Eggy spinach pizza!

 'Polpo: a Venetian cookbook of sorts'- a book Waterstones deemed one of the year's best cookbooks in 2012, contains a number of beautiful recipes, and this Spinach and Egg pizza was inspired by one of them.

I made the dough using a recipe from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's  Veg Every Day. 'Magic dough' it is, and from my experience, it gets better with time.
If you leave it in the fridge for a few days, the flavour improves immensely. It starts tasting like the real rustic stone baked Italian pizza bases- which is exactly what you'd want!

I recently learnt just how well spinach, egg, and creamy sauce go together when I made a Welsh Rarebit with spinach. Delicious!

Ingredients:

• 100ml milk
• 2 bay leves
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• 50-100g grated cheddar cheese
• freshly ground black pepper
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 2tsp cornflour
• 150g spinach
•  tennis ball sized blob of pizza dough
• one egg

To make the sauce:

• Heat the milk in a small pan, on low, with the bay leaves, ground pepper, garlic, and nutmeg, and keep stirring to stop the milk from catching.
• Once it has been warm for 5 or so minutes, take some of the liquid and spoon about one tbsp in to a glass containing the cornflour. Mix this in to a paste until all the lumps are gone, and then add it to the rest of the milk.
• Turn up the heat a little and stir until the milk has thickened.
• Add enough cheese to your taste- it should not overpower the other flavours, but still be strong enough to come through on a pizza base.
• Taste, and add make sure the seasoning is correct, if it is then remove from the heat.
• Preheat your oven to as high as it will go (mine was 250C) and line a good heat-conducting baking tray with non-stick foil, and stick it in the oven.
• Just cover the bottom of a deep pan with water, turn up high, add the spinach and put a lid on it. The spinach will only take a few minutes to wilt.
• When the spinach is done, drain through a colander and squeeze out as much water you can from the spinach using a fork, and set aside.
• Roll out/stretch out your pizza dough to an appropriate size on a flat surface which is lightly dusted with flour.
• Take out the backing tray you prepared earlier and place your pizza base on it. Next take the white sauce and spread it evenly on top of the dough base, laving a rim clean for the crust. Then scatter the spinach on top of that. Crack your egg right in the center of the pizza and carefully place the pizza in the center of the oven for about 10 minutes.

Buon appetito!