Pizza Express Cook at Home Margherita Pizza

We were very excited when we learnt that Pizza Express were finally bringing out a Gluten Free pizza to be sold alongside their other chiller cabinet offering... admittedly, only being stocked in Sainsbury's at the moment. 

The pizzas were launched in certain stores last week and our Saturday supermarket shop revealed a disappointingly empty 'slot' for the product.  Not to be dissuaded, we went to another store on Monday and were successful in locating stock... trying to be reasonable,  and leave some for others, we bought three pizzas (selling at £4 each).

Sous Chef J was delighted when he was shown the packs... and requested a 'speedy taste test'... which was easy to deliver!

We checked the cooking instructions, pre-heated the oven to 200ºC, unpackaged the pizzas and cooked them for 7 minutes.  Checking them we decided they needed a little longer to brown and set the timer for a further 2 minutes.

Removing them from the oven there was the 'classic' Pizza Express aroma and it wasn't long before SCJ was happily diving in and getting his hands dirty....

The pizza is about 10" in diameter.

VERDICT: Just like in the restaurant, the topping is tasty, the base is thin and crispy and the pizza didn't last long!  Perfect for a quick and easy teatime.

We sincerely hope Sainsbury's are able to keep the pizzas in stock in the chillers... and that we aren't disappointed by poor reliability of availability.  We'll definitely buy again and will stock our freezer next time.

Slow Cooker Jacket Potatoes

 One of Sous Chef J's favourite meals is jacket potatoes and we wondered whether we could use our slow cooker to make them... so we gave it a try.

First of all, we placed a little scrunched up tin foil in the base of the cooker then arranged six mid sized potatoes around the slow cooker.  The lid was placed on (it needs to be a snug fit to stop water/heat escaping.)

The cooker was set to high... and, as we needed the potatoes for lunchtime, we left them on high for about four hours and they were done.

This is what the cooker looked like at during cooking... you can see that there is quite a lot of moisture inside the cooker. Some has also escaped out.



Here is what the potatoes looked like after cooking.  They are moist and soft.  The points where the potatoes touched the ceramic pot were crisp.

The pot was switched off at this stage and care was taken removing the potatoes as they are hot and very soft.  We found some tongs worked well.

A good amount of butter and some freshly ground black pepper were added and our meal was ready.

We have tried this when going out for the afternoon - starting the cooking off on high for about an hour and then reducing to low for the remainder of the cooking time.  We find 4-5 hours will cook the potatoes through but, obviously, that depends on their size and also the power of the cooker.  Ours is a very basic, 3 litre cooker with settings labelled as High, Low and Warm.