Scotty, beam me up ... frustration or pizza

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of ... To boldly go where no man has gone before ... (Just play the video in the background to get the proper atmosphere!)

... well, not quite. How about the following?

Food: The final frontier. These are the voyages of Cooking Around the World ... To boldly cook what no one has cooked before.

Facing the facts, though, it can be quite challenging to cook something that no one has cooked before. A lot of people are cooking a lot of wonderful things around the world and many a thing has be done before ... mainly.

No worries, though! I didn't really plan to do anything like that. In fact, very often I just prepare things I have done before (and others of course). Maybe there is just a slight change of amounts or ingredients or something else.

Well, that line of thought is not getting to far.

It was time for pizza again. The main things were ready to go. I wanted to have half semolina and half strong baking flour for the dough amounting to 500 g of flour combined with 300 ml of water and 7 g of dried yeast, a bit of olive oil, sugar and salt.

OK, clear this up a bit. The flour goes into a bowl with a pinch of salt. The 300 ml of water get the dried yeast, oil and sugar. So far so good. Well, I didn't have 250 g of semolina left. No worries, just take a bit more of the other flour. Salt, and ready!

Now pour the water with the yeast to the flour and ... have a real wet dough, nearly swimming. What's wrong? I always use 300 ml of warm water. Hm, mixed it up and filled water until the 300 marker for flour ... so it must have been about 600 ml of water. A bit confused today, aren't we?

So, simply add flour until the dough gets fine ... yes, and well, some more yeast. Fine, we saved that, time for the dough to rise and to get the thoughts on the sauce for the pizza.

We start off with frying some sliced garlic in olive oil and throw in some basil leaves later. Then only a 400 ml tin of tomatoes and some extra water, bring to the boil and then simmer for some time.

Why not use the time for a change and bring down some rubbish. Said and done. Oh, let's get a new bag for rubbish. There we have a new roll of bags. Get one. Hm, strange, the bag has to openings ... useless! What about the next? Two openings! The next? Two openings ... all of them. Great!

Oh, what is that over there? Why is it that the door of the freezer is slightly open? Oh, oh! That was not on purpose. Let's think ... it must be like that for three days now. Have a closer look. It seems like the meat must be defrosted ... for some time now ... and all the other things. To cut things at least a bit shorter ... most of it for the bin and mopping up some water and cleaning up the freezer.

I decided only three small chocolate cakes could be saved and the thing I had put in three days ago ... (oh, that's how it happened ...). Scotty, beam me up! It gets to frustrating down here! So after working some time on that ... yes, the tomato sauce was still going and reducing itself towards nothingness or worse. Save! Turn it off and remove it from the heat.

Take a few breaths. We just wanted to have some pizza. So let's get on with it. The dough had enough time. Roll it out and top it with some lovely things. We have here this sauce ... kind of. We put some slices of chorizo and mozzarella on it. There on the windowsill are also these nice chillies. Some already have turned red. Get some of those. Taste check! Hm, just taste like normal peppers, not really hot. Put them on anyway. By the way, the sauce couldn't be finished properly and so I discovered, before it was too late, that it could need some seasoning. Done!

Finish the pizza with some olive oil and dried oregano and bake it at highest heat possible for 15 minutes. At least that worked with no further incidents. 

Now there is some dough left (the water and flour thing). What do we do with it? Do some bread. 

As we see it, life is not always smooth sailing. However, it's not the cards you get that matters, but how you manage to play with them. Well, I managed to write that up here ... somehow. I only hope there are no further surprises for me in the coming days ... Well, then: "May you live long and prosper!"