No matter how often you cook or how much time you spend thinking about what evening meals to make, it’s always a challenge to come up with enough ideas to keep meals interesting without spending hours over a hot stove.
It’s even more challenging when those meals have to be something that young children will also eat. So it was a godsend when, one evening this week, just as I was preparing to shut down the laptop and leave the office, I stumbled upon a Jamie Oliver no-oven pizza recipe that took just a few minutes to make.
It promised to take just 10 minutes from start to finish, with just a handful of simple ingredients that I already had at home and no need to even wait for the oven to heat up.
It sounded perfect for a working dad-of-two whose evening routine involves rushing from work as fast as possible to collect two children from school then getting their food made as quickly as possible (while often needing to get them to and from one sort of after-school club or another).
I headed straight home to make it, thinking not only would it be an easy evening meal there and then but, if successful, could be something the kids would enjoy helping me make on a rainy weekend afternoon. The beauty of this recipe is even if you don’t have everything on this ingredients list, you can easily swap in substitutes. Treat it as a “principle” recipe and just adapt it however you like. Here’s how it went.
Jamie Oliver’s no-oven pizza — ingredients
- 250g self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting
- olive oil
- 1 red onion
- ½ a red pepper
- ½ x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
- 50g mature Cheddar cheese
My experience of making the pizza
I have to say that I was suspicious about whether making this pizza would be as quick or as simple as the recipe claimed. But it turns out I needn’t have worried. It’s really the one thing about this entire recipe that stood out: it’s so simple.
I don’t know why making your own pizza base, or dough in general, can feel so daunting when it is literally just mixing flour and water in a bowl. Mine was done quickly (and if you ever fear your dough is too dry or too wet and sticky, just add more water (if dry) or more flour (if wet)).
By flouring the working surface and rolling pin, rolling out the dough ball into a nice flat pizza base was easy. Frying it was simple, then I just spooned the chopped tomatoes directly from the can on to the base, mashing the lumps as I went. Then it was a case of adding the other ingredients on top. I also added sweetcorn at the end just because the children like it.
And that was that — it wasn’t a perfect circle but who cares? I just chopped it up in rough triangle shapes that could be easily held and that was that. The kids ate it all, and that’s always the main aim these days.
