Golden vegetable pizza with feta

This one started as a way to make pizza without a long wait for yeast to rise. The base is a quick dough built from gram flour, ground rice and cornflour, with mashed potato worked in so it stays soft and tender underneath the crisp top. Gram flour is simply ground chickpeas, and it has a warm, slightly nutty taste that works well with tomato and feta. If you have only ever used it in bhajis, you may be surprised how well it suits a pizza.

The potato does more than add body. Mashed potato holds moisture, so the dough stays pliable when you roll it out, and it helps the base brown evenly in a hot oven. Bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar do the rising job that yeast would otherwise do, so mix the dry ingredients and get the dough shaped fairly promptly once the milk goes in. A round of about 30cm is a good size for a standard baking sheet, and it does not need to be perfectly neat. Rustic edges look lovely.

For the topping, I like to slice the tomatoes thinly and let them sit on a sheet of kitchen paper for a few minutes first. That draws off some of the surface juice, so the base stays crisp rather than soggy in the middle. Dot the mushrooms in between the other vegetables so they do not all end up in one clump. Crumble the feta over the top rather than slicing it, since it softens in the oven and melts into little salty pockets.

Leftovers keep well. Wrap any slices tightly and refrigerate them for a day or two, then reheat them on a dry baking tray in a hot oven rather than in the microwave, which tends to make the base rubbery. Cold slices also make a decent lunch with a handful of rocket on the side.

For something to round out the meal, a bowl of lentil soup or a simple salad with lemon dressing works nicely. If you are after more ideas along these lines, the Spanish onion and anchovy pizza is another flatbread style that leans on slow-cooked onion, and the feta stuffed peppers with cherry tomatoes cover much of the same flavour ground with less fuss. For a sweet bake to follow, the cinnamon banana and raisin loaf is an easy one to make in the same oven session.