Well, here’s day 7 of my week of food. My menu has worked sometimes but then been hijacked at others. But nothing can hijack Sunday pizza night…except going out for lunch which we did a couple of weeks ago.

Pizza is a wonderful Sunday night dinner. I always think of pizza as a quick dinner, but it never is, so at least I’ve got time on a Sunday to put together all the component parts. It also makes great school lunch for Monday (never any arguments). So here goes:

Dough (done in the breadmaker): 350ml water, 500g flour, 1 1/2 tsp salt and 2tsp yeast (4tsp of surebake). When it’s done, I divide it into two, roll them out and put the fillings on.

Tomato base: I use a very simple base these days of a couple of cans of tomatoes blitzed in the blender, then put in a saucepan to boil down to a spreadable paste. Add some salt and pepper near the end, or if you’re being terribly adventurous you can fry up some onions and garlic and put them in the blender too.

Toppings: whatever I’ve got but tonight we had fresh oregano, fresh mozzarella (homemade of course!), red and yellow capsicum, mushrooms, sliced sundried tomatoes, stuffed olives and feta (again, homemade). That was one of the pizzas anyway.

The other one was made along the lines of a recipe I read from an Australian chef whose name escapes me…he used to be on Surfing the Menu and he’s this kind of blonde surfing bloke. It’ll come to me at some point, so if I just randomly insert a name at any point (Ben something?), please put it in this story. Anyway, his recipe was a potato and gorgonzola pizza. Yep, potato. Never have blue cheese (just waiting till my 1kg block of it will be ready), so I just missed that out and it’s still great. Basically, you spread your uncooked pizza base with garlic butter (plenty), then a handful of chopped herbs (I used garlic chives, rosemary, parsley and thyme), then very very thinly sliced potatoes (if you have a mandolin it does a fantastic job), then more butter and herbs and top it off with a good grating of parmesan (homemade!). It’s yum, especially with some rock salt over the top after cooking.

We always have pizza with chips. Yum!

Sunday is usually a reasonably busy cooking day, but not quite so today as Briar seemed to have what Tara had yesterday. And I forgot that I did cook one thing yesterday! Remember that slow cooked chook from earlier in the week? I had chopped it all up and still had some of the carcass in the fridge, so I added it to the slow cooker with some onions, carrots, celery, parsley, thyme and some peppercorns. Covered it with water and left it on low for 24 hours. Came out beautifully! I only thought about it after reading another blog, the zero waste chef (haven’t quite worked out how to link you to that blog, but I’ll work on it! Oh, done it now!). She actually freezes all the bones after a chicken dinner and then makes stock when there’s “enough” bones. Now I’ve got to put it in some zip lock bags in the freezer.

And of course there needs to be something for the lunchboxes, so as we have loads of lemons and excessive eggs at the moment, a lemon slice seemed to be a good option. Haven’t made anything like this for ages, so found a recipe on the internet for Lemon Delicious Slice. It’s pretty good too!

So that’s a week of food from us. Not as much different bread as I would have thought, and a quiet week on the cheese front, so I can see that there might be a week of bread and a week of cheese at some point. As for this week coming, it’ll be the week of Tara. She starts school tomorrow, officially leaves playgroup and day care on Wednesday ( a cake required for each of these I’m told), has her birthday on Thursday and her birthday party (obviously another cake required) on Saturday. Phew! Busy cake week. Can’t wait.