April

Cooking new things in new ways

This month, now that the Uni work is behind me, I thought what better comfort that lovely food. While this sits in opposition to my goal of being healthier I thought a little treat wouldn't be so bad. I recruited my husband to join in the fun as well.

We started with homemade pizza. Sounds simple enough but making dough from scratch was trickier than first thought. Even more difficult was getting the dough onto our pizza stone. This is a stone you place in your oven to recreate the conditions of a true pizza oven. Getting dough onto a pizza paddle looks so easy in the movies. In reality everything was melting as the kitchen was warm from the oven being on its highest heat. No matter how much flour we added, everything with sticky. We then had a the great idea of making the pizza on the paddle and sliding onto the stone. but even this was achieved with great difficulty. Then came getting it out ... Just as tricky as getting it in. I thought the pizza would happily jump onto the paddle but oh no. Had to chase it round the back of the oven and employ the support of a spatula. In the end the pizza was lovely albeit well cooked. The stone helped make the base nice and crispy, rather than a heavy bread base. So the stone was a definite hit. My skills needed some practice. We invited friend over to have a go too which was lots of fun!

Deciding not to stop at pizza, we went for a whole banquet. Tapas. Never made it at home but had it lots of time on holiday. I can't take credit for the paella. That was all my husband. Everything else we did together. It was a good experience actually. We worked well as a team and had various ovens and air fryers on the go. We were very happy with the results. The dishes were a steal from a charity shop! eating it was as much fun as making it.

Cooking taught me that knowing the theory of something doesn't mean it will work seamlessly in practice. What appeared to be simple tasks were difficult skills in practice. Things took a few attempts before they were photo perfect. I've still go a long way to go before I apply for master chef but it was a way of making a daily chore something to look forward to.