Thank God it's Friday!

Friday fills us all with joy! The weekend is here and we can wind down from our daily grind.

We often turn to Pizza on a friday night- usually home made as mostly I can't stand the dial-in variety.

I love making pizza with the kids- they love to make their own and make the dough into all sorts of wierd and wonderful shapes.  I bought myself a Pizza at home pizza maker about 10 years ago which I LOVE!!! It cooks pizza beautifully and until we build our woodfire oven ( a whole 'nother story....) it   has well and truly paid for itself ten times over!  And I do love that it is ready to use in 10 mins as opposed to the three hour prep that a wood oven needs to cook a pizza in 4 minutes!  I love to make things simple as you may have guessed by now!

A Pizza recipe that I love to do with the kids is Middle Eastern Open Pizza.  This one is cooked in the regular oven so you can make it even if you don't have a pizza oven. It is one that we all happily eat- and it SOOO easy.  The kids love making it as it is basically like playing with playdough.  All my boys love to make & eat this dish- as you will see from the pics! And you will see that even Mr.3 is able to help with this one- start them young I say! 

 SO tonight I think that is what's on the menu!

We put it together straight onto the oven dish and in it goes- served with fresh cucumbers and a tomato and basil salad. SCRUMPTIOUS!

What you will need to make GOURMET GIRLFRIEND'S OPEN PIZZA:

• 500g lamb mince
• 1 onion
• a bunch of mint
• a good handful of mint and parsley
• 2 cloves of garlic
• plain greek yoghurt 
• pizza dough (see below for a simple and good dough recipe)
• a good handful of toasted pine nuts
• olive oil

PIZZA DOUGH

• 400g OO Flour (you can now get this at  S/Market)
• 100g semolina
• 375g lukewarm water 
• 50ml olive oil
• 1 sachet dried yeast
• 10g salt.

Combine water, yeast & sugar together and leave for ten minutes or so until the mix is noce and frothy- this lets you know the yeast has activated).

Now add the yeast mix in with all other ingredients and knead unitl it has good stretch- alternately you could put it in a mixer with a dough hook for 10 mins.
Let it prove for at least an hour.


METHOD:
Heat oven to 220C.
In a food processor blitz the parsley, mint, garlic and onion.  Leave a good handful of mint for the topping later.
Mix this herb mix with your hands through the mince.  (The kids LOVE doing this!)
Then place your pizza dough onto an oven tray and tease it out so that it completely covers the base.

Then with your hands place the mince mix so that it covers the pizza dough- leave a 2cm edge of dough.

Sprinkle with pine nuts.
Then put it in oven until meat is cooked through- about 15 minutes or so.
Take out of oven and drizzle with plain yoghurt and a little olive oil (or crumbled fetta- for that salty yumminess!) and load of freshly chopped mint.

How good does that sound (and look!)!
And you can tell from the photos that the kids really can do it!

Today I am listening to the gorgeous Jim White....


Join me on my journey........