We first made a calamari pizza earlier this year but we ate it before I thought of taking a photograph. The sauce was passata, garlic, courgette and chilli which was liquidized then simmered until it had thickened.

The calamari was from Marks & Spencers and was chargrilled in a red pepper dressing. It was topped with lots of grated cheddar and shredded mozzarella.

(Crossposted from the Pizza Blog)

A few weeks ago we bought a pack of Marks & Spencer's Mustard & Pepper crumbed calamari. It's very easy for squid to come out like slightly fishy rubber bands but these were very tender. The only downside was to do with the breadcrumbs which mostly fell off during frying but we scraped them out of the pan and crumbled them on top when we served. Since we were impressed with the calamari we bought another pack shortly afterwards.

Last week we bought some calamari, again from M&S but this time it was pre-cooked (chargrilled in a red pepper dressing) and we put it on a pizza. Unfortunately we had eaten it before I thought that we should have taken a photo of it.

Tonight we had another go with calamari. This time we bought some raw unsliced squid which we sliced and fried alongside some king prawns and served with some gnocchi in a tomato and vegetable sauce.

We have been to the 'old' Pizza Express restaurant in the city centre but this was the first time we'd been to the new one in Belgrade Plaza, next to the theatre. We tried two of their new pizzas: I had the Da Morire Romana which was the winner of the competition where customers could invent a new pizza. It was quite a brave pizza, with a lot of strong flavours including pancetta, blue cheese and rosemary. The flavours worked well together and didn't clash or overpower it. Emma had the Monte Bianco which was a chicken pizza using bechamel sauce instead of tomato. We both enjoyed our pizzas.

For dessert we had the new Doughballs with Nutella. Although the menu didn't describe it as such, this was more suitable for sharing than individual servings.

The food was good, the service was friendly. I felt a bit guilty ordering dessert and asking for the bill at the same time but we had tickets for the theatre and only had a few minutes to finish eating and leave.

The pizza base was made using a naan bread recipe:

• Make a yeast starter using 1 tsp of yeast, 1 tsp of sugar and a couple of tablespoons of warm water. Leave for a few minutes for the yeast to start working.
• Add 200g of flour, 1 tsp of black onion seeds, 1tsp of chilli flakes 1/2 tsp of baking powder and a pinch of salt.
• Add a couple of tablespoons each of milk and yoghurt and mix together to make a dough. Knead for a few minutes.

The pizza sauce was a mixture of tomato purée and curry paste.

The first pizza was a chicken curry, topped with onion, pepper, chillies and a slightly sweet cheese with bits of ginger in it.

The second pizza had prawns, the same vegetables, and a garlic and herb cheese.

The pizza sauce was a home-made pesto using herbs from our garden: rocket, land cress, oregano, parsley and basil. I added finely ground pistachio nuts, mature cheddar, vegetable oil, salt and pepper.

Toppings included red onion, leek, courgette, capers, anchovies, chillies and cubes of tuna, along with the usual mozzarella and more grated cheese.

This was my attempt at recreating a Marks & Spencer dish which we ate a couple of months ago. I can't remember what the original tasted like but I was happy with the flavour of my version. A lot of our cooking is based around what we can buy reduced or on offer. The sweet potato and butternut squash came from a supermarket pack which was cheap since it was going out of date.

In a low oven (approx gas mark 4), roast the following for about 30 minutes:

• 250g sweet potato and butternut squash.
• 2 cloves of garlic (peeled but kept whole)
• ½ green chilli (chopped).
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil.

When everything has cooled down, add to a food processor, along with:

• 100g cooked white beans
• 2tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tsp chopped parsley
• a pinch of salt
• ½ tsp lemon juice
• 1tsp pumpkin seed oil
• 1tsp horseradish or ½ tsp wasabi paste.

Add a small amount of water if needed, to get everything to blend to a smooth paste.

We used some of the dip as a pizza sauce, and topped it with salmon, leek and cheese.

The pizza base was made using some root vegetable mash which was in the freezer. I can't remember which vegetables were there but I think it included carrots, sweet potato and possibly turnip. The mash was quite coarse so I puréed it, added 3 quail eggs (equivalent to 1 small egg) and a splash of vegetable oil. I gradually added plain flour and cornmeal until the texture became a bit dryer and more dough like. I didn't add any yeast.

I roughly shaped the base before putting it on a hot pizza stone, followed by a bit more spreading out. The pizza sauce was our usual favourite, red pesto. I topped the pizza with some thinly sliced onion, courgette and chilli pepper, then sprinkled on some assorted cheeses.

I cooked it for the usual 15 minutes at gas mark 7. The base was very similar to a shop-bought potato cake but with a lot more flavour.

We ate out at Frankie & Benny's in Coventry tonight. The restaurant was a bit noisy but the food was good. We shared two pizzas: Top - Chicken Caesar Salad. Bottom - Seafood Supreme.
The Seafood Supreme had anchovies, prawns and clams. The other pizza was a chicken pizza topped with tomato and lettuce in a caesar dressing. It was unusual to have a dressed salad on top of a pizza - we have often topped a pizza with a strong leafy salad such as rocket or watercress but we'd not thought of using a dressed salad. It was a surprisingly good combination.

We had a frozen lobster which we'd bought from Iceland a few weeks ago. The last time we bought lobster there was barely enough to cover a half-bagel each. There seemed to be slightly more meat in this lobster - it was sufficient for one pizza.

