Prawn pizza

Another weekend another pizza but not one for the Sunday pizza group. I had bought some prawns for a pizza on Friday and couldn’t resist making something with them on Saturday. It was delicious! How grateful am I to have fresh seafood on hand at my local Piedimonte’s! 

Ingredients

1 wholemeal Lebanese bread

Sundried tomato pesto

Mozzarella 

Cooked prawns about 250 gr

Green pepper

Mushrooms 

Mode

Preheat oven to 220c

Spread pesto sauce on the Lebanese bread

Slice Mozzarella and add

Place prawns over sauce and cheese

Slice mushroom and sprinkle over

Slice green peppers and sprinkle over 

Bake in 220c oven for 12 minutes

Enjoy on a Saturday or Sunday (or any time). 

Friday night footy pizza

Friday night finals footy with Geelong playing so what better thing to do than experiment with pizza. Tonight I experiment with sun dried tomato pesto which I have never tasted before. Otherwise ricotta and various vegetables and olives and anchovies are nothing particularly new. The end result was delicious. Whether Geelong will win remains to be seen. 

Ingredients

1 Wattle Valley wholemeal wrap

Sun dried tomato pesto

Ricotta

Sopressa

1/4 green pepper 

4 mushrooms 

2 black olives

2 anchovies

Mode

Preheat oven to 220c

Place wholemeal wrap on oven tray

Spread the sun dried tomato pesto on wrap

Spread with ricotta

Slice green peppers and mushrooms

Place sopressa  on the ricotta

Add mushrooms, followed by pepper 

Sprinkle over chopped olives and anchovies

Bake in 220c oven for 12 minutes

Enjoy!

Rocket pesto, salami and ricotta pizza

Ah Sunday evening! What is there to cook except a pizza after years of the tradition of Sunday night pizza? It would be very nice to meet some friends outside in a pizzeria, but that was another time before lockdowns. 

We have no idea when this time will end. So I continue to experiment. Pritikin modified pizzes are the basis of my experiments, though he would not approve of all my changes, as indeed I don’t approve of his low fat options. I have experimented with a few wholemeal/multigrain wraps or Lebanese bread. My absolute favourite to date is one produced by Wattle Valley as shown in the illustration. 

This time produced a delicious combination of wholemeal wrap, ricotta, rocket pesto, and vegetables accompanied by capers and ginger. I can’t say that it is a very traditional pizza but I enjoyed my Sunday night pizza a lot!! 

Ingredients

1 Wattle Valley wholemeal wrap

Ricotta

Salami slices

1/4 red pepper

1/4 green pepper 

2 mushrooms 

1/2 zucchini

1 heaped tsp capers

1 tsp crushed ginger

Mode

Preheat oven to 220c

Place wholemeal wrap on oven tray

Spread the rocket pesto on wrap

Spread with ricotta

Grate zucchini

Slice red and green peppers and mushrooms

Crush the ginger 

Place salami on the ricotta

Add zucchini, followed by peppers and mushrooms 

Sprinkle over capers and ginger

Bake in 220c oven for 12 minutes

Enjoy!

Pizza with ham, mushrooms and chargrilled red pepper

Another Sunday night, another Sunday night pizza! Once upon a time a long, long time ago some of us used to gather every Sunday for pizza. Now decades later we are scattered but the Sunday night pizza still exists wherever we are though not every Sunday and not often together.

This one of mine, Covid comfort food perhaps or nostalgia for the past, is based on the Pritikin idea of using wholemeal Lebanese bread as a base. I find it a lot lighter than the traditional Italian base and probably healthier.

Ingredients

1 wholemeal Lebanese bread

Pizza sauce from tomatoes (ready made)

Mozzarella 

Ham

Mushrooms 

Chargrilled red pepper

Mode

Preheat oven to 220c

Spread tomato pizza sauce on the Lebanese bread

Slice Mozzarella and add

Place ham over sauce and cheese

Slice red peppers and sprinkle over 

Bake in 220c oven for 12 minutes

Enjoy on a Sunday (or any time). 

Spanish style pasta sauce

 A couple of weeks ago when we were first allowed to meet people from another household in the open, I met my friends Penny and Mark in the rotunda at Darling Gardens one afternoon.  They very kindly brought me some garden produce, including silverbeet and coriander. When I was wondering what to cook the next evening I remembered a recipe I sometimes cook with sherry, mushrooms and pinenuts. Its origins are a bit obscured by the passing of time but my memory is that it was originally based on a tapas recipe that I read in a library book. Sometimes I cook it with ham but this time I added coriander, silverbeet and some chicken that I happened to have. As it was once a tapas you could eat it as such or by itself, but I had it with some pasta!  The serving is enough for one person.

