Hard News: Food and drink
417 Responses
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Personally, I think food tastes much better if I cook it over natural gas I've prepared myself.
I think I'll have to take your word for that.
I've been accused by family and acquaintances of being a producer of great volume (in both senses), but I cant imagine making enough flatulence to cook with?
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Kong,
Proposal for entertainment at next PAS gathering: put Giovanni in a room and force him to watch as someone prepares a Genuine Kiwi Pizza c.1980.
Can't say I was much impressed by what was passed off as pizza in Rome. Perhaps that really is the genuine thing, but how proud can you really get about inventing toast with tomato sauce on it?
Gimme one with some decent fillings, and yes that can actually include pineapple. If I'm not allowed to call it pizza, my tongue won't feel the loss.
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Perhaps that really is the genuine thing, but how proud can you really get about inventing toast with tomato sauce on it?
Permission to treat this witness as hostile, your honour.
Really, I don't know where you ate pizza in Rome, although I will say that in this one place in Florence I ate a pizza that was probably inferior to Pizza Hut's, but you'd be the first person I've ever come across that comes back from Italy and reckons 'our pizza is better'. Nothing wrong with that, of course, to each their own etc.
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As for the "toast with tomato sauce on it" rejoinder, I will refer you to Manuel Vazquez Montalban chapter in Immoral Recipes on the subject of tomatoes on bread, unquestionably the food of the gods.
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Montalban's, naturally.
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Kong,
I'm not the first person I've met who thinks the pizzas in Italy weren't all they're cracked up to be.
My pizza was bought from a number of different vendors. Some served nice pizza, all the standard Italian styles that form a small corner of the menu of any pizzeria in NZ. But quite a lot had a big sign saying pizza, but served some lightly toasted bread with a smear of tomato sauce on it. There were quite a lot of locals eating the stuff so I was pretty sure it wasn't just a tourist trap. It tasted OK, quite nice even. But it was tomato sauce on toast, nothing more or less. I was with a foodie girl at the time who went nuts over the amazing authenticity of the stuff, and I just scratched my head and figured I had discovered proof that authentic could certainly be improved upon.
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But it was tomato sauce on toast, nothing more or less.
And again I refer you on tomato on bread. Made well, it's sublime. You have every right not to like it, but it's not any less delicious for being so simple. In fact, most Italian dishes are very easy to prepare. Two of my favouritest: pizza marinara (garlic, tomato, basel) and spaghetti ajo-ojo (oil, garlic and red pepper). If I was ever told I would be allowed to eat only two dishes for the rest of my life, I'd probably pick those.
(In this scenario, I'm not doing a lot of kissing obviously. A desert island type situation.)
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The best pizza I've ever eaten was in Chicago (thin crust) and New York...I didnt (and dont) like ANZ pizza-chain versions (I can make way better myself) but - there I was, with a highpowered wee group of 3 writers & an actress, traipsing round USA cities is association with Te Maori...Chicago I loved for it's jazz & poetry clubs (o yes! Still going, way back then! Probably still are now!) and for the perfect- to my taste- thin-crust pizza: for me, it was just the tomato sauce & plenty of herbs, and mozarella. And I discovered something v. similar in New York (tho' the pastry wasnt quite as crisp on the bottom)....ahhhhhhhh
Kia te roko na, Giovanni! I've never been to Italy!
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Oh, Giovanni, aren't they all philistines? Having said that, I do like a bit of pineapple on me pizza.
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I like pesto on mine.
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"Pizza hawaiana" (with pineapples) - supposedly introduced by American soldiers stationed in Naples - is pretty standard fare back home.
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My son and his friend have a ritual way to make their pizzas. Giovanni, sorry about the lack of culinary sophistication, but it is about autistic independence. It is all spread out on the bench and they assemble their own from bases (organic from the Kapiti coast are the best commercially available), and whatever pizza (or pasta) sauce we have, crushed pineapple, and ham, frankfurters, salami, cherry tomatoes, grated cheese, black pepper and oregano. Cooking and slicing and eating is all part of the process.
It may sound trivial but making pizzas is a significant part of their relationship. (Yes, he has said I can tell you this)
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Hilary, that sounds great - creating food together is something everyone should get a chance to experience.
