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Monday 12 May 2014

Eurovision madness

For those who may have missed it, this weekend was Eurovision weekend. The big European wide song contest. I may not always have been to Eurovsion parties, but I've always made sure I've watched the competition. In recent years, I've at least managed to find to like minded friends who've also enjoyed the whole Eurovisionness (is that even a word) surrounding the competition, and in the last two years they've even been baking friends too!

My next door neighbours are BIG Eurovision fans, well, I'm not sure if both of them are, but Martin definitely has been around for a few of the parties I've attended, and if not at the same part, we still spend the entire competition texting about each act.  This year we decided to make it easier and actually be in the same room!

I offered to host the party at my house, especially as as we've had some particularly chilly weather this week, and I could crank up the log burner.  I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time to do a massive bake (last year a friend and I spent the entire day baking, which was amazing fun, but it's a big commitment), so we decided to keep it simple and just cook a Eurovision themed meal.  What even is Eurovision themed?  Well, it was hosted in Denmark, so we researched the Danish national dish, and one of the suggestions was meatballs.  Perfect - just the other week I'd brought back some meatballs from Ikea, so that was the main ingredient sorted, but we couldn't just do meatballs and pasta - so I suggested go Italian and make our own pizzas!

We found ourselves running late, but about an hour before the competition started, we began making the dough for the pizza. You may start to notice a theme with my baking, but I found I didn't have all the right ingredients for the base. I have just about enough strong bread flour, but had to top it up with some plain flour - so we just threw in a bit of extra yeast and hoped for the best.

In less than 30 mins we had a lovely risen base (OK to be fair it was "resting" by the log burner, on a comfy chair, so was in a lovely warm room).



Once the dough was nicely risen, I left Martin to roll it out to pizza ish shapes, while I grated the block of cheese (gadgets are great for this - food processor with grater here I come) and then chopping up veggies and meat for the various toppings.

Just to give you a full picture of what was going on, I was bopping away to Radio 2's broadcast of Eurovision, while dashing into the living room for each song, just to check up on what the act and the costumes looked like - it's important don't you know :)

So the three pizza's consisted of:
  • Sarah (in no particular order) cheese, tomato purée, garlic salt, peppers, sweetcorn, tuna, olives, spinach. (I'll update this later, or let them both comment if they have more toppings to add)
  • Martin (in no particular order) cheese, tomato purée, IKEA meatballs, salami, peppers, chilli, ham, sweetcorn, mushrooms, olives, and no doubt random other meats as well. (I'll update this later, or let them both comment if they have more toppings to add)
  • Mine (in some order, as I created it) tomato purée, Ikea meatballs, salami, ham, courgettes, mushrooms, sweetcorn, mushrooms, peppers, mushrooms, cheese, mushrooms, garlic salt and a bit more cheese.


The pics below are mine at the top, in the oven, then Sarah's (bottom oven) and then Martin's waiting to be cooked - I think he was checking how long to cook them for with ours... ;)




They really were huge pizzas, and lasted for the whole of Eurovision, well, I had my final slice the following morning for breakfast, but I had been taste testing most of the ingredients as we prepared them!  Oops

My pizza, post cooking, pre-eating! Yum yum!!

I did create a rather English rhubarb and apple crumble to go alongside our Danish/Italian pizzas, but none of us had the room to indulge after all that food, so that had to put on the shelf for a couple of days. I'll blog a bit more about that one next....

So after our fab pizza creation session, we definitely want to get a bit more creative. Things we'd like to try next include a stuffed crust, possibly looking at those cheese string things (meant to be good?), also looking at a pizza pie like the one @OMG_foods tweeted about recently - http://t.co/EyY7UMQi7o

So, is anyone else inspired to create an over the top pizza? What would your favourite topping be?

1 comment:

  1. Aagh, first comment got eaten

    Let's try again

    If I over indulge on pizza toppings my pizzas don't cook properly but that's because I use simple pizza dough (due to the whole can't cook bread thing!)
    Favourtie toppings on ours for me is : homemade sauce, some pesto, cheddar, mozzarella, tomatoes, mushrooms and ham. I sometimes think I need to be healthier and add rocket a la pizza hut.

    Cheese strings are the devils food,

    I always find the pizzas on Man V Food look lovely so one of them would be great!

    Neb loves Calzone and has made some before - or these look yum too
    http://tinyurl.com/m4lm9z2

    BNM (so hungry now!)

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