Mushroom Pizza

Pizza is fun to make! I love making yeasty doughs, and you also get to choose any flavour combo you like. It's hard to get them just as crispy as the professionals do, but if you've got an oven that can get really really hot you'll still have something delicious on your hands.

We had one of my friends over for dinner on New Years Eve, and we made it a pizza night! The dough recipe is from Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy, a huge tome that I've had for years, but never actually used - it's almost too big and intimidating to be picked up and read regularly.

His recipe for pizza is actually for small pizette, but it's not too hard to just use the dough to make grown-up sized pizza.

The dough is a pretty standard yeast dough, with a good lot of olive oil in it. However, what is interesting is the way in which you knead the dough. It is referred to as la colomba, (dove), because you fold the dough over like a dove's wings!

To start, you press it out with your fingers, both stretching the dough and leaving lots of indentations in it.

Then, much like the turns in puff pastry, you fold the dough into thirds...
... and stretch it out again. You do that a couple of times (no need to rest in between), and then let it rest for 20 minutes. According to the recipe, the indenting and folding creates pockets of air that get trapped in the dough.

You can already see the trapped air bubble when you roll out the dough...

I divided the dough into 3 pieces, and we all choose our own toppings for them.

Onions, salami, red peppers, provolone cheese, mushrooms and tomato sauce (homemade!!!) - all of my favourites.

They took about 20 minutes in a super-hot oven (240C).

The pizza you see at the top of this post was pure mushroom - mushrooms and cheese, with a little porcini powder for extra mushroomy oomph.

This one had mushrooms, tomato, cheese and salami!

And finally, we have our pizza with the lot - a bit of everything!

The dough was really yummy and super elastic... and thanks to the colomba, I got some of those funky stretchy dough bubbles that fancy pizzerias do!

Dough Bubble 1
Dough Bubble 2

What are your favourite pizza toppings???

I was feeling slightly delicate today after a big night out last night, and I wanted to make a bowl of Keema from Nigella Lawson's Feast. Keema is an Indian spicy mixture of minced lamb and peas, which is apparently perfect for the day after the night before. Sadly though, my parents wanted to have leftovers for dinner, so I couldn't justify going out and buying the lamb for it. This, you see, would have just created more leftovers, thus exacerbating the problem.

So, I made this. I have fallen in love with frozen peas, and wanted to use them in a pasta dish. I also vaguely recall Giorgio Locatelli having an orecchiette dish with anchovies and green vegetables, and thus thought they would go well together. We also have some very nearly overripe tomatoes sitting on the kitchen bench...

Hangover Orecchiette



Put water for the pasta on the boil. When it's boiling, add salt and cook 100g orecchiette according to packet instructions.

Add some oil to a frying pan, add a small crushed garlic clove, a little bit of chopped onion and three large anchovies. Stir it around until the onion is soft and the anchovies have become mush. Add a finely chopped birdseye chilli (keep the seeds), a diced tomato and a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. Stir over medium heat until the peas are cooked and the tomato has gone mushy. Drain the pasta and add it to the pan. Stir to combine and serve with pecorino cheese shavings.

Serves 1

Now I know Italians don't serve cheese with fish, but this is my dish, and my hangover, dammit! It's good, it works! The heat of the chilli, the sharpness of the anchovies and cheese, and the bite of the pasta (it's better more al dente than normal, in my opinion) all work together really well. Similar to (I imagine) the Keema, this pasta is a reviving hangover cure in a bowl.