SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

Rosemary ... ahhh - you're great for roast anything, and lovely to sprinkle on top of home-made breads with coarsly ground salt

While Suzi Franks just posted a lovely little piece about how to manage your garden so you can eat from it all year round, I’ve just consumed a chick pea, parsley pizza with a rice flour base and mozzarella cheese on top.  Mmmm.  It was packed with herbs from my garden, so I wanted to share the recipe with you.

Once I gave myself permission to bake, I fell into a delicious timeless spell in my kitchen.  I just LOVE baking, when I give myself the space to enjoy it.  It’s a gorgeous feeling knowing which herbs work best with which, and knowing my way around various gluten free flours, and feeling confident and fluid in my work.

Here’s that recipe –

Charlotte’s Parsley Pizza

Ingredients

Pizza Sauce

Two onions

One large sprig of rosemary, pulled apart by hand

A small handful of thyme, also pulled apart

Four leaves of mint, shredded

1 Tablespoon of dried basil (or fresh, if you have it)

1 tin of tomato puree

1 generous teaspoon of organic sea salt

Black pepper to taste

Oil to fry it all in

Pizza Base

2 Cups of brown rice flour

1 third of a cup of oil

1 teaspoon of salt

Water – around half a cup – enough to mix into a dough that can be pressed onto the bottom of a tray

Pizza Topping

1 cup of fresh coriander – chopped finely

1 cup of chickpeas (cooked and soft)

2 large handfuls of parsley – chopped

1 generous cup of mozzerella cheese

Salt and pepper

What to do

Get your sauce cooking first so it can have time to simmer and develop in flavour.  Fry the herbs and onions in the oil, on low heat for a good ten minutes until the onions are clear.  Then add the tin of tomato puree, let it simmer, add salt and pepper to taste.  Let that sauce simmer away on a low heat while you prepare everything else.

Next – the base – ahhh such a work of art!  Brown rice flour isn’t glutenous, so you have to get it to hold together with oil and water.  Add these liquids (plus the salt), the oil first and then enough water so that it forms a dough.  Don’t bother trying to roll the dough with a rolling pin, it falls apart easily.  Once you’ve created a dough, gently, patiently press it into the dish you’re going to cook your pizza in.  Make sure the base is only around a centimeter (if that) thick, and make sure the dough evenly covers the whole dish.  You want your dough, when cooked, to come out slightly crispy, but soft enough to enjoy.

Next – pour the sauce over the base, ensuring that it evenly coats the dough.

Next – add your topping.  Sprinkle the coriander over the sauce, then sprinkle the chickpeas over the coriander, then all that lush chopped parsley, then the cheese over everything else.  Finally, add a little more salt and pepper.

Cook at around 180 Celsius for around twenty minutes – I’m sort of guessing here as my oven cooks too hot and is such a furnace that mine only took ten minutes and I’m not sure how hot it was.  I do know that it’s best to cook pizza in a hot oven, and lowish so that the bottom of the base will brown slightly.

Enjoy!

Today’s rating: 10/10

365 Days of Fun and Chillaxation (as I raise my gorgeous son and grow my good news website to a subscription base of 100,000 people).  The Low Down on this Blog.

Check out yesterday’s blog.

Check out the story of my first ever ebook ‘Ten Ways to Have Fun and Chillax As You Live Your Green Dreams’

Tags: Food, herbs, kai