One of our latest obsessions is home-made pizza, usually a special treat towards the end of the week. We’ve been buying bases for a while and it’s starting to add up since they’re about $4.50 for two. They’re not the frozen ones, they’re fresh and found in the bread aisle – they’re really quite delicious but I was thinking about how to cut back and save some money. I figured, we’ve got a bread maker, why not make our own dough?

I found a simple recipe on Best Recipes that claimed to be “super easy” and, since there wasn’t going to be any practice runs, I needed something fool-proof. I must admit, I cheated a little. I had a lot of stuff to do before lunch and I had a bread maker in the cupboard so, instead of doing everything manually by hand, then allowing it to rise, I decided to throw all the ingredients in the bread maker and let it do it instead.

In goes flour, yeast, caster sugar and salt, then oil and water. Select the “dough” setting, press start… and walk away.

From memory I think it took about one hour fifteen minutes all up. It plays a nice little tune when it’s ready, just like the washing machine does. Ha, that reminds me of yesterday when I was outside taking the clothes off the line and I heard the neighbour’s washing machine finish. It beeped an alarm, like a truck reversing. I remember thinking how much nicer my little tune was. Puddy has even memorised the tune – as soon as she hears it, she comes running into the laundry because she enjoys flopping around in the sun as I hang out the clothes.

Anyway, here’s the finished dough:

Please ignore my creepy fingers. Let’s just say lighting isn’t my strong point.

The dough was nice and warm and a little strechy. I lightly floured the bench, tore the dough in two and rolled out two pizza bases. The amount of dough was perfect for two thin bases, but if you like your pizza bases a little thicker, you might want to make more. I think the recipe creater uses this amount of dough for one pizza, so I guess it just depends on your personal taste.

The speckles in the dough is some sort of herb – I can’t remember! We added it right at the beginning when we put all the ingredients in the bread maker. You can see the dough was quite thin in places, but we didn’t have a problem with it tearing or anything like that – in fact, it probably made it more crispy.

Toppings went on: tomato pizza sauce, mushrooms, cheese, red and green capsicum, mini pepperoni and some shredded shoulder ham (a old favourite from my childhood) and we popped it in the oven at about 200 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes. Keep an eye on it, once it’s golden brown it’s ready.

It was absolutely delicious! The darker bits around the crust aren’t burnt – I think we just managed to get the pizza sauce all over the place and it was cooked on. To get a crispy crust, you need to cook it for a little longer than a store-bought crust because then the pastry is cooked through and you don’t get that doughy taste.

We’ll definitely be making this dough the next time we have pizza and I think we might experiment with different herbs and seasonings – some basil or rosemary would be nice in the dough.

SUPER EASY PIZZA DOUGH
from Best Recipes

Ingredients:

2 cups plain flour
1 x 8g sachet dry yeast
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
3/4 cup warm water

Method:

1. Combine dry ingredients in large mixing bowl and add oil or water. (If using bread maker,  now select dough setting and leave it to do it’s own thing. If not using bread maker, continue to step 2)
2. Mix to a soft dough.
3. Knead on a floured surface until soft and pliable.
4. Return to the mixing bowl and cover with cling wrap and leave in a warm spot for 30 minutes. The dough should double in size.
5. When it has risen, “punch” the dough once to remove air bubbles.
6. Remove from bowl and knead gently for 1 minute.
7. Roll the dough out to desired size and add favourite toppings.

Note: This is where the recipe ends. As for cooking, I just went off previous pizza recipes and guessed 200 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes. It depends on your oven, you just want it hot so the base fully cooks and goes crispy. Some people have suggested adding some oil to the pan before cooking – this helps the base crisp up.

Mmmm, now I’m craving pizza for dinner!

Yeah, now I’m really getting into the old photos! Remember that weekend Phill and I went to see Jamie Oliver? Well, we also went to the Melbourne Zoo, since everyone told us we absolutely had to go. First off, we stopped at the markets for some fresh jam doughnuts, since we’d heard so much about them. We were told to look out for the van but as you can see, we had no problem finding it, since the queue was halfway down the street!

We could smell the doughnuts as we waited, eagerly anticipating eating them. The line moved quickly since everyone was paying with cash and we were just as quick, grabbing a bag of piping hot doughnuts.

