It’s strange, I complained about cooking every day during Level 5 yet we haven’t ordered a take-away meal yet. Have you?
I’m so over cooking every day. Trying to think up something that sounds appealing to eat every day is a chore. Buying the food to make it is a chore. Listen, this is not a new thought for me… this has been happening for years but for some reason it feels worse now. Actually everything feels worse and more intense now than it did before (but that’s a thought process for another post).
During level 4 lockdown we’ve been able to get meal deliveries from take-away joints and restaurants. We haven’t even tried it yet. I’m wondering if we’re alone in this. I just see so many issues online with people waiting, and having to book your order early so that it gets delivered, that I’m not sure I’m ready for that mission.
Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to talk about in this post.
I only see successful cooking and baking attempts on social media at the moment, but surely they haven’t all been successful.
We’ve had a monstrous flop, and we won’t be trying that again.
A few weeks ago, the hot topic on Instagram was homemade pizzas. Literally everyone was rolling and making pizza dough, so we tried our hand at it.
We first tried a Jamie Oliver classic pizza recipe from his Italy cookbook. It’s a cookbook I got as a gift years ago and I rarely use because the recipes are quite complex or have ingredients that I can’t find or my family just won’t eat it.
That pizza recipe was a huge success! It was beautiful, and tasty and it worked perfectly. It took hours but it was well worth it.
Then I spotted a recipe on Instagram for a Neopolitan pizza base which is meant to be thicker than the one we made before. It was on the restaurant Saint’s Instagram account. I thought we’d be very clever and try and follow the instructions from the IGTV post. Well, it was a disaster. It proved to be a nightmare to try and follow without instructions written down (and by the time we tried it I couldn’t find the post with the written ingredients). It took much longer than we expected to work out what to do because of the video, instead of just reading the instructions.
In the end the pizzas were awful. They didn’t cook properly, and we had over-kneaded them (I think). They ended up being like biscuit on the edges and undercooked in the middle.
What a fail!
Anyway, long story short. I’ve learnt that we work best with instructions we can read and not instructions on a video alone. So we won’t be trying that again.
We’ll also be making the Jamie Oliver recipe again… that was delicious!
My recent pizza success is only due to doing it fairly regular from scratch before lock-down. My bread making skills have developed properly under lock-down (I finally learnt the technique of kneading bread properly and for the right amount of time).
My hot cross bun attempts (both batches) were – on review – unmitigated disasters. The second batch ended up being turned into half decent bread and butter pudding.
Two (videos I know :-/ ) guys that have helped me with my pizza and bread making techniques:
Andrew Rea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqYiUmutGI
Jack Sturgess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oednglADc0M
I must say that the only reason our first pizza was such a success was because we watched a video on how to knead the dough properly too
We have now had takeaways twice – Sat and yesterday – and I am prepared to never do it again. It is expensive, not great as in the restaurant, and the portions were much smaller. We ordered the same things we usually order when we go in person, and the kids and I were fine, but Dion needed extra, so what is the point?
My kids eat so much now! They eat way more than we do… just wait. Your grocery bill is going to sky rocket
I believe you – Connor has been eating more than I eat for a good few years now, probably 3 🙂