Pizza!

Saturday, May 17, 2008 Liyana Hanim 0 Comments

The first season of Gossip Girl has ended and I will blog about my opinion on the whole season in general and the huge difference about the series and the book later in the week because I haven't watch the finale yet.Can't wait!

I have been keeping myself occupied with cooking and reading and driving my mum to places for errands .Am halfway through the book The Bean Trees.I baked pizzas for the family a few days ago and here I include a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert's book 'Eat Pray Love', on the best pizza in the world.The book is about Elizabeth's journey to Italy,India and Indonesia.And I bought it a few months ago because I love buying any books about a person's travel to Italy.I have a whole collection of Frances Mayes books--she's an American who bought a house in Tuscan and her books is about her discovering Italy and it's charm.Although 2 of her books that I have are not just about Italy,for instance the book 'A Year in the World' is about her traveling to Scotland,Fez and many more great places and the book 'Swan' is her first fiction.Okay..I am totally getting sidetracked here,so down below is an excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert's book that I have typed for your reading pleasure.. ; )

'......before I left Rome he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try,because,Giovanni informed me,it sold the best pizza in Naples.I found this a wildly exciting prospect,given that best pizza in Italy is from Naples,and the best pizza in the world is from Italy,which means that this pizzeria must offer....I'm almost too superstitious to say it..the best pizza in the world?Giovanni passed along the name of the place which such seriousness and intensity,I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society.He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said,in gravest confidence, "Please go to this pizzeria.Order the margherita pizza with double mozarella .If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples,please lie to me later and tell me that you did."

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele,and these pies we have just ordered----one for each of us--are making us lose our minds.I love my pizza so much,in fact,that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me,in return.I am having a relationship with this pizza,almost an affair.Meanwhile,Sofie is practically in tears over hers,she's having a metaphysical crisis about it,she's begging me,"Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm?Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?" Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one non-stop oven.It's about fifteen minutes walk from the train station in the rain,don't even worry about it,just go.You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of dough,which will break your heart.

By 1.oo PM,the streets outside the pizzeria have become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get space on a lifeboat.There's not a menu.They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese.None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle.The dough,it takes me half my meal to figure out ,tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried.It's soft and chewy and yielding,but incredibly thin.I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy,ot thick and doughy.How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy?Holy of holies!Thin,doughy,strong,gummy,yummy,chewy,salty pizza paradise.On top,there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the whole pizza with herbal radiance,much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact of high of glamour to everyone around her.It's technically impossible to eat this thing,of course.You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds,and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide,makes a mess of you and your surroundings,but just deal with it.'

Yup people..we in Malaysia have been fooled by pizzas by the likes of Pizza Hut, Shakeys & Domino's...
So I tried to replicate the pizza that Elizabeth had in Naples...but my pizzas although they are thin and doughy..the edge of it were crispy and they were only doughy towards the middle.And thanks to my mum who has her own herb garden..I manage to have fresh basil on my pizza too...But oh..wouldn't it be great if I could fly straight to Naples and eat at Pizzeria da Michele???sigh....