Pizza - leek/roquefort and sundried tomato/aubergine/mozzarella

Leek and Roquefort pizza

A few years ago, my lovely husband acquired a pizza dough recipe from an Italian friend of his (Guisceppe - I don't suppose you're reading but, if you are, we love you and your pizza recipe!), and we've used it regularly ever since.  It produces perfect (Italian-style, thin crust) pizza every time. 

I reproduce it below as given to us as, frankly, his directions are a lot more precise than mine.

Aubergine, sundried tomato and mozzarella pizza

Usually, we slightly ruin the purity of the recipe by piling it high with all kinds of things.  Oh, we have onions, let's put those on, look we've got half a jar of olives left over from caponata, we'll pile those on, oooh but we have that bit of gorgonzola..  etc, etc.  Our pizzas are usually half pizzas, half mountains.  Anyway. 

This time we decided - for no particular reason - that we'd try to be a bit more focussed and so we we went for one pizza with white sauce, leek and roquefort and one with tomato sauce, sundried tomatoes/aubergines/mozzarella.  We fried up the leeks before putting them on the pizza and roasted the aubergine slices.

They were Good.  

Leek and Roquefort pizza

Sundried tomato, aubergine and mozzarella pizza

Pizza dough

Party food - puff pastry tarts, mushroom & stilton, tomato, garlic & olive, tomato & mozzarella

Mushroom and stilton puff pastry tarts

Tomato and mozzarella puff pastry tart

One of the things that I find difficult about hosting parties is providing enough food to cater for different preferences - e.g. people who don't like cheese or tomatoes or whatever - while not cooking so many different things that results in kitchen chaos.

At the party we hosted recently, I went for making mini puff pasty tarts with different toppings.  Very easy, can be made small enough that they are finger food, and allow you to have a variety of toppings to appeal to all.

Mushroom and stilton puff pastry tart

Mushroom and stilton puffy pastry tarts

What you do is:  buy some puff pastry, cut into squares of about 2 1/2 inches square, put on topping, bake for 10-15 mins at 200 degrees C.  It's worth leaving some space around the edges to avoid spillage but you don't need to leave more than about a 1/4 of an inch.  To avoid having to faff in the kitchen too much with guests around, we baked these the morning of the party and served at room temperature but they would be good hot/warm too.

The toppings I went for were:

Mushroom and stilton:  which I made by frying mushrooms in butter and sherry, then melting in some stilton.  These were probably the ones that got eaten fastest at the party.

Mushroom and stilton puff pastry tarts

Tomato and mozzarella:  thin slice of tomato on each with a slice of mozzarella on top.  These looked like mini pizzas.

Tomato and mozzarella puff pastry tarts

 Tomato, olive and garlic:  slice of tomato, olives and chopped garlic.  Mmmm, garlic!

Tomato, olive and garlic puff pastry tart

Tomato, olive and garlic puff pastry tarts