Stromboli

After watching the Hairy Bikers make one of these on Tuesday I absolutely HAD to give it a go. It's probably one of the worst things I could make given that white flour hates me and Rich is lactose intolerant so shouldn't eat cheese. But hey, it's Friday and we've got all weekend to be ill. And anyway, it was SO worth it.

The original recipe is HERE but I changed it up a bit because I'm lazy.

I copied their dough method and recipe pretty much exactly apart from using garlic infused olive oil instead of the plain stuff.

Neither Rich or I like chunky tomato sauces so I used normal pasata straight out of the jar. It's also because I'm lazy and wanted to watch something awful on the telly. A teaspoon each of Very Lazy chopped garlic and chilli were also added to the pasata.

The fillings we had were prosciutto ham, smoked bacon, sausage, salami and three different kinds of cheese. At the time of writing the posh prosciutto ham is half price in Sainsbury's and the pre-cooked smoked bacon strips are £1.75 and I only used a quarter of a packet. I cooked the sausages last night and pulled them apart into tiny pieces. The cheeses were grated mozzarella, grated mild cheddar and reduced fat buffalo mozzarella although quite frankly, trying to reduce the calories on a recipe like this is a futile mission.

After I stretched the dough and skillfully and artistically placed scattered the fillings I tucked the edges in and rolled it up which was actually easier than I had anticipated.

My rolling could have been neater but it was my first attempt so I'm not going to be too hard on myself. After a second proving and 30 minutes in the oven the meaty beast emerged golden and glorious.

We had ours with a side of baby spinach drizzled with a bit of garlic oil.

There was more than enough to feed myself, Rich and my mum as well as the birds in the garden who have been given the ends of the Stromboli to feast on over the weekend although poor Monty was unsuccessful in his begging attempts.

Overall it was love at first bite but I must have done something wrong. When I watched the Hairy Bikers make theirs, they used only ham, mozzarella and basil - around half what I used in terms of volume but even with the mountains of fillings we all felt that they got a bit lost in all the bread. I used 4 whole sausages, 4 torn slices of ham, several strips of bacon and an entire mozzarella ball not to mention the grated cheese and slices of salami. It looked like so much before I rolled it up and I was worried I'd over done it but I think you could easily double that!

I'd still rate it a solid 8 out of 10 and it's something I will definitely be making again in the future. That's if we both the survive the weekend ahead without dying from our food intolerences. Oops.