Last Saturday we both agreed we'd try a Neapolitan-type pizza for dinner. To that end, I decided to prepare the pizza dough using only unbleached hard-wheat white flour. With water, salt and olive oil. I made enough dough to set some of it aside for use on Sunday, to bake notional cheese croissants to accompany our pulse-vegetable soup planned for dinner.

Those croissants are easy enough to accomplish; the dough is rolled to a circle, spread with Becel margarine, liberally sprinkled with grated sharp old cheddar, then folded in on itself and rolled out, turned, folded again, rolled out and repeated until the dough has been well layered. Set to rise, then rolled out again to a round, and sliced into triangles, the triangles themselves rolled into the classic croissant shape and baked until crisply brown, resulting in flaky, layered rolls, perfect with a hot winter-appropriate soup.

As for the reason for a plain white pizza dough rather than what I usually prepare adding wheat germ and oat bran, it is to have a puffier, more absorbent base for the few ingredients that top it, a more traditional type of pizza. For which cornmeal is sprinkled on the baking pan - for me that means the pan that slides into the pizza oven beneath our large microwave oven - and then the waiting pizza dough rolled out and fitted into the baking pan.

Over the waiting dough is lightly sprinkled and spread olive oil. That is topped with sliced fresh plum tomatoes, and over the tomatoes a scant grating of fresh Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) cheese. And then I tore up fresh basil leaves - roughly about three-quarters of a cup-worth. A slight sprinkling of olive oil, followed by rough-cut small pieces of mozzarella sprinkled over everything. Then popped into the pizza oven and baked until the dough was risen and browned at the edges, and the topping sizzling and aromatic.

This pizza was the first my husband has enjoyed enough to eat without leaving anything over, in quite a long time. His is a jaded palette, but my own was more than a little pleased by this new version (for us) of the classical pizza. We plan to repeat it.