This week's Saturday night pizza took place on Sunday. One of the pizzas was inspired by a recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, from his latest tv series 3 Good Things, which highlights simple recipes using 3 main ingredients. The recipe was originally for a pasta bake but I decided to have a go at using it as a pizza sauce.

I started by cooking the sliced courgettes in a little oil.

When the courgettes were cooked down, I added a splash of double cream (just enough to mix in to make a smooth sauce) and a handful of grated parmesan.

I spread the courgette mixture onto the pizza base

Topped it with sliced chicken.

Then added mozzarella and sprinkled with grated cheddar.

I was a bit worried that the final cooked pizza would be a bit soggy but it was fine. In the spirit of the original programme, I kept the toppings to a minimum but the courgette mixture was full of flavour and worked well on a pizza.

We made two new recipes today. The first was carrot cake. Emma's aunt recently gave us some apples from the tree in her garden. I ate most of them and we decided to bake something with the rest. Emma had read about using apple sauce as a replacement for vegetable oil in recipes. Last night I chopped the apples and simmered in half an inch of water until they had started to break down. I then liquidized the apples to make a smooth sauce.

We usually follow Delia Smith's recipe so I used that as the basis but replaced the oil with an equal volume of the apple sauce. I also reduced the amount of sugar from 6oz to 4oz. Delia's recipe suggests baking for 35--40 minutes but we found that it needed closer to 50 minutes.

This evening I make tuna and chickpea burgers, based on a recipe from the BBC Good Food magazine. I used leeks instead of onions and parsley instead of coriander but apart from that I followed the recipe fairly closely. The cooked burgers had a fairly soft texture but they tasted good.