Pondering moments...

I was having a reflective moment last night while I was organising myself some dinner, putting things away and generally pottering around like you do when you first get home from work.

I had decided yesterday that I wanted pizza for dinner.  Now, quite often, I make pizza using Lebanese bread as the base.  Didn’t have any at home, and wasn’t about to buy any either!  So – I found myself a basic recipe online, which I then played with a bit because I didn’t need the quantities that they had listed, and I didn’t have the ingredients in the manner that they suggested either.  What I wound up with was:

Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees.  Put a fine layer of flour over the pizza stone and pop it into the oven to heat up (if you’re using one).

Thin & Crispy Pizza

1 cup plain flour
small sprinkle of salt

½ teaspoon sugar
3 grams of yeast
about 95 ml warm water

Mix the warm water with the yeast and the sugar and let sit for a few minutes to activate.  Mix in with the plain flour & salt, and then knead till smooth.  Roll it out thinly. 

Get the pizza stone (carefully) out of the oven and put it on a heat proof mat (I just used my stove top – sits really well on there!!!).  Put the pizza base on the hot stone.  Putting it onto a hot stone gives the base a crispy finish, not a soggy one. 

I made a mix of tomato paste & ricotta cheese with a small sprinkle of mixed herbs for the pizza base, and then I turned to the freezer & found some shredded ham for one of the toppings.  I chopped some shallots and sprinkled them over the top and then finished off with cheese.   Back into the oven for about 20 minutes – I had mine on the lowest shelf as I didn’t want the top too brown.  Check out the results!!!

So... it's not so perfectly round - and I did actually have to trim it a bit because it overhung the pizza stone. 
Still tasted okay though!

Ah... hang on – back to why I was being so reflective last night.  As you can see in the side bar, I am a fan of Simple Savings.  That site has truly taught me to think about things differently.  Pre SS, I would have bought a pizza.  Post SS, I would have gone and bought the ingredients and made my pizza.  Truly now taking on board the SS philosophy, I looked around for what ingredients I had at home, and made the entire dinner myself.  Total spent - $0.  It made two meals – last nights’ dinner AND today’s lunch, so an extra bonus there! 

In the quest to declutter my life of the things that I no longer wish to have in them, one of the things I am actively thinking about is the things that I DO wish to either keep or those things that I want to develop.  One of those is resourcefulness and adaptability.  I need to be able to know that I can live comfortably without having to rush out to the shop every day to “just pick up some....”.  When I think about how long it took me to make my dinner last night, it was done in about an hour.  In that time, I came home, I called a friend and chatted to her and her partner, I opened my mail, turned on the computer etc., AND I made my dinner.  From scratch.  I don’t think that’s too bad actually.  Mind you, I didn’t have hungry children nagging at me or anything like that – if I had, I think I would only have concentrated on the dinner and it would have been faster! 

Aren't they just sooooo cute when they're not trying to kill each other?