Tag Archives: Home Cooking

Pizza Night

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Italian Vegetarian Cooking

Italian Vegetarian Cooking

Tonight was a night I’d been promising myself for a little while as I don’t often get the time to make pizza from scratch anymore.

The base is from a book we’ve been using for almost 40 years now, Italian Vegetarian Cooking by Jo Marcangelo. We’ve mainly used it for the focaccia and pizza-base recipe and not much else and I’ve still to figure out why?

But I think we will start exploring it more in a little bit to see what else we could possibly make from it, or at least remind ourselves of why we don’t cook much from it.

The pizza base dough is standard and I really don’t need the book to remember it though I like to use it:

  • 225g OO flour
  • 7g instant dried yeast
  • 1tsp sugar
  • small palm of rock salt crushed
  • 150ml warm water
  • 2 tablespoons oil

This doesn’t change at all, mix it all together and knead until smooth, let rise for 1.5 to 2 hours.

I usually make my own tomato sauce base from:

  • half an onion finely diced
  • 2 cloves garlic finely diced
  • fresh rosemary, chopped
  • handful of black olives finely minced
  • salt
  • pepper
  • tin of chopped tomatoes
  • good squeeze tomato paste

Sauté the onions until soft, then add the garlic and rosemary and cook for a few minutes before adding the olives, salt, and pepper.

Let this cook for a while and then add the tin of tomatoes and squeeze of tomato paste, cook for 20-30 minutes over a low heat to cook tomatoes down and get a strength of flavour in the sauce.

Preheat the oven to 230°

After the dough has risen spread it out onto an oiled baking tray and make sure it fits, then spread the sauce on thinly. From here it’s completely up to what you fancy to have on the top, usually we have anchovies, black olives, and feta. Tonight though we opted for roast artichoke, black olives, and feta.

We do like feta on a pizza due to the sharp taste and it complements the tomato base so well.

Cook in the preheated oven for about 15 to 20 minutes until the base is well cooked, then enjoy.

Pizza

Pizza

Future Food

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Polpo

Polpo

I’ve got so many bookmarks in books, screenshots in Photos, bookmarks in browsers (a lot of these are from the Guardian…), and have lost track of the recipes I want to cook.

There are a few of these recipes that I’ve used and adapted in the past but not for quite a long time and I want to make them once more and add them to the blog as our recipes.

I thought if I have a list here of those I really want to cook and a link or reference to where I can find them it might encourage me to get round to cooking them, at least it will mean I can get all my bookmarks back.

Miss you Che.

This will be added to whenever I find a new recipe that takes my fancy and edited once I’ve cooked something and added it to the blog.

Last updated 29th April 2025.

Cookbook Library

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Cookbook library

Cookbook library

This is a growing list of all the cookbooks we have in the house, mainly for me to remember when I look at this post, and choose a cookbook we’ve not used for a while.

I’ll also be including biographies, foraging, and other books that talk about food as their main subjects.

This is also a permanent work in progress as we will be adding books to this all the time.

last updated 26/01/25

  • 10-Minute Sourdough by Vanessa Kimbell
  • An A-Z of Pasta by Rachel Roddy
  • Bazaar by Sabrina Ghayour
  • Brutto by Russell Norman
  • Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many by Jeremy Lee
  • Feasts by Sabrina Ghayour
  • Flavour by Sabrina Ghayour
  • How To Eat A Peach by Diana Henry
  • Japan: The Cookbook by Nancy Singleton Hachisu
  • Khazana by Saliha Mahmood Ahmed
  • Larousse Gastronomique
  • Leon: Happy Soups by John Vincent, et al.
  • Made In Italy by Giorgio Locatelli
  • Malaysia: Recipes from a Family Kitchen by Ping Coomes
  • Morito by Samantha Clark, et al.
  • Nights Out At Home by Jay Rayner
  • The Noma Guide to Fermentation by David Zilber, et al.
  • Polpo by Russell Norman
  • Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul by Diana Henry
  • The River Cafe Cookbook by Rose Gray, et al.
  • Sirocco by Sabrina Ghayour
  • The Social Food: Home Cooking Inspired by the Flavors of the World by Shirley Garrier, Mathieu Zouhairi
  • The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking by Vanessa Kimbell
  • The Tucci Table by Stanley Tucci
  • The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak
  • Zaitoun by Yasmin Khan

Recipes

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Bread and soup

Bread and soup

A list of the recipes that are up on the blog (this will be caught up with as a priority), most of these recipes are vegetarian, some have fish.

