Living in the back of beyond (as we do), one of the few things I “miss” from living in an urban environment is the ability to phone Dominos when you’ve got no enthusiasm for cooking for whatever reason. You know, it’s late, you’ve been working hard, (or you’ve been lolling on the sofa all day and are STILL too tired to get off your bum) you phone Dominos and before you have finished feeding the dogs and shutting in the hens there’s a hot pizza ready and waiting to be consumed.

Here, to get your mits on a takeaway, it’s a forty minute round trip to town and you get rewarded for the effort with lukewarm and not particularly nice curry (no pizza place here).

So, you just have to plan better and when you “need” a pizza, you’ve got to make it yourself – well, excepting that you could buy a frozen one, which’d probably be nasty. This too would require a trip to the supermarket, roughly the same distance as the curry-house. Actually, given that you’re going to make your own, you may as well do your best to make a really GOOD pizza – a proper “Italian” one if you know what I mean.

Over the years, I’ve worked hard and now think I’m close to the perfect pizza.

Today’s pizza though has to be a diversion from usual because I’ve not got any pasta flour left (all used up and nowhere to buy it down here) so I decided that the dough would be an experimental recipe, using 1/3 wholemeal flour, 1/3 white bread flour and 1/3 semolina.

Here’s the dough, being rolled out to the right thin-ness. It’s about to get topped with the last batch of home-made pizza sauce made with our own tomatoes, onions and chillis, some organic mozzarella, olives, onion, red pepper and jalapeno chillis.

What I can tell you with the benefit of hindsight is that the experiment worked. The dough was good and crisp and there was no graininess from the semolina so this seems like a good substitute for the semola flour that I usually use.

If I could be so bold as to give a tip to any budding PAD challengers, I have found that when all else fails, a pic of supper is a good stand-by!

I reckon that last year's photo was one of my very best ideas in all of the five I've been doing it.