Other toppings included anchovies and capers. The photo above shows the pizza before the cheese was added. The photo below is the cooked pizza just before eating.

We recently bought a few tins of chunky crab meat - this is better than the cheaper shredded crab meat but I think it's actually better than the cheap lobster meat, which was a little bit chewy.

(Cross-posted from the Pizza Blog)

We drove north to visit my parents yesterday. We took some pizza dough, a few toppings and a selection of the flavoured cheeses. My parents provided the rest of the toppings and a couple of bottles of wine.

This morning we drove over to Lymm for the hamster show. Anita had a balloon animal kit and was making balloon hamsters for people. I think ours must have been a Winter White Sapphire.

Last year I planted some Land Cress. It grew slowly and was still quite small at the end of the summer so I left it in the garden over the winter. With the recent warm weather, it seems to have put on a growth spurt.

This afternoon I harvested a big handful of it. Some of the stalks were a bit thick so I stripped the leaves from some of the thicker pieces. It is fairly well known that winter-grown water cress is spicier than summer-grown and the same seems to be true of the land cress.

Tonight we cooked another home-made pizza, topped with chicken and some cheese from the Thame Country Show. We had the cress as a spicy salad garnish.

The remaining cress in the garden looks like it may start flowering so it probably needs harvesting soon. I made a pan of chicken stock yesterday so I could make a variation of watercress soup using the land cress.

(Cross-posted from the Pizza Blog)

We received a pizza stone for Christmas - one of several kitchen related presents from my parents. We were going to use it for our first post-Christmas pizza but it needed a couple of washes and a while in the oven to drive off the fumes (presumably from manufacturing), so it wasn't ready at the time of our previous post.

The pizza shown here had the rest of the home-made spicy tomato sauce, mixed with red pesto because there wasn't enough left for 2 pizzas. The toppings were sliced courgette, anchovies, capers, grated cheddar and parmesan, and mozzarella. For the meat I had a selection from a Marks & Spencers Christmas pack which contained sausage, stuffing flavoured meatballs and rolled bacon. Emma had a selection of M&S 'party food' chicken pieces.

The stone needed heating up first - we placed it in a cold oven and slowly let it come to temperature, giving it at least half an hour before we used it. We had to make our pizzas one at a time, taking the stone out of the oven, quickly assembling the pizza, then putting it in the oven to cook.

Heston Blumenthal, the chef, tested different ways of cooking pizza on his TV programme. He didn't like the pizza stone, preferring to use an upside down red hot cast iron pan, putting the pizza under the grill to finish cooking.

I really can't see why he didn't like the pizza stone. He wanted to cook his pizza in 90 seconds whereas we give ours 15 minutes at gas mark 7. We like thin bases but we also like a lot of toppings so a very hot fast cooking doesn't suit our style of pizza. Sometimes the pizza base would go a bit soft but the hot pizza stone starts cooking the base while the toppings are being applied so the base stays nice and crispy. It's a bit more fiddly than using our normal pizza trays but the improved crispy base makes it all worth while.

The ingredients for the pizza sauce:

• Tomatoes from our garden (via the freezer)
• ½ a dried chilli (home grown cayenne pepper)
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 tsp dried herbs
• a pinch of salt.

The tomatoes were defrosted and peeled. All the ingredients were put in a liquidizer. The resulting sauce was very runny so I simmered it to thicken it. The chilli was very hot so I ended up thickening it with cornflour to avoid concentrating the heat too much.

The finished pizza, with quorn sausage, courgette, onion, mushrooms and cheese. I put a small sprinkling of cheese on before the mushrooms to help stick everything together, before topping with more cheese.

We have been going to a lot of country shows recently. We had entered the Hamster Show on Saturday so I had some time to explore and watch some of the shows and demonstrations. The glass blowers were the same people I saw at Wiltshire Country Show but this time they were demonstrating how old-fashioned window glass was made.

The cookery demonstration was also by the same person from the Wiltshire show. He made a tasty looking savoury Chelsea Bun containing cheese, pesto and various other ingredients.

A lot of different foods were available in the two food tents. We tried various free samples before buying a selection of flavoured cheeses (mature cheddar, garlic, garlic and herbs, horseradish, curry, chilli) and a 1½ litre jug of cider.

We used some of the cheese on our regular Saturday night pizzas. We put a different cheese on each half, and cut the pizzas at right angles to the cheese divide, so we each had 2 half-pizzas with 4 different cheeses (We liked them so much we had pizza again on Sunday).

There was no hamster show on Sunday but there was a display. We were kept busy all day dealing with the public, answering questions about keeping hamsters and explaining the differences between the various breeds of hamster.

Earlier in the year I bought a 'mexican garden' seed kit from the Woolworths closing down sale. I never managed to get the oregano to germinate but I have several tomato and chilli plants. Most of the chillies and tomatoes are still green and unripe but we have had 5 small red tomatoes (not enough for a pizza sauce) and one red chilli so far.

I finely chopped one of the chillies and sprinkled it onto one of tonights pizzas. The other toppings were: red pesto, salmon, red onion and cheese. It was a very tasty pizza.

The chillies were fairly strong when I tasted one on its own, but there was a slightly unripe or possibly just a raw flavour. By the time they had cooked on the pizza they were fine.

There are many more green chillies on the plant so hopefully we will have a good supply for the autumn.