Friday night is pizza night in my house.

I don’t really know how it started, but it’s been that way for several years now. Almost every single Friday at about 6 p.m., I make some dough and set it aside to rise, throw together one of two types of tomato sauce, put my pizza stone in the oven and start preheating the oven pretty much as hot as it will go. I pre-cook any toppings that need pre-cooking (roast veggies, sausage), oil my pizza pan and sprinkle it with cornmeal, chop some extra garlic, maybe grate some cheese. When Jeremy gets home from work, I stretch the dough into a round, brush it with oil, and pre-bake the base a bit before covering it with sauce, toppings, and cheese, and then cooking the pizza for real, along with any excess dough which I turn into dough balls for dipping in olive oil.

I always make two different toppings for my pizza, so one half is topped with one set of ingredients and the other half is topped with something different (variety being the spice of life and all that). I don’t need my dinner list to tell me that the most common pizza by far in my house is the pizza Napoli (anchovy, caper, black olive), followed closely by ham and mushroom or ham/salami and artichoke.

In the summer, I also make pizza Margherita a lot (tomato sauce, mozzarella, fresh basil) as well as pizza topped with Parma ham, arugula and shaved parmesan. For these lighter pizzas, I’ve taken to making a sauce of fresh tomatoes roasted with garlic, fennel seeds and lots of olive oil; for heavier pizzas, I make my default stovetop sauce of tinned tomatoes, garlic, onion and oregano.

I’ve made 34 pizzas in the past year and a half. I’ve used 10 different kinds of cheese (buffalo mozzarella, cow’s milk mozzarella, parmesan, goat’s cheese, Sussex slipcote sheep’s cheese, feta, Taleggio, Gorgonzola, cheddar, and smoked Irish cheese), about the same number of meats and fish (chorizo, chicken, sausage, smoked ham, roast ham, Parma ham, various types of salami, anchovies, tuna, sardines, shrimp), and an array of vegetables (mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, spinach, onions, and, most recently, chard, which was delicious).

I am by no means a traditionalist when it comes to topping pizza—for a long time, my favorite topping was pesto, fresh tomatoes, and feta cheese—but there are two things you will never, ever find on my pizza, namely, corn and broccoli (it’s not that I don’t like corn or broccoli, I just think they have no place on a pizza). Other than that, pretty much anything goes, from spinach alfredo to chicken parmigiana.

It’s not just the pizza itself that makes Fridays fun, it’s the ritual of ensconcing myself in the kitchen and filling the house with the comforting aroma of warm dough and simmering tomato sauce, and then sitting down with Jeremy and enjoying the fruits of my labors with a hearty red wine and a dose of Mark Kermode. And then the weekend can begin.