...I sliced my finger on the food processor blade and bled into the dough I have been putting off making for the last 20+ years.

But let me back up a little.

Hannah has known for the last, oh I’d say 5-8 months that she has a personal talk due this week.  Near the beginning of the school year, her class was given personal project tasks along with requirements for each task and completion dates for those tasks.  The first 2 were reports which we she completed both times the night before and both times we she received full marks for and gold awards!  I was very proud of us her, but both times I told her I would never again sit up with her until 11pm the night before a personal task was due because of our her lack of planning.  Now, some would debate that, the fact that Hannah climbed the stairs to bed at 10:30 tonight with Elmer’s glue smudged all over her face and hands from the display we she was making is the fault of her unorganised mother… The mother should have ‘guided’ her more diligently, gently insisted she stick to a better time scale, encouraged her more enthusiastically, but I say, no.  The girl is her mother’s daughter and we both seem to work better under pressure and… we both had fun tonight (all 6 hours of it!!); her researching for her 5 min talk on ‘Visiting Italy’, me throwing ideas out there, her either knocking them back or remoulding them to suit her way of thinking, searching together for the right pictures on google, printing, gluing, me drilling her on public speaking techniques, her hashing and rehashing how she will word it… searching for ways to add humour to keep her audience’s attention, calling Dad in Belgium to ask him to ask his Italian co-worker how to pronounce things properly… yeah, we had fun.

So, Hannah decided her grand finale will be to say… “I hoped you enjoyed my talk today, and now I give you a little slice of Italy!!” Then as she uncovers the (wait for it!!!) HOME-MADE Pizza that we I will get up at 5:30am to bake tomorrow morning… she will say in Italian “would you like some pizza”!!

Which brings me back to the food processor… It was 11:05pm and I realised that to make pizza, I would have to make dough, to make dough, I would have to use yeast, to use yeast, I would have to overcome the inexplicable and irrational intimidation that particular ingredient has always had over me.  I have never used yeast or made anything that calls for it… until tonight.  I searched the world wide cookbook and found what claimed to be an easy pizza dough using a food processor and dry yeast… both items I had.  Apart from one nasty little nick in my finger, all seems to be going well.

As we speak, the dough (well the second batch of dough, due to the first batch being contaminated with my blood) is resting… every surface of my kitchen is covered in flour, sticky doughy amber-paw prints, wads of bloody paper towel, and approximately 4 times the number of bowls, spoons and measuring utensils need to make a little pizza crust.

My finger throbs… and the chicken lives.