Ioana's salty cake

I’ve named this dish like this, because it can be served as a Sunday late breakfast, as lunch, dinner or as a starter and I have the recipe from my good friend, Ioana. At home we call this Ioana’s pizza, just to make the distinction between a traditional pizza and this dish. I wouldn’t say this is a real pizza, it looks more like a salty cake, but when we are in the mood for pizza, I prepare this very easy recipe, we serve it with ketchup on top and that’s it, everybody is happy! As I said it’s very easy to prepare it and you can use what you already have at home. You can prepare this as a festive starter as well, with the advantage that it’s easy, fast and the amount is quite big. We serve it as a one-dish meal with a salad next to it. So let’s start!

Prep.: 20 min

Cook.: 45-50 min

Difficulty: easy

Ingredients for a baking pan of 25x35 cm

150-200 g ham (I used 100 g and 60 g bacon)

150 g tin sliced mushrooms

Spring onions, thinly sliced or red onion, julienne cut

1 small tin corn kernels

100 g sliced black olives

1-2 tomatoes, thinly sliced

100-150 g grated cheese/mozzarella

Dry basil/oregano

Salt and pepper

For the batter

200 g white cheese (feta, Turkish cheese, etc.)

450 g yoghurt of sour cream

6 eggs

200 g flour

1 tsp backing soda (bicarbonate of soda) mixed with 1 tsp lemon juice

Method:

I like to start by preparing all the ingredients I use to put on top of the batter. Chop the ham, mushrooms, onion and the rest as I mentioned above. If you use fresh mushrooms, brown them a while in some butter in order to dry them a little bit, so they will not leave too much liquid into the batter.

The batter:

Mash the cheese with a fork and stir in the yoghurt, eggs, flour and the backing soda mixed with the lemon juice. The result will be as thick yoghurt.

Pour it into a buttered baking pan and add the rest of the ingredients on top, like for the pizza. I like to use this order: mushrooms, ham, olives, onion, corn kernels, tomatoes, cheese, basil/oregano, salt and pepper. Bake it in the preheated oven at 180° C for 45-50 min.

My tips:

You can add on top spicy sausages, paprika, dry tomatoes etc.
The quantities for what you put on top are estimated. You can use as much as you prefer.
You can use a smaller pan if you like it higher or even a rectangular loaf pan, but in this case I would recommend you to add into the batter the ingredients you normally put on top and to bake it a little bit longer.

Enjoy it!