Mini cheese pizzas with cherry tomatoes; sticky toffee pudding and custard

So here we are: the first review of supermarket food, and the first meal I have had even the slightest hand in cooking since the summer (my assembly jobs of stuff y’all sent me at the care home don’t count, imo).

First were mini deep dish cheese pizzas, from the Iceland grocery delivery that stretched the capacity of mum’s freezers to the limit while leaving me making a list of all the things I forgot and will need someone to take mum to the local supermarket to buy (indigestion remedies for mum, something to put in sandwiches, some more bread to make sandwiches with, smoked salmon for my Christmas morning breakfast because it isn’t Christmas without a smoked salmon breakfast…)

These little pizzas are meant as party food, but also make a nice light meal. The pizza crusts are crunchy to the point of being too hard if you cook them for longer than indicated on the box, which I needed to do to get the cheese to the appropriate golden colour.

Tastewise, they unsurprisingly reminded me of the Chicago Town mini deep dish pizzas (which are considerably less mini than the Iceland ones), with gloopy tomato paste-y sauce, cheese with little flavour but an impressive amount of stretch, and flecks of green that you can only hope are herbs. If I make them sound unappetising, I’m sorry: they’re really very good.

They hold their heat surprisingly well: I’m glad I’m typing this and not speaking it aloud, as my tongue is rather sore from the resulting burn!

Then a proper hot pudding: sticky toffee pudding and custard: STP courtesy of Aunt Bessie, custard courtesy of Ambrosia, cooking courtesy of mum’s carer (thank you!). Mum had about a third of the pudding and left the last couple of mouthfuls, declaring it “too sweet”; as I seem to have lost the concept of “too sweet”, I ate my serving, finished mum’s, then polished off what was left in the container. I can’t pretend it’s the best STP I’ve ever had, but for a pudding you can heat and eat in under three minutes in the microwave, it’ll do nicely, thank you.

Scores:

• Mini pizzas: 7/10 – not exactly prize-winning pizzas, but pretty good for what they are.
• STP: 8/10 – very sweet, very sticky, very good.

So that was dinner, and now I’m wondering how early is too early to go to bed. (And, for those in the UK watching tv atm, also wondering what on earth Gabby Logan is wearing as SPOTY presenter: it looks like a dressmaker took a crow and a geode, stuck them both to an eighties power suit, and gave the whole thing to Ms Logan to wear on live tv. It’s a look, I’ll give her that. 🤨)