In preparation for Lent: Salmon Pizza

Here at the Atsma household, we have a tradition of homemade pizza every week, on Sundays during the football season and on Fridays during the rest of the year.  Our policy is to make the pizza from whatever we happen to have in the house, but I usually make sure that we have pepperoni, mozarella cheese, and tomato sauce in the house so our options are open. 

The following recipe, however, has none of the above.  We threw it together last week to use the last remains of a salmon filet.  I now post it for all my Catholic friends in Bremerton who are about to start fasting for Lent. (Fish is still allowed, right?)

 

Crust:

Use on whatever crust suits you. I use Nigella Lawson’s pizza caesarea recipe:

• 1 2/3 cups cake flour (I use whole wheat and it works fine.)
• 1 heaping tsp. yeast
• .5 tsp. salt
• approximately 1/2 cup + 2 Tbls. warm water
• 2 Tbls. extra virgin olive oil

Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the water and the olive oil, adding as much water as necessary to form a dough. "When you've got a shaggy mess that's on its way to being a dough" (I love Ms. Lawson's cookbooks), dump it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for about 5 minutes. Let it rise for an hour in a lightly oiled bowl covered in plastic wrap.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees (I've used 450 with no ill effect). Nigella prescribes flattening the dough by hand, but I roll the crust thin and cut down the cook time by five minutes (15 minutes for the crust and sauce + 10 minutes with all toppings). I also coat the pizza pan with olive oil and sprinkle rosemary and parsley on it. Just a habit of mine.

Sauce: 

• 1.5 – 2 cups white sauce (butter/ olive oil sautéed with flour, add milk and thicken)
• 3 tablespoons prepared mustard 
• .25 cups mayonnaise
• .5 tsp. lemon juice 
• 2 Tbsp rosemary
• 1 Tbsp dried parsley 
• Salt and pepper to taste

Prepare the white sauce until it reaches canned mushroom soup consistency.  Add the mustard, mayonnaise, and lemon juice and stir until the sauce is uniformly yellow.  Then add the herbs and spices, turn to low heat, and let sit until the crust is ready.  Spread the sauce over the crust, and put the pizza as is in the oven for 15 minutes (as mentioned above).

 

Toppings:

• 1 cup cooked salmon, shredded 
• 1 cup mushroom pieces 
• 1.5 cups fresh spinach, chopped (We put spinach on almost all of our pizzas.)
• 2+ cups  grated monterrey jack cheese

Take the pizza out of the oven.  Sprinkle the toppings over the sauce in the order given, making sure that the cheese covers everything else liberally.  Put the pizza back in the over and bake for another ten minutes.  Cool the pizza for about five minutes.  Serve with a salad or something dark and green.  We drink milk with dinner, but with the cream sauce and all the cheese, it's almost overkill.