The most popular and visited page on this blog is the one about making (or rather, attempting to make) Aloo Paratha, complete with a dodgy recipe. It gets a minimum of ten to twenty hits a day from search engines. So what better way to improve stats than food-blogging. First off: pizza. Now, we all know it’s always best to make them from scratch, so get a bag of flour, add in some of that dried instant yeast for dummies, mix it all up then weigh it out into say 200g batches and vacuum seal them in bags. When you want a pizza, just add some warm water, milk and olive oil, wait a while, knead, roll out (I can’t do that spin it around your head thing, which one needs for maximum show-off effect) then shove on the topping of your choice and stick it in the oven, pre-heated as hot as it’ll go, wait a few minutes and there you go. Perfect. And guests think that your ability to make what is, in fact, glorified cheese on toast means you’re a culinary genius.
Of course, one doesn’t always have all the ingredients to hand and you’re shopping in Lidl and you quickly grab what appears to be a frozen thick-crust “Chicago” pizza, which costs just as much as in proper supermarkets, despite Lidl being a discount (i.e. hellhole) store. So. How To cook a frozen Lidl Pizza , here goes..
- Remove box from freezer and open it
- Discover that instead of buying a deep-pan Chicago pizza, you’ve actually got three very thin pizzas with about 10g of cheese spread between them.
- Remove one of them from its cellophane wrapping and put the other two back in the freezer.
- Read box, see tiny sign that it is indeed a pack of three. And the words “cook from frozen”.
- Contemplate writing letter to the management at Lidl about the meaning of the term “thick crust”.
- Preheat oven to 200°C
- Watch hungrily through the glass oven door for 12 minutes.
- When oven goes beep, open door, burn forearm whilst removing pizza.
- Cut into quarters and serve.
- After waiting a few minutes to cool (and running arm under cold tap), take a bite.
- Throw rest of pizza into bin.
- Consider the other two pizzas in the freezer, chuck them in the bin too.
- Call “Napoli Pizza Delivery”*, wait 15 minutes
- Hand over €7.50. Eat and enjoy.
*”Napoli Pizza Delivery” is not its real name, it is, however, the only place near here that delivers decent pizzas. The owner pretends to be Italian, but isn’t, he’s called Nazeem and he’s from London. Italians do not, as a general rule, pepper their sentences with the word “Innit?” Second give away is the menu/flyer thing; it’s in a mix of comedy German and Italian, but all the standard German pizzas are there: Marinara, Quattro Stagione, Calzone, Murgh.
“Pizza Murgh?” I asked him, when he arrived.
“Yeah, it’s like pizza with bits of spicy chicken on it, innit?”
“I’d guessed that, but it doesn’t sound very ‘Authentic Italian Pizza’, as it quotes on your flyer, does it?”
“Oh, shit, thanks man. I’ll change it for the next batch of flyers. By the way, what is the Italian for chicken?”
So, I got the pleasure of helping someone, receiving the pizza for free on the basis of my help and knowing that in just a few weeks I’ll be able to order a Pizza, er, Gallus. Perhaps it’s a good job that I’m going to be moving soonish anyway.
German Phrase For Today: “Salami, Artischocken, Zwiebeln, Knoblauch” - Toppings for a Pizza Haaf, apparently.
Song playing as this was published: Belle and Sebastian - “Beautiful”
POLLO!!!!
I’m a Brit living in, er, England…but it was great to visit your blog, I particulalry enjoyed the ‘10 grams of cheese’ comment with regard to the pizzas!
God Bless!
“By the way, what’s the Italian for chicken?”
Ha! This post made me spit tea all over my keyboard.
Those 3-pack pizzas are awful and should only be eaten in a dire emergency.
All I can say about three-pack pizzas is that it doesn’t matter whether they’re from Lidl, Aldi or any other supermarket - they’re always horrible. Similarly, frozen pizza with either ham or tuna always seems horrible, no matter the brand, price or quality.
Making fresh pizza yourself is good, unless you manage to burn it heavily like me and my girlfriend did last time we tried. But that was mostly down to not paying much attention to the pizza because we were, er, busy…
liseuse: Yes, I know and I’ve tried to tell him, but that’s what the next leaflet will say. He’ll just have to pretend that it’s very, very old “authentic Italian pizza”. And I did at first say Gallus gallus, it was the science part of my brain working….
UkOk: Thanks for stopping by, although I maybe overexaggerating that there was actually 10g of cheese, it was probably less.
Christina: It WAS a dire emergency, it was the Sunday before re-unifaction Monday. I don’t shop at Lidl for fun you know (yes I know you like the landmark-shaped maize snacks). But it was the last place open and, oh, anyway.
Stefan: “Busy”? Was that smutty innuendo? We don’t do that at this blog, thank you very much…. BTW I’ve linked you as Tübingen to Leeds - A Student’s Life in the expat section. Can you come up with anything snappier, but that’s still “you”? Hmm. Sentences such as that last one make me wonder if I hang around marketing people too much.
Snappier? That’s a hard one, especially as I don’t want to end up with the completely overused, far too predictable (and not all that fitting) ‘Lost in Leeds’… Seeing how you’re the one who hangs around marketing people, feel free to come up with something yourself.
murgh is urdu for chicken, so pizza murgh is actually a desi version of chicken pizza.