Ingredients

1 leaf silverbeet

5 mushrooms

1 handful of pine nuts

1 clove garlic

1 stem coriander

1 spring onion

100 gr chicken cut for stirfry

1 sherry glass dry sherry

Olive oil

Mode

Heat some olive oil in a pan on the stovetop

Crush the garlic

Slice the spring onion

Add the garlic and spring onion to the oil and stir until covered

Slice the mushrooms and add

Chop the coriander and add

Add the pine nuts

All the while continue to stir

Add the sherry and stir

Chop the silverbeet including the stems

Add the silverbeet and the chicken to the mixture

Continue to stir until the chicken is sealed

Turn the heat down to a simmer

Cover and summer until the chicken is tender

Serve with rice, pasta or noodles.

Lemon and mushroom chicken after Abla

Lots of nice fresh chicken drumettes sprang to my eye when I was at Piedimonte's the other day on an allowed outing from lockdown. So, of course, I thought of my variants of Abla's chicken wings.  This time the variant to my Abla chicken recipe was to use wild mushroom sea salt instead of her normal salt and to add mushrooms to her recipe. I cooked wholegrain Basmati rice to accompany the chicken. It was a lovely meal for a cold Melbourne night in lockdown and I had plenty left over to share with friends. 

Ingredients

16 chicken drumettes
2 dessertspoon wild mushroom sea salt
2 lemons

1.5 tbs of minced garlic

5 mushrooms

Mode

Preheat oven to 210c.
Arrange the chicken drumettes in a baking dish
Sprinkle with mushroom sea salt 
Roast for 30 minutes
Meanwhile juice the lemons
Add minced garlic to juice (about 150 ml in total)

Stir thoroughly

Slice the mushrooms

Remove the chicken from the oven and pour the  mixture over chicken

Sprinkle mushroom slices over the top
Return to oven and roast for another 25-35 minutes.

Serve with rice or roast vegetables  

Lockdown pie

Well, of course, you could actually plan to cook this pie or you could just scour your products and decide to experiment any time. But I have hardly been out of the house for weeks and today I wanted to cook a pie for dinner and wondered what to cook. So I had some fresh vegetables, some coriander pesto, puff pastry and lentils. This is the result.

Ingredients

2 sheets frozen puff pastry

1/2 red pepper

3-4 mushrooms

2 spring onions

2 tbs coriander pesto

400 gr can lentils

Poppy seed

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c

Remove pastry from freezer to thaw

Peel and chop spring onions

Chop red pepper

Slice mushrooms

Place one sheet of thawed pastry on base of baking dish

Add vegetables

Drain and rinse lentils and add

Add coriander pesto and stir to combine

Place second sheet of pastry and form pie 

Sprinkle with poppy seed

Bake in oven for 45 minutes.

Chicken and mushroom pie with yoghurt

I love pies and often try them out in pubs. I also enjoy making them. This batch contains some of my favourite flavours: chicken, mushrooms, basil, ginger, Greek yoghurt. I made four individual pies in souffle dishes but you could make one large pie. Make sure that you use chicken thigh meat as the darker meat has more flavour than the white meat. With basil, I hang fresh basil to dry but you could use purchased dry basil.

Ingredients

I sheet of frozen puff pastry (or adequate for pie dishes)

6 chicken thighs (about 500 gr)

6 tbs Greek yoghurt (ie strained yoghurt)

10 button mushrooms

2 tsp crushed dry basil

2 cloves garlic

2 tsp ginger

3 spring onions

Olive oil

Mode

Preheat oven to 200c

Remove pastry from freezer to thaw

Add oil to frying pan to heat

Roughly chop chicken thighs and add to oil

Stir constantly until sealed

Slice mushrooms and add to mixture

Crush garlic and chop ginger and add to mixture

Crush basil and add to mixture

Slice spring onions and add to mixture

Add yoghurt and stir to combine well

Reduce heat and simmer for about ten minutes

Divide the mixture into four ovenproof souffle dishes

Cut the pastry into circles or squares approppriate to the size of your dishes

Cover the dishes

Bake in the oven at 200c for about 30 minutes