Mmmmmmmmmm so delicious and sugary! That’s Phill’s arm in the background – not sure why it’s there. I remember it took me a few shots to get a non-blurry picture and it was soooo hard not to eat the doughnut! We munched on our doughnuts as we wandered around the market. It was so big and everything was so cheap and fresh (well, until you got to the organic section which, while fresh, was quite expensive). If I lived in Melbourne, I’d travel to the market weekly to buy my fruit, vegetables and meat.

We caught the tram (yay!) to the zoo after a quick lunch at Nando’s, which was across the road from the market. We saw heaps of animals at the zoo, including the cutest little meerkats, but my favourite was the butterfly house. It was amazing – all the beautiful colours in their wings as they fluttered by. A couple landed in my hair and I had to be careful not to take them outside with me when I left. Sadly, I saw quite a lot with damaged wings, although most of them happily fluttered around – reminded me of the key bird in Harry Potter.

This one sat patiently on the railing as I took a few photos – I love how the sun is coming through its wings. When you get close to butterflies you see that their bodies aren’t that cute – in fact, they’re a little ugly – but their wings are beautiful (even the brown ones!).

This little one had pretty badly damaged wings, but I loved the orange against the back and white. I wonder if it hurt it when the wings were ripped. It almost looks like someone took a large bite out of the left one – I wonder how it happened?

This one slowly wandered down the side of the railing as I took photos, cheeky thing.

These two weren’t on top of each other, they both had a leaf to themselves, but I loved the contrast between the bright, clear colours of the top one compared to the duller ones of the bottom one. I didn’t realise there were so many different types of butterflies! I walked through the butterfly house very slowly, paranoid I would stand on one.

See the blur of bright blue? It was amazingly blue – brilliant and gorgeous, and I tried desperately to get a photo, but it refused to land. There were a few of them, all flitting around at the top of the house. I stayed in there for a while, following them with my camera – I didn’t even notice Phill had gone outside and was waiting for me! I never got that photo, the best I got was mid-flight.

It was a really great day at the zoo, seeing the different animals. I didn’t realise it was so big! Hopefully one day we’ll go back to Melbourne and visit the zoo again, since we were only there for half a day and didn’t get to see all the animals.

I struggled with the title because, seriously, what do you call two pots of vegetables, one pot of herbs and one pot of fruit – it’s hardly a garden or a patch. And they live on the BBQ. Whatever they are called, they are my latest obsession. You might remember me mentioning going to Bunnings and buying some plants? Well, let me tell you – they are doing really well (except the strawberries because well, apparently they’re not going to fruit for a while).

So let me introduce you to my little selection of plants:

Cherry tomatoes! This is how it looked when we first bought it, with heaps of little green tomatoes already growing. You can see the little flowers that bloom, then die which allows the tomato to grow. It took just less than one month for us to start picking, but our only (tongue-in-cheek) complaint is that they don’t all ripen at the same time! They taste delicious though – like tomatoes, which is always a good sign when you’re growing them yourself.

I love the green unripe tomatoes because they’re slightly fuzzy all over and as they ripen, they lose that fuzziness. Just yesterday I was able to pick three more tomatoes – one a good size, the others rather small.

Please ignore the dirty bench. Thankyou.

There’s something incredibly satisfying about growing (and eating) your own food. When we end up buying a house and settling down, I want a full-blown veggie patch with all sorts of food – lettuce, tomatoes, chili, peas, beans – anything and everything!

So now for pot number two…

Chili! Aren’t the flowers beautiful? They follow the same theme as the tomatoes – flowers bloom, they die miserably, then drop off as the chili grows through the centre of the dead petals. You can actually see the start of a chili in the big flower, that little green thing poking through the centre. The white bulbs are flowers that will bloom within the next couple days. As you can see, there’s a lot of chilis coming!

And come they did – here’s what the chili plant looks like now. I couldn’t believe how fast they were growing. They all (except for one stubborn tiny one) started out green and are only just starting to tinge red. Apparently they will ripen to a deep red. I have no idea why the tiny one is already red – maybe it will be the first one we’ll eat? I’m already thinking of dishes to make with the chili – there’s going to have to be some sort of Thai stir-fry!

The chili plant is in a little pot, so it needs frequent watering because it seems to gulp up the water like crazy. We’re thinking we might re-pot in a larger pot this weekend to give it a little more room because, well, it’s very busily making us chilis so we should look after it.

Pot number 3 isn’t too exciting, it’s just…

Chives! Good ol’ chives – you can do so much with them. I think these are a garlic version, which adds a nice flavour (I love garlic) and also helps to prevent Puddy from chewing on them. I think my favourite dish with chives is simple mashed potato with butter and chopped chives – YUM. I think I might have to start looking for more dishes to make, since the chives are growing at a rapid pace! It seems that when you chop it back to use it, it grows back twice as fast!