Will add to this list as we get more recipes onto the blog.

last updated 23/05/25

  • Leek and Thyme Galette
  • Pizza Night
  • Roast Red Onion, Carrot, and Hazelnut Tatin
  • Sour Cherry and Pistachio Biscotti
  • Spanish(ish) Fish Soup
  • Spicy Mushroom and Lentil Sauce
  • Spicy Smoked Mackerel Parcels
  • Torta di Riso
  • Wild Garlic Risotto

Sour Cherry and Pistachio Biscotti

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Sour Cherry and Pistachio Biscotti

Sour Cherry and Pistachio Biscotti

  • 100g pistachio
  • 50g sour cherries
  • 250g caster sugar
  • 1 tsp fennel seeds (optional but not really 😉)
  • Grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
  • 250g plain flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp fine salt
  • 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
  • Icing sugar or flour, to dust

This is the perfect recipe to make on a bumbling Sunday morning, just gradually get everything ready in separate bowls before heating the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark six. Spread the nuts out on a baking tray and bake for about seven minutes. Allow to cool a little, then roughly chop.

Meanwhile, put 1 tbsp of the sugar in a mortar with the fennel seeds (if using) and bruise them together. Stir this, along with the zest, into the remaining sugar (if you’re not using the seeds, skip this step). Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

Mix the sugar with the flour, baking powder and salt, then stir in the eggs, followed by the almonds. Bring it all together into a dough.

Dust a work surface lightly with icing sugar or flour, then divide the dough into two. Roll into sausages about 5cm in diameter, then arrange well apart on the tray and flatten slightly. Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden and firm on the outside. Remove from the oven and leave to cool a little, reducing the heat to 150C.

Transfer to a chopping board and, using a bread knife, cut into diagonal slices about 1cm wide. Lay the slices on the baking tray and bake for a further 20-25 minutes, or until golden, then turn over and repeat (they’ll probably need less time on the other side). Allow to cool, then store in an airtight container, the more they are packed in the longer they’ll last.

Food and Me

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Roast tomatoes

Roast tomatoes

I was remembering an article from a few years back (2018) that talked about the number of recipes that the average family cooked on rotation, and was surprised it was nine.

We then did a quick think of how many different meals we cooked regularly and it wasn’t many more than that!

Our goal from then was to diversify our repertoire and see how many new things we could cook from our 30+ cookbooks, and initially we did well but quite quickly fell back into our rut.

So once again we are going to be trying to expand the number of recipes we make regularly, and even if they don’t get added to the regular rota make new and different foods to excite.

Our regular list of food at the moment is below, though some, like pizza. have many variants:

  • Spanish Fish Soup
  • Frittata
  • Lentil mushroom spaghetti bol
  • Scrambled Tofu and rice
  • Spicy Tuna
  • Veggie chilli
  • Smoked haddock, leek and potato soup
  • Omelette and salad/beans
  • Veggie Burgers
  • Pizza
  • Chickpea, coconut and spinach curry
  • Goats cheese parcels
  • Beetroot falafel
  • Butternut and squash falafel
  • Roast carrot and chickpea soup
  • Carrot and red lentil soup
  • Fish pie
  • Salmon, potatoes and peas/broccoli
  • Smoked mackerel pate
  • Fishfinger sarnies
  • Pasta pesto and rocket
  • Peanut butter noodles
  • Veg stew
  • Risotto
  • Gnocchi
  • Salmon with cannellini bean mash
  • Roast carrots with walnuts, feta and cumin
  • Sausage casserole
  • Butternut and chestnut roast
  • Savoury flapjack
  • Vegetable tagine

We also do a lot of chutney making and pickling when things are in season.

This is despite having a couple of dozen cook books and masses of bookmarked recipes from newspapers and websites, and being a more than competent cook who’s very comfortable in a kitchen.

It just becomes too easy to fall back on the regular meals, the ones you can put together without thinking, the ones that are store cupboard meals, filling and comforting after a long day at work.

So the plan is to make at least one different recipe a month and log it here, discuss it, and talking about any changes I would make to it to encourage myself out of my comfort zone with cooking.

And to support all this I want to develop a nice allotment growing ingredients to put straight into our kitchen, we have one but I’ve not really been involved and I want this to change.

So keep an eye on here, and BlueSky to see what I’m up to!