PIZZA

I am making a middle of the year resolution, in order to curb my cook book buying addiction, I hereby promise to make at least one dish from each new book I buy within a fortnight - starting next week!!!

While gearing myself up to this, I decided I'd better use some of my more recent purchases - "The Australian Women's Weekly - The Complete Book of Modern Entertaining", it is a lovely looking book, fantastic photography and very doable recipes.

I have made pizza before, without much success (could be the yeast phobia issue!!) my pizza bases were too thick and spongy - I like my pizza thin and crispy!  But I knew from all my favourite Australian blogs that the AWW are ultra reliable, so I decided to take the bull by the horns (so to speak) and give it a go.  My favourite pizza restaurant is "The Steps of Rome" off Grafton Street in Dublin, and they make a fantastic potato and rosemary pizza - and when I saw one in this book - I knew it was for me.

The pizza base recipe makes enough for two large pizzas, so I made one potato and one asparagus and tomato.

The base was really easy to make - I used the kitchen aid mixer.  I found it easy to roll out to the desired thickness (or actually thinness!)  The recipe called for raw potato, but I have a "thing" about undercooked potato so I decided to use up the previous nights left over roasted baby potatoes, and that was a good decision the pizza was delicious - I just spread the sliced potato over the uncooked base (which I spread with some goats cheese) then sprinkled with chopped rosemary and maldon salt, drizzled a little extra virgin olive oil over and popped into the oven.

As I was on a "use up the leftovers" roll, I chose to use the roasted asparagus and tomatoes which I had stored in the fridge.  I spread some "Bunalun" (an excellent product) concentrated tomato puree over the base and then placed the veg on top.  I then cut up a ball of mozzarella and distributed the pieces over the top.  The result was a deeply flavoured topping over a light and crispy base.  Good stuff!

I am having a problem with the alignment of this post  - the only thing I can  think to do is post the recipe for the  pizza base separately, and then publish this post. I'm really sorry about this!!