HOT DOG ROLLS AND PIZZA FAILS

For a blog about feeding your family this post is actually more about failing to feed your family. I love cooking. I love the smells, the touches, the tastes, the ingredients, the alchemy, and the whole process of cooking.  But there are times when I don’t want to cook. Occasions when the art of rustling up a fresh, healthy, made-from-scratch dinner defeats me. Usually this occurs on a Wednesday evening but this time it happened on a Monday, which is a very bad sign. In my defence, we were squeezed with deadlines, Duke of Edinburgh meetings, homework, GCSE revision, late trains, fast day diet for the adults and a Mother Hubbard effect in the cupboard, fridge and freezer. So the kids were given convenience food. Junk food as it may also be known to the judgemental. Pizza and hot dogs. Oven Chips. On the plus side the hot dogs were quorn, which at least doesn’t contain any bits of animal, or indeed any animal that you may wish to avoid consuming. In any case, both the vegetarian child and the non-vegetarian child prefer quorn frankfurters to the real deal. But my guilt was not letting up. I decided to make the hot dog rolls and the pizza myself.  It was a toss up between that or making chips but I can’t stand peeling spuds and am terrified of a chip pan full of hot fat.

My daughter did not want me to make the pizza. She begged me to order her favourite take-away. I said “No, far too expensive, besides I love making dough and if I ordered in, this meal would lacking in evidence of my maternal love for my offspring.” She muttered a response along the lines of “Who cares?”  

At 3pm I unplug myself from the laptop and start to make my hot dog rolls. Well, Dan Lepard’s rolls to be exact, they are found in his brilliant baking book, Short and Sweet, and involve his technique of kneading in 10 minutes intervals for shorter periods. It is a foolproof bread making technique. I do love kneading but there are days when you feel like standing in the kitchen in the same spot pummelling dough for an eternity and there are days when you don’t. Today was one of definitely the later. I have to admit that my shaping of the rolls left a lot to be desired. To call them finger shaped would be wrong. Still they were fine for sticking a frankfurter in and topping with ketchup.

The pizza though was not so successful. A work phone call took up more time than expected.  I didn’t start on the dough process until really too late and you can’t rush the rising of dough. So it left me with little time to cook the thing. In order for my son to eat before he went off to D of E, I did manage to get roundish pizza bases in the oven but the tomato passata, oregano and mozzarella slices got too short a blast. The kids complained the passato was too runny and the mozzarella was too rubbery. I didn’t take a picture, as you didn’t need to see the unappetizing result of anaemic cheesy blobs amidst a thin passata, which was trying to run from the indignity of the misshapen undercooked dough it had been placed on. I could see, reflected in my daughter’s eyes, the logo of the local pizza take-away.

On a plus, the hot dog rolls were a hit. Well, I say a hit but nobody said anything about them at all. If there’s not a complaint or crumb left I take this as a compliment. As it was a fast day for the adults of the house we ate a salad with a meagre amount of the left over mozzarella and eyed the finger rolls lecherously. Nothing like fresh bread, even if it’s a funny shape, to test your mettle, when it comes to dieting. We both knew it would be a race to the bread bin in the morning.