Pizza Day

So, apparently February the 9th is Pizza Day, and that seems like an ideal opportunity for me to talk about pizza.

Pizza is great, it's an amazing invention.  Take bread, put a layer of tomato sauce down as a sticky base, pop on your favourite meat and veggies, and then cheese on top, and cook the whole thing so that the cheese helps to fix the toppings to the pizza base, and serve.  Delicious.

There was a danger that sandwiches could argue that they are easier to hold, but lo! Calzones!

Personally I love a good selection of meat toppings, perhaps with some olives or peppers, or even a few jalapenos.  I quite like ham and pineapple, but my wife advises me that pineapple on pizza is just wrong, so I've not seen that variety of pizza for some time.

But to be honest, I don't really want to talk about pizza, it's just been a topic to get me writing.  I find that once I get writing it's a great deal easier to keep going.

You know what, it's early February, and it's cold. Of course it's cold, it's early February in northern England, it's going to be chilly.  I'm sure that I got a bit of sleet on my windscreen earlier.  Not a problem of course, but I'm looking forward to the weather warming up a little, although I do like waking up and it still being dark - summer brings its own challenges, particularly when my son wakes up early!

Speaking of my son, here's a photo of the toilet rolls in our bathroom - he decided to take the time to take a pen to them and number them all:

I do hope that we don't have to use them in order...

The Top Eight Snacks to eat during Superbowl 2017

In just a few hours, Superbowl 51 is going to kick off, New England Patriots versus the Atlanta Falcons.  Now, despite my long-term insistence that soccer is better, this post is all about the Superbowl.

So, I'm going to take a guess that Tom Brady and the Patriots are going to bring the thunder today for the win, but that is pretty much where my American Football knowledge ends, and instead I'm going to focus on the snacks!

So, what snacks should you have?  The key is having a variety of snacks, and I'd recommend ones that are sweet or salty, and not too sticky.  Anything that requires the use of cutlery is out.

Here's my top eight snacks, in reverse order:

8th : Chocolate - chocolate is great, but be warned, if you delay eating it, it melts in your hands and is not nice.  And too much will just give you a sugar rush.  Ration your chocolate if you're in for the long haul.

7th : Carrot sticks - bit of a bizarre one, but if you're on a health kick, carrot sticks are probably one of the best snacks you can get.  Quick to make, reasonably tasty (maybe with a dip) and healthier than anything else on this list!

6th : Pizza - now, I love pizza, but it's just a little bit stickier than other snacks, earning it a lowly sixth place.  Nevertheless, pizza is still good, and might even be slightly healthy if you load it up with veggies.

5th : Biscuits aka cookies - not as sugary as chocolate, you can plough through biscuits for longer before sugar rush becomes a problem.

4th : Chips/fries - American fries are a great idea, with some salt.  British chips are great too, thicker and make sure they're liberally doused with vinegar as well as salt.  Or get some chip spice!

3rd : Pretzels - slightly controversial, I'm not a huge fan of pretzels, but I don't know why, and for the Superbowl they tick all the boxes.  Dry, crunchy, salty, tasty!

2nd : Popcorn - popcorn, especially when still warm, and ideally a mix of sweet and savory popcorn is just awesome.

And finally...

1st: Crisps aka chips - Crisps are the winner for me, simply because they come in so many different flavours. Salted, cheese, meaty, prawn cocktail... the list goes on, and the types too, puffed corn, potato chips with ridges in, baked crisps.... you can get a huge variety of crisps, in a massive bowl, and just plough away at them!

Enjoy your snacks and go sports!

Not really sure what this picture has to do with Sunday, but I searched for Sunday in my favourite picture website and this came up...

Pizza

So, with all the exciting events occurring in the world at the moment, let's focus on one of them.

Yes, apparently today is Pizza With The Works Except Anchovies Day (really) - I'm a big fan of pizza, it's a wonderful invention, a sort of hot open sandwich .  In a way, it's just a sort of cheese on toast (open grilled cheese sandwich for Americans) with extras, isn't it? Yet it tastes totally different to cheese on toast - and I do love cheese on toast also, in fact it's a source of disappointment to me that the grill in our oven doesn't work at the moment, so the only way of doing cheese on toast is to toast the bread, arrange the cheese upon the toast, and then microwave it, which just seems a bit wrong.

When ordering pizza I generally go for some sort of meat feast, although if I am going to Domino's it's more likely to be a Texas BBQ, and ideally I like a thin crust pizza, not deep pan.  Sometimes I do try the "Chef's special" which is basically everything except anchovies, I don't really know what an anchovy is to be quite honest, I'm very inexperienced when it comes to fish - I like haddock, cod, and pollock when fried in batter and served with chips, I've discovered that I like tuna, perhaps with melted cheese in a sandwich or on pasta, or mixed with mayonnaise and on top of a jacket potato, but apart from these types I have very little experience of fish.  Swordfish I tried once and it was very nice, but whenever I'm shopping, spot the fish counter, and think "hey, swordfish is okay" I then see the price and realise that actually I ought to work on clearing the mortgage rather than having to apply for a new credit card to pay for the swimming thing.

I have had tuna on pizza, and it was actually okay, but it did still seem a bit strange to me, I felt uncomfortable eating it, in a similar way to how you might feel uncomfortable changing seats on the third or fourth day of a week-long training course - theoretically you can certainly do it, and there's nothing necessarily wrong in doing it, but you wouldn't.  Social norms, and all that.

What's your favourite pizza toppings?

I'm delighted to say that the Robin Hood's Bay roadtrip is coming up very soon (Monday, in fact), so tomorrow I'll be packing!  I did a quick update video this morning, talking about beers and our planned itinerary, I must thank all of our supporters:

Diane Lynn of www.thegratitudeletters.com - The Gratitude Letters is a great blog which makes you stop and think for a moment about all those things in life that we should be grateful for.  I find it very beneficial, I'm a nightmare for rushing from one thing to another without allowing enough time to contemplate.  Do check out her blog.

Denkai Designs - my wife kindly supported us, I presume so that we'd not run out of money and have to come home early!  She's a flosstube YouTuber (she videos about cross stitch) so do check her stuff out, she's annoyingly good on camera.

Also thanks to deano_1 and cinders1980 who also both kindly supported us!

Sadly, the sponsor t-shirts that we were planning to wear I just can't make happen, I'd love for them to but it would just take too much out of the contributions to do.  Nevertheless we'll be recording videos while we're away and I'll be blogging and videoing when we get back (internet access in Robin Hood's Bay isn't the best, plus I don't have a laptop to take anyway) which I hope will be good fun for everyone!

No Toast

My wife has just put our son to bed, and had the below conversation.  For information, we used up the last of the bread earlier for sandwiches, but (apparently unknown to him) I went to the garage and bought a loaf.

Son: We've got no toast.
My Wife: Yes, there's toast, daddy bought some bread
Son: But there's no toast tomorrow.
My Wife: Yes, we have bread, you put it in the toaster and you make toast.
Son: But there's no toast tomorrow.
My Wife: Yes, daddy bought bread.
Son (sadly): There's no toast Monday. No toast on Tuesday-
My Wife: Yes there is darling! Daddy. Bought. Bread.

I'm kinda excited to see what happens tomorrow when I try to make him some toast for breakfast while he insists that we can't have any.

Here is the bread.  It exists.

Not that I care - it's Fathers Day, I got candy pizza :)

All the calories of real pizza, but without those nasty vitamins.

And to celebrate Fathers Day, I made a video of dad jokes - and if you think these are bad, you should have seen the ones that I didn't include :)