutto
Pepperoni
Italian sausage
… basically you can see that the options are endless. Anything you throw at this will be delicious, in my opinion.



Personal favorite combinations of mine include Italian sausage and green olives, prosciutto and goat cheese and roasted red peppers and black olives.

The store bought dough I use makes two medium-size pizzas, though tonight I made multiple small ones. It entertained me. Also if you like a crunchy, thin crust, you might want to make multiple smaller pizzas. The baking time is roughly the same - I cooked mine for about 8 minutes instead of 10.



Easy as Pie Pizza

(adapted from Alice Water’s recipe in The Art of Simple Food)

Preheat oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and place an oven rack on the lowest level
Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal
Roll the dough into a circle roughly ten inches in diameter
Brush with olive oil
Turn over onto baking sheet
Top with favorite toppings: sauce, cheese, etc.
Bake until crust is brown, about ten minutes

Et voila, dinner! (And tomorrow's lunch, and tomorrow's dinner, etc)