Kale & garlic pizza with a green bean, carrot, & sesame salad
Last night I cooked dinner for some friends. This substantially involved re-cooking a couple of things from Veguary I'd been meaning to blog about for a while. Both are variants on dishes from the River Cottage Veg Every Day book that I've made a few tweaks to, and both work really rather well.The kale pizza is pretty much straight up from p186, with a base sauce of insanely thick roasted garlic béchamel sauce, and a spot of cumin. This has the benefit of tasting stupidly indulgent whilst not actually being all that bad for you. But I am not fucking about with the garlic; you were warned.For the salad, I borrowed the dressing from Fearnley-Whittingstall's"Asian-inspired coleslaw" on p115, and whacked it over blanched beans and julienne carrots. It's all about the sesame, and the dishes work together surprisingly well, although there's a lot of very strong flavours sloshing about here.
Ingredients:
For the pizza (one large one):
- Around 300g of oil-rich, nicely-elastic bread dough (see below)
- About 300g kale,
- A couple of onions, or just one huge one
- Cumin seeds (a sturdy pinch)
- A bulb of garlic
- Flour
- Butter
- Milk
- Oregano (again, a pinch)
For the salad:
- Fine green beans, trimmed
- Carrots
- Spring onions
- 2tbsp soy sauce
- 1tbsp honey (maple syrup also works)
- 2tbsp white wine or cider vinegar
- 1tbsp strong sesame oil
- 1tbsp toasted sesame seeds
- 2tbsp olive oil
- A piece of ginger
A note on bread dough
Giving bread dough as an ingredient is a total cop out. Mea Culpa, and all that jazz. The thing is, I really can't add any value here. Pizza dough recipes are substantially a solved problem. Personally, I don't use one - I start with about 200g of strong flour, activate some yeast in a mug of warm water, and do the rest by touch, in increments. But I'm a colossal ponce. The dough recipe in Veg Every Day is perfectly adequate, as is the one in Delia's Complete Cookery Course, or in Silver Spoon.