Friday nights home made Pizza

Part of my home made take away range blogs this week we are doing home made pizza, and i really should of done a Ta Da finish cooked pizza shot but little miss had been making the pizza with me and when the dinger went on the oven she started chanting dinner dinner, so i had to cut it up for her and put on a plate for her to eat.

We started by making our own dough but of course you could buy ready made pizza bases if you want, but the dough is pretty simple enough to do and i buy my fresh yeast off Ebay of all places since i have stopped shopping at Tesco's where i used to get it from, you can also use dried yeast too.

Pizza base recipe

40g fresh yeast 

30g sugar

1/2 pint of warm milk

250g strong bread flour

1 tbs olive oil

3/4 tsp salt

warm the milk and the sugar, i just put mine in the microwave for a min then add the yeast and stir and leave for 15 mins to active and get frothy.

Sophie then measures out the rest of the ingredients with me and we add them to the bowl one at a time together.  Once the yeast mix is ready we turn on the K mix and gradually add the milk until we get a firmish dough sometimes i need all the milk and sometimes not, so mix and add the milk until you get the dough consistence right using your eye rather than the qty above.  I leave this dough on top on my oven to keep warm and rise about an hour.  

In the mean time Sophie and i get lots of vegetables out of the fridge and look, smell and taste them, i let her have a butter knife so she can cut and play with the vegetables she is rather keen on raw mushrooms now, and loves to copy me in chopping and organising the veg.

After an  hour we get our hands into the dough and knock it back and kneed it, she get a small lump of dough to move around the work top, them she helps me roll out the main bit of dough singing her rolly rolly song.  Once rolled we leave on top of the oven again to rise a little, we like a thin base so it isn't left to rise to long.  Then the fun begins as we place all the vegetables we cut on top of the pizza, over the tomato paste, although Sophie just tends to luz them all in one area, we will work on placement later, next we finish off with the pepperoni else daddy will have words with the chefs and top it all off with grated mozzarella, and put it in the oven for 15 mins.  This is such a great way to get kids eating vegetables and Sophie ate 2 big slices which had courgette red and yellow peppers, red onion, chestnut mushrooms, olives, pepperdew peppers on it. What a good girl, mummy was so happy with her, and i think she was happy being included in the process.