FRIDAYS

It's been over a year since I stopped working on Fridays. It was a choice that I thought about for a while, a choice that I know I'm lucky to have been able to make, and a choice that has turned out to be one of the best I've ever made about work.

There are the Fridays when I stay in bed late, catch up on TV, only leaving the house to pop to the supermarket. And then there are the Fridays when I go out in the morning to a yoga class or for a swim, do some sewing, clean the flat, make bread, fill my day with things that make me feel productive. But most, like today, are somewhere in between. Today I popped out in the morning, had a long chat to my Mum once I was back in the flat, went to the supermarket, came home and baked a raspberry yoghurt cake.

And now, now the cake is cooling, I'm waiting for Chris to get home, and there's pizza dough resting in a bowl because, as it turns out, there is almost always pizza dough on a Friday.

I make a half batch of the recipe from Jamie's Italy that I've been faithful to for years and then freeze half of the dough for the following week. I used to form two roundish pizzas on baking parchment, pulling the whole thing onto an oven shelf. Now I make a single, roughly baking tray sized, one. The tray goes into the oven as it heats up, the pizza is shaped on parchment, then the whole thing pulled onto the tray while I try to avoid my hand brushing the scorchingly hot metal. It works well, sometimes even better with the frozen dough, and is just the right amount of pizza for two.