A Recipe for Perfect Pizza

How to make a perfect pizza. 

Key points are in bold in case you don’t want to read all the words.

• Make a bread dough. Use strong bread flour because this has instructions on the packet.  Mash the dough for a while because there has to be Gluten.  If there is no gluten you won’t have the right thing. 
• Put some garlic in a pot and heat it slowly.  Do not let it go brown. The plan is that your tomato mix will reveal chunks of soft golden roast garlic. Add a tin of chopped tomatoes and boil to a paste.
• Oil a tray and squash a bit of dough onto the middle. Don’t spend a lot of time on this because magic happens over the next hour.

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• Every time you walk past the dough, it will have puffed up and grown a bit.  Push the puffed up edges out towards the edge of the tin.  When it has stretched to fill the tin in a crispy, effortless way, you are ready to bake. 
• Spread the tomato paste thinly over the thin dough and cover that with food. Olives, salami, artichoke, sweetcorn or whatever you like.
• Top with cheese, followed by more cheese with grated mozzarella on top of that.

• Cook in a very hot oven for 10 minutes. Serve with a healthy salad like a bit of iceberg lettuce.

• Watch out.  It is easy to eat twice as much as you normally do.  It can expand in your stomach so you feel sick for hours.  Be careful about this. You want people like to talk about the ‘day you made pizza’. Not ‘the day you ate too much pizza and it made you ill’.

Then it might be time to go out again. But there is a chance of coming across scenes like this.

Ghosts of summer hanging around.  If you get engulfed with nostalgia about green beans, you might have Januaryitis.

What is Januaryitis?

It is not being able to say ‘Oh wonderful it’s January, an excuse to stay in, watch TV, keep healthy, get extra sleep and watch the snowdrops grow’. Every Monday is declared blue and too much time is spent complaining that Christmas was rubbish or fussing about lack of light and Vitamin D. It is a waste of 8% of the year.

Here are some irritatingly positive ways to turn things around.

Less alcohol

Gone are the heady days of baking ginger biscuits in a frenzy of sherry, drooling over fattened roasts and or swallowing trifles whole. In January we charge off on a tidal wave of things that are supposed to make us better people, but because we have decided we ‘have to do them’ we get miserable just thinking about it.

Dry January isn’t all about misery. It is OK to get real sleep and wake up without a headache or raging anxiety. If you go to bed sober you get good dreams. Last night I met up with a nice man who looked suspiciously like the star of Bridgerton and we talked about meeting up again as soon as possible.  He gave me his email address and asked me to get in touch with his another friend dragstarfudge@hotmail.com  I felt good about this all morning.

Less exercise

It’s about now that people agree to hand over a £5 a week for a year and then go to the gym twice. It works out at £130 per session.  Now the gyms are shut so you can go for a walk instead if you must get some exercise. Or just do a puzzle. I did this one and accidentally cured my own face-blindness. 

Never again will I walk past my best friend in the street or rush up to greet complete strangers in a bar. Three weeks of wrestling with this one and I finally discovering that all faces are different.

Find out your favourite things to do.

Here are a couple of examples.

Rescue Mice

Cats like to bring mice in to play. It is easy to tell when they have a live mouse on the go because, instead of snoring all day they are up, alert and pointedly staring at the thing they have hidden it under.

No mouse was harmed in this photo session. He was found and released into the wild. Saving mice is a great way to spend time in January.

Make Gourmet Meals for Chickens

Feeding scraps to chickens can cause them to drop dead. They would love a daily selection of cold meats and fresh pasta but, like humans, they don’t always know what is good for them. So their lock-in winter has been on an austere diet of pellets and occasional expensive birdseed on days when it might be their birthday. 

This week I cracked and made a delicious dinner of mashed potato and spaghetti. 

A chicken with a mouth full of mashed potato is pleasing to watch.

And suddenly January is gone

This was a January like no other. This time last year I was idly wondering how it felt for the people of Wuhan and speculating innocently about washing my hands more. Now, here we are, stuck in a portal of vaccines and variants. But at least we have good news from America and we can eat pizza while we soak it in.