Socca!

Nope, I'm not talking about the American word for football - socca is a type of pancake from the South of France, made from chickpea flour. Chickpea flour is also known as gram flour, and if you fancy getting some, you can find great big bags in Asian supermarkets or in the world foods aisle of most supermarkets, or Tesco actually sell smaller bags in their wholefoods section. I first read about socca on Keeping Healthy Getting Stylish and was intrigued, so I bought some flour and gave it a go. You can use socca for all sorts of things - so far I've made thinnish ones and used them as wraps, filled with salady bits, and then tonight I made this amazing socca 'pizza'!



For this one I used 50g of chickpea flour and enough water to make it the consistency of double cream. The chickpea flour has quite a distinctive beany sort of taste, which I like, but it's even better if you add herbs and/or spices to the batter. As I was making a pizza-type affair, I went with a sprinkle of oregano, but I've used garam masala before too and that was delicious. I made quite a thick pancake, flipping it once, and then I piled on tomato sauce (just made from a little tin of chopped tomatoes and some onion) and topped it with roasted courgette, red pepper, broccoli, artichoke hearts and a little bit of mozzarella, and popped it under the grill until the edges of the socca were slightly toasty and the cheese was melted and bubbling.

It was absolutely gorgeous and really filling, and of course it was packed full of protein and veg and approximately ten million times healthier than real pizza! It's gluten-free, too, in case that's important to you!