Pizza...with Attitude

Recipe: New Year's Day Pizza

This needs you to be one of: brave; stupid; hungover; still drunk. Perfect for new year's day. I'll say I was brave. Others around here will tell you I was stupid.

For the pizza base:

• Strong white or 0-0 grade flour
• Salt
• Yeast
• Sugar
• Lukewarm water

Unless your new year's resolution was to be:

• anal
• more anal
• even more anal
• pedantic...etc...

Don't bother weighing anything. Just more stuff to clean up. Bung what looks like enough flour into a bowl. The volume of flour will be about half that of the risen dough. Add a pinch of salt. Guess how much water the flour will need. Hot tap is fine. Add a teaspoon or pinch of sugar and some yeast and let it stand until it's frothy (man) (no, you won't remember, Google “Cresta Ad” - it's a big bear and fizzy pop thing). Chuck the liquid into the flour. Tip: too runny's fine, just keep dusting with flour and kneading until it's smooth and elastic (easier to recognise than to describe) and leave it somewhere to double in size.

Toppings:

• Squished up tinned toms, the posher the better but, really, we're not in Heston's lab with the litmus paper, are we?
• Leftover cheese. Mine was blue stilton. I overdid it, slightly.
• Mushrooms (because we had some – my cunning plan is to not go shopping for food until at least Valentine's Day).
• Six anchovies (look in the deepest darkest corners of the fridge. If there's not a little plastic box with anchovies in it, you're defying the laws of physics and living in some strange parallel continuum. Don't soak them in milk or any of that old rubbish. They give a good salt and fish kick. If you don't want so much, just use less. Or omit them, if you're fussy.
• Six green chillies. Don't remove the seeds, see anchovies, above.

Bung on the toms, the cheese and the mushrooms, then criss-cross with halved chillies and anchovies.

Cook in a pre-heated (to the max) oven (at the max) for about five minutes.

I ate mine with gallons of fizzy water, the Ukrainian guys previewing the Arsenal game on the pc, and The Black Keys on the stereo.

Brave, I'm sticking to brave.

Watching the Arsenal in Ukrainian

Among the best of 2013 has been the computer football streams. A couple of years ago, you needed to be some sort of MIT-level hacker with the patience of a saint to find a grainy, stop-go, rubbish stream that struggled if you expanded it over postage-stamp size.

Now, if I'm not watching every game in near HD TV quality, hitchless, buffering-free quality, I'm gutted. Three mouse clicks, and there it is. The foreign-language streams can be better, because without the commentary tip-offs, you're forced to concentrate and watch every minute of the game. That's the idea, after all.

Just as I was thinking about swapping country of stream origin to change our luck, the best player that ever lived scored, and then Feo made sure.

At one-nil, I risked parking the laptop on the worktop, and preparing BLISS' pizza, an altogether more mild-mannered affair.

Happy New Year!