Jottage from Lancaster - making my own pizza

Heather mentioned to me that she made her own pizzas so that was enough to throw down the challenge to me to have a shot at it. I decided to make the Magic Bread as the basis but because I was in too much of a hurry, I chucked the ingredients into the bread maker to let it mix it all up rather than go to the effort of kneading it myself. Lazy, I know, but I ended up with some nice stretchy stuff that I suddenly realised would have to rise for an hour or so before it could be made into pizza. So I postponed the idea of having pizza and put the covered dough into the fridge in the hope that it would be OK to use tomorrow. 


Now tomorrow has turned into today and that bowl brimming over with risen dough seems to be filling the fridge so this morning I took it out and next I had to work out how to make a thin circle. In River Cottage Veg Hugh seems to make out that you can just roll it out very thinly but the dough seemed to refuse to roll and stubbornly stuck to the rolling pin or just shrank back to its original size. Suddenly I remembered a silicone roller I had bought from Lakeland in a sale and I threw the ball of dough on to the baking sheet and eagerly rolled it into shape. It seemed to obey and obligingly stayed in shape.

Nice rolling thing

I then slathered it with a layer of passata, cut up a red pepper very thinly and layered on peperoni, mozzarella and a little grated cheese. I was very spare with everything making one little ball of mozzarella do 2 large pizzas and barely used an ounce of cheese on each. I had put the oven on to very hot, threw in the 2 pizzas (I had enough dough left over to make a plain flat bread-y thing which I'm not sure what to do with yet) and this is what came out:

Now this may not look that appealing or professional - but it tasted wonderful - much tastier than anything shop bought and I would say barely a quarter of the price. Success, I think!

Jottage from Lancaster - Spicy Yoghurt Marinade for Chicken

Although we've been back at home a week from our US trip, and there are no jet lag excuses left, cooking is still something I don't really want to get involved with in any deep way. Not least because I haven't really been seriously food shopping and so I don't have everything in the house. So it was with some relief that I remembered a jar of pasta sauce in the cupboard which would do in an emergency. And today seemed to be that emergency - I definitely wanted an easy dinner that I didn't have to think about much.

Hidden away.

I suddenly remembered that bit of chicken in the freezer and wondered if there was anything simple I could do with it so I quickly scanned the index of River Cottage Everyday in case there was something I could rustle up without too much effort. To my surprise I noticed Spicy Yoghurt Marinade for Chicken which I had never seen before. I thought that there wasn't a recipe in the book I hadn't at least read through so when I looked this up I eventually found it tucked away at the bottom of the Herby Chicken page. It looked so simple, so trivial, that even opening a packet of pasta sauce seemed complex (just getting the lid off seems to be quite a faff these days). So I took out a little pot of home made yoghurt from the fridge, added curry powder, garam masala and a little bit of lemon juice and mixed them together adding a clove of garlic and dropped in the chicken. I did this at lunch time so that the flavours would develop. 

Marinading

Then I cooked a bit of rice and voila! it was all done. 

Ready to eat!

PS It was, incidentally, lovely to eat too. One of those infinitely adaptable recipes that you can put in almost any combination of spices that you like and it will always be that little bit different.

Jottage from Lancaster - er.....

We have been away on holiday for nearly 3 weeks travelling round the North West USA doing some touristy things like Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole, Seattle and Portland. Coming back home after a 9 hour flight without too much sleep was a bit of a culture shock, and adjusting to this time zone some 8 hours ahead of what we have been used to hasn't been too easy. Overall, we haven't felt too ill - just tired at unpredictable times of the day.


I dragged myself to the freezer last night in an attempt to find something light and tasty for dinner that would perhaps make us both feel a bit better. There was an unmarked plastic tub of something tomatoey which looked rather nice. I am always of the opinion that I will remember stashing away these little left over bits and pieces and will know exactly what they are. This time (in truth like all the other times) I had absolutely no idea what was in it. But it looked quite nice and so I pulled out a piece of haddock that I bought some time ago and put the frozen tomato stuff on top, covered that with a bit of cheese that I had put into the freezer before we went away and cooked in it my faithful Remoska. As it happens, it was really rather nice. Now I am trying to rack my brains to work out what that tomato stuff was as I want to do it again. It was certainly a River Cottage something. 


Tonight I have found a chicken breast and I don't have any ideas about what to do with that but I may well mine the freezer again just in case something else turns up...