Gratitude and Keto Pizza: An Ordinary Wednesday Joy

An Otherwise Ordinary Wednesday

#smilingontheinside – Wednesday 16 July 2025

We’ve had our pizza oven for a few months now and have turned out pizzas with varying levels of success. The best ones have been when we’ve made our own dough. We’ve also bought “designer” pizzas ready-to-go from the supermarket and although good time-wise (ie, fast), the cooked results have been a bit meh!

Keto Pizza Base Experiment

I thought I’d give Farrah’s Keto Pizza Bases a go. I figured the “keto” would mean they wouldn’t sink in our stomachs full of heavy carbs. I quite liked the result. Alan told me he prefers thick bases. A lot more practice is still required, me thinks.

Here’re the before and after pizzas: uncooked and cooked. I would have again. However, I think it’s going to have to be either when Alan’s on an overnight or we have two different bases.

Pizza - Farrah's Keto Pizza Base - pepperoni + pizza cheese + fresh tomatoes

Interestingly, Alan said – apart from the fact he prefers thick bases – it was a bit too spicy for him. That kinda made me #smileontheinside given when he makes cottage pie, he uses about half a jar of HP Sauce! Now that! is spicy! In cottage pie? Meh!

Finding Gratitude in the Ordinary

I don’t have much to journal here today. Yesterday was pretty uneventful. One of those days where I need to look hard to find three things I’m grateful for… appreciative of… Exactly the type of day when journalling is ever-more-important… because I have to look… I have to reframe!

As I sit here writing, reverently drinking my coffee at the same time – I’m grateful for my new little Nespresso machine. What I’m grateful for is not having to go outside and dump my coffee grinds into the garden – especially on wet days. It’s no-mess – I’m very grateful for that. #smilingontheinside #grateful

My Hero’s Problem-Solving Ways

I’m also grateful for My Hero. Because Alan likes his milky ‘frothy coffees’, after we returned from Pauanui a couple of weekends ago, I shouted him a milk frother for the van. It turns out the one I bought doesn’t work the way it’s meant to. I could just see it wasn’t working. But My Hero needed to know why it wasn’t working.

So he did a side-by-side test with the “house” one.

When we make him a coffee, we use setting #3 (chocolate) because it’s the hottest.

In his test, Alan put water into each machine and ran on 1, 2 and 3 settings. The #3 setting on the van frother wasn’t creating the same vortex as the house frother. He swapped out the jugs, bases and little magnet twirly things to make sure that it was the base that wasn’t working, and nothing else.

I would’ve just returned it, saying “it’s broken”. But yesterday, My Hero returned it and showed them how it didn’t work and where the fault was. I’m sure Heathcotes appreciated the insight as it makes their return to Breville easier.

Yes – I’m grateful for Alan’s need to know “how”. #smilingontheinside

Getting Things Done

And finally, my third grateful, is that I finished writing some pretty grunting articles for VJCs website. And I mean grunty – thousands and thousands of words – serious, helpful, information-packed, helpful articles. Not fluffy stuff like some of our competitors write. These have been on my to-do list for a while. But they’re not getting us any Google SEO-love stuck in my head.

They took me ages to write. Fortunately, I’d done most – I thought – of the heavy lifting with the information in my podcasts, which I was repurposing into written articles. However, what I didn’t realise was that it’d take me almost as long to load them to the website and format them into something easy to look at. The CMS on VCJs site isn’t anywhere near as easy to work with as WP, that’s for sure!

However, I’m #smilingontheinside in that I’ve started!