June 23rd

Today I have had a very productive day indeed. Fridays always seem to be like that, it starts badly with a Monday and then picks up a little on Tuesday when I realise I’ve essentially wasted a whole day. Wednesday is always a bit of a rubbish day as everything I should’ve done on Monday (which carried over to Tuesday) catches up with me and buggers me about. Wednesday is also the day when I tend to have something else to do. Basically Wednesday’s can fuck off. Thursday is an all round decent day, things actually start to happen on a Thursday and there’s always the comfort that I still have one whole day left of the week with which to get things done. Friday rocks. By around 4 o’clock on a Friday I’ve achieved a great deal and I’m now a little sad that there’s not much time left to finish everything up. By this point I’m on a roll you see. My philosophy has always been to try to take each day as it comes but recently many days have taken to attacking me all at once.
So, today, today I dropped Beth off at the station and then headed home to find that my free sample of ‘Jelly Belly’ jelly beans had turned up. It was a mighty small bag but hey, it was free. I wolfed these shortly after polishing off my brekkie and my second cup of tea for the day. Once this repast was over I went to Waitrose and got myself all the ingredients needed to bake bread and tonight’s tea (pizza). I’ve only ever tried to bake my own bread once and I seem to remember it went pretty badly wrong and I ended up with something that more or less resembled a rugby ball in shape and texture. How I could get something so simple so badly wrong I don’t know, but then it’s always seemed to be that way with cooking and me. I can knock together all manner of complicated and experimental dishes but can I poach an egg? Can I bollocks. Actually that’s not entirely true, I can poach an egg like a pro but it’s never what I’d call ‘a given’ that it’s gonna come out right.
This time however the bread baking went excellently well despite the fact that the kitchen ended up looking like someone had lobbed a bag of flour in through the open window when I wasn’t looking. I did get rather stressed at one point and ended up laughing at myself ‘cos my hands were covered in sticky dough and I just couldn’t get the bloody stuff off. Everything I touched stuck to me, I began to feel like some kind of cartoon glue monster, I imagined my hands sticking to the work surface in that kind of ‘pizza cheese’ way and the comically transferring the goo to my shoes.
Whilst the dough was proving I finally wrote and typed up the pitch I’ve been trying to get done for a few days now. As I said before I’m not much good at pitching for work but this time I was quite pleased with the way it came out.
Anyhow, the dough was rapidly expanding and growing at an alarming rate (Jamie did say in his recipe that it needed three sachets of yeast so I used three) and I had visions of it growing exponentially and it consuming everything in the kitchen whilst I back away from it, terrified of the monster I’d created. I could see Beth coming home to find the flat bulging at the seams as the dough expands crushing me in the corner. (Thankfully, that didn’t happen.)
The bread came out very well and, once baked, I tested a wee slice with some plain ol’ butter. Fresh baked bread really is one of life’s luxuries as most of us most of the time just buy it from a supermarket. It was delicious. With the left over dough I made some pizza bases, two respectable ‘small’ ones and one large one that looked like it had been thrown around by a pizza chef who had really lost interest in his job. ‘Quirkily rustic’ I think is the only way it could be described, that or just plain old crap.
After my busy day I thought I deserved a pint so I went to meet Marc at the Tin Drum where Beth joined us fresh off the train. Later that night Beth & I made the pizza toppings of our choices and flaked out in front of the telly. All in all a very good day was had.

Tea drunk: 4
Pitches completed: 1
Kitchen’s floured: 1