Holy Pizzaiolo!

This one is for anyone who loves pizza – actually even if you don’t love pizza you probably will after my latest find.

I am a faithful follower of Craftsy.com.  This is an absolutely brilliant online training facility where you can learn all sorts of new skills from baking to gardening and cooking to quilting.  I sign up for ALL the free lessons because I am a firm believer in accumulating as much knowledge as I can, in as many areas as I can before my time runs out.

My latest enrolment was very well received by the boys of the family – Perfect PIZZA making!  This is an amazing course with a wonderful instructor and having watched all the classes and sourced all the ingredients our son quickly got to work making our first batch of dough.  Sunday was for preparation and Monday the making.  Oh boy, what an incredible job he did!  The recipes proved to be brilliant and I can honestly say they were the best pizza’s I have ever tasted.  The dough was delightful and the toppings to-die for – all in all he gets 10/10 for effort and execution.

Craftsy and Peter Reinhart – a huge big thank you for providing such an amazing resource – and free too!  You guys are heroes.

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It isn’t elementary dear diary!

We bought a beautiful cooker from a friend who had just completed a kitchen refurbishment because we definitely do not have money for the beautiful range cooker that I fell in love with….http://www.lacanche.co.uk/ – so this one stays firmly on the wish list and we use the Smeg until another day.  I know a lot of people who would love to have our used cooker so I was definitely not complaining – until it was installed the week of Christmas and we  had to call out the engineer because only one of the ovens many cycles worked.  A few panicked calls later and he was on the way to hopefully fix it for Christmas dinner in two days time – nothing like cutting it fine around here!

Half an hour later and GULP, we need 4 new oven elements! I know, how can a two oven cooker possibly need 4 elements???? AND we are lucky because two of them are still working fine!  Of course he didn’t have them to hand so they have to be ordered and won’t be here before the cooking marathon that is Christmas in our house.  At least we have one fan element working in the main oven so everything was cooked on turbofan mode – the small oven grill worked as well and that came in handy for the roast potatoes.

Now to wait for the order to arrive and see how much of my leg or arm I will have to sell to pay for them – actually, the way my arm feels at the moment I could do with a new one anyway – and it may cost less than the cooker repairs!

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