And finally, the last pot in our collection:

Strawberries! We were so excited about growing strawberries, but we’ve discovered that, while the plant itself is doing quite well, we probably won’t see fruit for another few months (booooo). We’ve also had to battle with hungry grasshoppers which seem to love the strawberry plant – we awoke one morning to discover one had eaten almost completely one of the plants (there had been four in the punnet). Luckily it grew back quickly and we’ve been keeping the grasshoppers under control by, well, disposing of them.

I keep checking for fruit but nothing yet – don’t worry, when they start to grow strawberries you’ll all know!

So that’s my humble little experiment. I’m lucky in that Phill used to work at a nusery so he had a fair bit of knowledge about repotting plants and the how to care for them – let’s just say the only plant I’ve managed to grow is a cactus. So far so good, and I’ll definitely keep you all updated on their progress. Come on strawberries – you can do it!

I just wanted to say thankyou for all your kind and encouraging comments on my last post.

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One of Phill’s favourite desserts are those little egg custard tarts you can buy from supermarkets. They are beautifully yellow in a little pastry case, with nutmeg sprinkled on top and they are usually delicious. However, we bought some last week and while we were eating them, we realised there was just something lacking. I found them to taste watery. We were disappointed and I decided I was going to try to make my own.

After a quick internet search, I discovered most egg custard recipes called for nine eggs and I only had four on hand. Luckily, I found a recipe that asked for three, so that’s the one I went with. It seemed simple enough, with only a few ingredients: three eggs, two cups of milk, two tablespoons of caster sugar and a cap of vanilla essence (I used extract).

For the pastry I used Pampas pastry cases, bought from the freezer section of my supermarket:

They require cooking at 160 for fan forced, or 180 for regular oven, for ten minutes, then allow to cool. The thing I noticed about them was how shallow they were. Since my custard mixture was quite thin (perhaps I should have somehow made it thicken?) I couldn’t fit much of it into the tart cases because it would quickly overflow. Is that what I get for being lazy and buying pre-made tarts? Perhaps.

Straight out of the packet, they’re quite yellow and raw. It’s recommended that you leave the alfoil cases on while cooking – I guess this might be partly so they won’t collapse? I’m so paranoid about these fragile cases – even while at the shops, I was willing the cashier to pack them separately so nothing would squash them (and he did, thankyou!) and the only casualty was one with a tiny bit of the crust missing – nothing too severe and it was obviously damage that had occured while in the bag.

After cooking, they are paler with a lovely crisp crust – YUM! I could eat them straight away, but I had to be patient and let them cool before filling them with the lovely egg custard. You can see in the photo how shallow they are. I had literally just started pouring when they began to overflow through the dimples in the crust, dammit.

I realised I had a lot of mixture left over, so I grabbed a sheet of puff pastry from the freezer and a quiche dish from the cupboard and made another pie. I realised we’d be having egg custard tarts for a few days (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). I pre-cooked the puff pastry for a few minutes before adding the custard mixture and returning to the oven for 15 minutes. It came out really nicely and the deepness of the dish meant the custard mixture was more substantial.

Oh my goodness, these were delicious! The nutmeg on top absolutely made them – added that extra flavour. I really enjoyed them, expect next time I’ll have to make my own pastry so I can fit more of the egg custard in, because while they tasted lovely, it was mainly the tart case flavour with a little egg custard and nutmeg, instead of the other way around. The puff pastry tart came out nicely too:

They were just so yummy and home-made, not like the watery mass-produced tarts you buy at the supermarkets. Phill asked why mine weren’t as yellow as the ones in the store and I thought perhaps they add a colour to make theirs look more appealing? Either way, mine were better hands-down (and that’s saying something, since I’m not the world’s most confident or capable cook!).

EGG CUSTARD TARTS
from Best Recipes (link also includes pastry recipe, which I didn’t use)

Ingredients:

3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 cups milk

Method:

1. Whisk eggs, vanilla and sugar in bowl until combined
2. Heat milk until hot, then quickly whisk into egg mixture
3. Pour the custard into pastry case and cook for 15 minutes (for one large tart or about 5-10 for smaller tarts)
4. Sprinkle custard with nutmeg and cook for a further 15 minutes (once again for larger tart or about 5 minutes for smaller tarts)
5. Refrigerate until cold

Enjoy!