Pizza and Salad for Sunday Brunch

I had a fun time yesterday preparing today's Sunday brunch. I found a recipe for pizza rustica on www.allrecipes.com and tweaked it a little. It was different from the usual pizza, because this had a double crust, and the recipe was more like an enriched pie dough. I followed the crust recipe exactly as it was on the website, but I substituted cottage cheese and cheddar cheese for the filling. For the meat, I used salami and cooked ham. It got me rave reviews, the sweetness of the crust countered the saltiness of the filling. The crust was also very tender (owing to the fact that it had 1/2 cup of sugar in it) and flaky.

I made a cold pasta salad to go along with it. I boiled macaroni, mixed it with olives, chopped celery, spring onions, cooked ham, green peas and dressed it with a mixture of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, equal parts sour cream and mayonnaise with a little milk, mixed them all together and chilled it overnight. The result was very good and complemented my pizza rustica. My sister said brunch was very yummy...