Did you spot the pretty well-informed Herald editorial today taking the gummint to task for chopping the extra physical therapy funding, and making clear why ORRS is not going to make up for that?
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Good tomato sauce & pesto on a pizza? Sounds really good!
Hilary, what your son & mate cook up sounds a huge feast (ur, for omnivores?)
And - note yet again- the Nats are making petty-but-painful 'adjustments' - that will cost & impact hugely on the people the programmes were meant to benefit.I didnt vote for the bastards.
Those who did- or didnt vote at all - and have any family member hurt by the vurrent government's actions - you deserve it mates- -
Giovanni, sorry about the lack of culinary sophistication, but it is about autistic independence. It is all spread out on the bench and they assemble their own from bases (organic from the Kapiti coast are the best commercially available), and whatever pizza (or pasta) sauce we have, crushed pineapple, and ham, frankfurters, salami, cherry tomatoes, grated cheese, black pepper and oregano. Cooking and slicing and eating is all part of the process.
Sounds terrific. Lucia loves to help me with pizza and bread also - esp. the messy part with the sludgey yeast mixture and mixing the dough.
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Authenticity in food is all well and good, but there's a lot of fun to be had with one culture's reinterpretation of another's food. Plenty of good dishes are the result of a subtle (or drastic) modification of a traditional food to reflect availability of different ingredients in a new country, or the desire for the locals to have something with a bit more gravy. From pizza hawaiana to lemon chicken, chicken tikka massala in the UK to karee raisu in Japan, and apocryphally including the humble flat white, the results can be startling and worthwhile. Oftentimes the result is something that a member of the originating culture wouldn't recognise (or, indeed, eat if you paid them), but them's the breaks.
I ate a Japanese interpretation of a meat pie once. Interesting, but not an experiment I'd repeat. But green tea icecream, now...
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I ate Italian cuisine cooked by a Japanese chef once - precise and awesome.
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At the cost of sounding like even more of a broken record than usual, I've got nothing against reinvention and reinterpretation - after all that's exactly how Italy got the cuisine it did. I don't think you could call the Pizza Hut fare or the food in a minute cannelloni reinvention, though, nor the Kapiti parmesan and brie and camembert. That's just making an inferior product by design, and banking on the name recognition of the real thing. Misappropriation, in other words.
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The word "hut" should be a clue.
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Sacha, thanks for that Herald link. Like everything else in special ed (I prefer to call it inclusive education in the hope that it will become so) it is complicated but of course ORRS and therapies are quite different and not an either/ or.
Giovanni, maybe I need to apologise for not actually encouraging those young men to make the pizza dough and cook up fresh tomatoes for the sauce. My son's father used to do that. He was a AFS scholar in Turin and he came back from Italy with the first pasta maker and parmesan cheese grater we had seen.
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I prefer not to use the "S" word myself - unless we're talking about food, o course.
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Giovanni, maybe I need to apologise for not actually encouraging those young men to make the pizza dough and cook up fresh tomatoes for the sauce.
Oh dear no. Why do I always manage to come across as such a killjoy? I guess where I'm coming from is that so long as you're not selling anybody a genuine experience that isn't, it's all good. I also happen to be a great believer in tinned tomatoes as opposed to fresh, for pizza, but that's very much by the by.
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Not you, Giovanni, just mother guilt in general, for not doing that quality cooking parental thing.
After all, I spent a lot of time cooking with my own mother. We two almost vegetarians used to:
-Cook an enormous animal tongue which I would then peel and we would set in jelly
-Peel the membrane off kidneys and chop up the kidneys and steak. roll out pastry and put the china elephant in the middle of the pie dish to release the steam
-Cook up the bowl of white slimy brains in the fridge as a treat for my father
-Mince meat up in the hand-powered metal mincer (making Xmas fruit mince with tart homegrown gooseberries was even more fun - followed by making the pies)
-In summer go to the market in Tory St for boxes of Golden Queens for days of bottling. -
Mince meat up in the hand-powered metal mincer
I used to love doing that. Although helping my grandfather bottle the Lambrusco was by far my favourite thing.
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Pizza is pretty much like a cheap tart these days, it is whatever you want it to be.
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