Mystic pizza

I’m all for slow food. I was brought up on slow food. I love the slow food my buddy Sharon Lee makes. But my love for slow food is in direct contrast to my need-it-now, kan cheong nature.  So it is that very often I pay exorbitant prices for ordinary things. I’d go to a buffet for its carvery counter so that I can eat five slices of lamb when my wholesale frozen store sells a 1.8 kg frozen lamb shoulder for under RM25 which can feed a dinner party of five.

My justification for the expenditure is that someone needs to do the work, and that someone deserves to be paid for what I choose not to do. Hence, I am sometimes spotted eating a RM35 plate of pasta because I can’t be bothered to wait till a bubbling pot of salted water delivers up al dente spaghetti. 

While on our ice cream run on Sunday, Kit voiced an intention to make pizza. He’s not made it since we moved from the Taman Tun studio, but I remembered them with appreciation. I also remembered it was a near whole day process. 

But since he was dead keen, and since Lisa, Vin and Jessie whooped at the thought of a three cheese pizza, we loaded up on two kinds of salami and three cheeses along with the Sunnyside Farms ice cream. 

I thought my grocery bill was a little extravagant – about RM130 for all the groceries including the pizza stuff, but when the pizza started rolling out, I was amazed. After everything was done, I still had a small bowl each of mozzarella and orange cheddar and half a small pack of parmesan. Plus one whole pizza uneaten! 

In total, the pizza dough recipe adapted from Jamie Oliver’s My Italy cookbook yielded five large pizzas. Kit had eaten nearly all of the first one ‘in order to gauge if anything was lacking’, and we served three, of which there was one lonely slice left over. And then there was a full, whole one. 

This is the one uneaten pizza. It looks a little sorry after being passed over, but it is still testimony to the value-for-money pizza exercise.

The dough took close to a kilo of flour, but we use good old Kunci Emas flour which is less than RM2 a packet. The recipe also called for semolina, of which we used half a can. The other half can be pressed into service for a sugee cake.A packet of yeast costs about 50 sen. 

I plundered my larder for a can of mushrooms, pressed two tired yellow capsicums into service and with the two varieties of salami and three cheeses, we fed six under RM100. No way would we have this small a bill for the same party at Pizza Hut. 

I wish I can now say that I am now a converted, flag-waving proponent of home cooking, but alas, the most I will do is pay for the groceries. Someone will still have to do the work. But if that someone is a rather cheap to maintain husband, hey, I’m all for slow cooking!