It's been a week or two since Easter now (how was everyone's Easter, by the way? Mine was a little hectic with both sides of my family - Greek Orthodox and Catholic - coming together on one weekend!) so I think it's about time we began to think about the healthy intentions our year started out with.
But I have my own brand of healthy - and that means not missing out on a thing! So why not have your pizza and eat it too?
I've been meaning to make a cauliflower crust for a pizza for quite a while now, and when I found the simple and, in the author's words, 'BEST' recipe around (I've adapted my recipe from http://www.theluckypennyblog.com/2013/02/the-best-cauliflower-crust-pizza.html) I just had to make it for dinner last night!
And it's super simple, though I found it a little time consuming probably because I'd never done anything like it before.
Firstly, cut a cauliflower head into florets and wash thoroughly, then blitz in your food processor (it took mine quite a few go's so don't fret, pet!)
It will look like this, now:
Then just cover with cling film and microwave it for 4 minutes, before dumping it on a tea towel and leaving it for about 5 minutes to cool slightly. Too hot to handle!
Once cooled, wring the life out of your cauliflower 'flour'. I was so surprised at the amount of water that comes out of a cauliflower, and to ensure I got a crisp crust that I could pick up and eat like a pizza, I wrung mine twice - first in a thick tea towel, then a much thinner one.
Pour the cauliflower into a bowl, then add 2 eggs, a pinch of salt, 1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese + 2/3 cup grated 'pizza'/mozzarella cheese, plus a pink of dried oregano. Mix, mix, mix with your hands to form a sort of dough! The dough is wet, and you won't be able to roll it out like a normal pizza dough, so just halve the recipe and pat the dough down on two separate lined baking trays to form a circular pizza shape (you know what a pizza looks like!)
While you're doing all this, pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees Celsius. Bake the two pizzas for 15 minutes until nice and crisp - do not rush this baking process because once you put toppings on the pizza the base will not crisp up anymore!
Add your toppings (I used pizza sauce, cheese, peppers, pequillo peppers) and bake once more for 10 minutes or until your cheese has melted. Et voila! A much lighter version of a pizza - in fact, I could probably have eaten the whole thing on my own!
Not much to post today - just one of my favourite holiday snapshots from England. It truly does represent the calm I had in January before the 'storm' of work and catching up with busy lives once the year well and truly kicked off.
As promised, I have the first of my England holiday posts, and to start off I'd like to talk about the best decision we made when on holidays.
Initially, we were planning to catch trains around the country, but when we discovered the insanely high prices of cross-country travel, renting a car seemed the best option. And it delivered on value a hundred fold!
Here's our little car!
After four brilliant days in London, we drove to Liverpool, and got to see so many sites and little corners of England that we would never have seem otherwise.
Before we even left London, we visited St. John's Wood to see Paul McCartney's London home, as well as write on the walls of Abbey Road Studios and be total tourists by crossing that famous pedestrian crossing.
We hadn't expected to see much but Motorways, so when we began to find little nuggets of interesting places, it became one of the most memorable days of the entire holiday.
Sorry for the blurry photo of Birmingham above - we didn't actually stop in the city itself but rather drove through on a quick sight-seeing tour.
It was on this first road trip that we were able to see an English sunset, since until this fifth day in England, as the sun sets near 4pm, we'd always been inside at the time of the sunset, only to emerge once night had well and truly fallen.
By far my favourite stop-over on this drive to Liverpool was in the pottery-town of Stoke-on-Trent. I was very happy to find that an antique thimble I bought in Plymouth later on was made in this town! It was gorgeous, and we walked through some of the streets before it started to get late and we began to get hungry...
... which is of course when we bought some Gooeys! I was obsessed by these biscuits and over the trip we tried other flavours but nothing beat the Hazelnut flavour pictured above!
All the places I've mentioned so far were those that we saw on that first day of driving, but after leaving our car at Liverpool Lime St Station, we eventually picked it up again four days later and used the car for the rest of the trip.
It allowed us to see so much, and go so many places:
We ventured out of Liverpool centre of the John Lennon Airport... and Speke!
...and we can't forget the opportunity to visit Stonehenge twice because the first time it rained so much we couldn't get many good photos, and the second time the rain held out until we reached the carpark again...
...we visited so many gorgeous little villages and hamlets, including Salisbury, Kingshead, Dartmouth, Bath and Axminster, and were able to deviate from our planned itinerary and choose to go to Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth and Oxford...
Driving around England was a magical experience and one that I treasure above all else on the trip (although driving on those tiny hedged-in 'B' roads in the night was a little thrilling for me!)
