Food ‘n Drink

This week I decided to try a couple of recipes from Jamie’s Italy cookbook, which I purchased a couple of weeks ago. Couple of reasons for the purchase, the first because I liked the series and love italian food and what I saw him cook on TV so figured I’d try it for myself, and the second reason is because of our trip to Italy later in the year. I figured that the book would give us some good information on the type of food to eat in each area and what we can expect to find or what we should try. The book does have a lot of his own thoughts and info about the food and it mentions his experiences in the different areas, it’s almost half like a reading book and half like a cookbook.

So I’ve been running through it and decided to try out the pasta bake dish I saw him make on TV - Tomato and Mozzerella Pasta Bake, and also on Tuesday night I had a go at making Pizzas from scratch with his recipe. The pasta bake was great, really nice filling food but not too heavy. It would also be good to accompany a meal. The pizza was a little harder to do, and I totally forgot about using the bread maker to mix the dough in! However with the help of Paul to kneed the dough, we managed to get the dough done and make 3 large 12″ pizzas, one for each of us. The pizza bases came out really nice however I wasn’t so impressed with my toppings however I didn’t really have a strong tasting cheese on top which I think was the main thing missing, plus a stronger tomato sauce.

However both dishes turned out quite well which I’m pleased about, and I’ll definitely be doing both again. The book is well worth the money, I only paid 40% of the RRP price from Amazon, and even though it’s now £12 instead of £10, it’s still a large saving for a great book. Highly recommended.