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!