Pitzza Party

What do you do when you need to cook for your mum, sister and nephew on a lazy sunday evening?

Pitzza. Yes, pitzza. In short,

Pita bread + pizza = Pitzza.

(by the way, “Pitza” is a racial slur for people of the Italian race, so don’t go around trying to order this in an Italian restaurant)

Here’s the shopping list.

1 bag of pita bread (6 pieces)
1 tub of coriander pesto
1 tub of mixed anti-pasto
1 chicken breast
1 bag of sliced mushrooms
1 bag of parma ham
1 bag of arugula
2 balls of buffalo mozzarella
2 cans of “Cirio” tinned tomatoes

First, start with some home made tomato sauce. Cut a few cloves of garlic and saute lightly in some good olive oil. Careful not to burn it. Then sprinkle some dried oregano and mix. Next, open the tins of tomatoes and pour them into your pan. Move them around, but be careful not to burst the whole tomatoes as the seeds can be quite bitter if you don’t it enough. Salt it a bit then let it slowly simmer for about 20-30 mins. Pop the whole tomatoes then and mix it through. Add a dash of red wine vinegar if you like. End result should look like this:

This basic tomato sauce will make you wonder why you bothered to spend money buying bottled pasta sauces. You can use this to make anything from tomato-based pasta to even a stew. It keeps for a couple of weeks in the fridge.

Back to pitzza. I took the coriander pesto, marinated the chicken and grilled it. After which, the meat is cut to chunks.

Pita bread is halved because I don’t like it too thick. If you prefer more bread, you can leave it whole. 6 pieces became 12 pitzza bases.

Wash the mushrooms and rocket, then pre-heat oven to about 180 degrees while waiting for your folks to arrive.

To assemble, just use the tomato sauce or pesto as your base, then pile on the toppings. I had four basic combos from the above ingredients.

Parma ham + Arugula (tomato base)
Mushrooms (tomato base)
Anti-pesto (tomato base)
Grilled pesto chicken (pesto base)

Tear up the buffalo mozzarella to top your pitzza and its off to the oven for a couple of minutes. Check for the mozzarella, when it starts turning a little golden brown, its ready. You can either serve them whole of like me, cut each into four pieces so they’re all bite-sized.

After the first round of four, the next batch had different combinations. The pesto chicken with mushrooms were quite nice, though my favorite is still the parma ham and arugula. I didn’t manage to take any pics when its fresh out of the oven, but here’s one I took when they stopped grabbing.

One last thing. If you want to try the parma ham and arugula, remember that arugula can’t take oven temperature. So put pitzza and parma ham with mozzarella into oven first, then top with arugula after you take it out, if not the lovely rocket will be all shriveled up.

Enjoy.