Pizza party!! ... with a tomato, basil and boccocini salad

So, The Boy has committed me to writing a post about pizza only I've just discovered that I've already blogged about our pizza making and repeating that would just be boring.

Here's the link to where I talk about our ingredients that top our pizza. This time though, we bought our pizza bases because we didn't have time to make our own pizza dough. We'll probably do that again when we make pizza next.

I also didn't have any pizza sauce made up, so we just bought a jar of pasta sauce and used that instead. Usually, I make my own pizza sauce, which consists of:

• 1 can diced Italian tomatoes
• 1 small tub of tomato paste
• Italian herbs (use as much or as little as you like!)
• Salt and pepper

I heat that in a pan and then blitz it with a hand blender until it's smooth and then let it cool. Usually that makes enough for about 4 serves of pizza. I put them into small baggies and freeze what I do not use. It defrosts just fine and once defrosted, I just add it straight onto the top of the pizza.

We had The Best Bud and his wife over to dinner so it was a little more that pizza that was served.

We started off with some garlic bread and a tomato, basil and Bocconcini salad.

The garlic bread was easy because we bought it, though I think next time I will make my own. The brand that we usually get was not available, so we tried the regular Coles brand (Coles seems to be replacing all the brands with their own brand and sometimes not for the better). The Coles brand garlic bread was disappointing. It was bland and did not have enough garlic or really any other flavor. Both The Boy and I were disappointed in it, but The Best Bud thought that it was ok. We had thought that we would keep any that was unfinished as leftovers to go with lunch the next day, but decided to toss the remaining pieces since it wasn't very good.

We love a good tomato, basil and Bocconcini salad and it's the easiest thing to make. We made enough this time to serve 4 people and here's what I did:

Ingredients:

• 3 vine ripened tomatoes (they taste better), cut into 7mm slices
• 1 tub of Bocconcini standard sizes cheese balls, sliced into 7mm slices
• Basil leaves
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

• Place the sliced tomatoes on a serving platter
• Place one basil leaf on each slice of tomato
• Place the sliced Bocconcini cheese on top of the basil leave
• Grind some salt and pepper over the top
• Drizzle olive oil over the top
• Serve and enjoy

It was a pretty leisurely evening, so we had the garlic bread and tomato, basil and Bocconcini salad first. After that we made up the pizza and popped it into the oven for 12 minutes at 180 degrees C to cook and melt the cheese. When that was ready, we had a few slices of pizza but decided not to eat the second pizza that we made so that there was room for an Affogato for dessert.

We ended up with a whole pizza leftover that we've put into the fridge. The Boy will probably have some for lunch over the next few days and will likely take a few slices to work as well.

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