The brother who speaks my language

It doesn’t matter how many months - or, lately, years - it’s been since I’ve seen my older brother Gordon, we always greet each other the same way.

One of us will say, “Hi, how the fuck are ya?”

The other will say, “fucking great, man” and we’ll give each other a bear hug.

Then we’ll step back and the next thing one of us will say is Well. That was never five minutes just now.

Anyone witnessing this or any other exchange between the two of us could be excused for thinking we’re more than just a little bit daft, because if each of us has his own particular set of quirks and foibles, stir Gordon and me together for a while and a whole lifetime of slang, sayings, even our own rhythm and cadence kicks in, and nobody else really gets it.

One of the main things we get into is adding the suffix -age onto everything. Length, for example, becomes footage. So to ask, “how far is it to…” we would ask, what’s the footage to get to….

It can sometimes get to ridiculous extremes. Damn, I’m hungry. I need some foodage, and maybe some drinkage too, at which point we silently call a truceage and cut out the crappage before we drive each other around the bendage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of it stems from late-1960s to mid-70s pop culture and television, which coincides from the time Dad bought our first TV ’til Gordon left home to go to university.

If someone’s having trouble opening something, we’ll say really fast just jiggle it a little, it’ll open. Try it. Justjiggleitalittleit’llopen. It’s from an episode of I Love Lucy.

Greetings can also be Hey Goob or Hey Goobah, which comes from Gomer Pyle, USMC. From goober we get goobernatorial, a play on the real word gubernatorial, which as Canadians we always found should refer to something stupid anyway. How goobernatorial is that?

If we’re playing a game and it’s the other’s move, we’ll say itchy goom, something our Dad mis-heard when we were telling him we were watching the TV game show It’s Your Move.

Have some crispy french fries, cousin Cesspool is a set phrase we throw in when offering any type of food to the other. It comes from a misunderstood TV commercial for Crisco Oil.

If we see or hear something stupid, idiotic or just a little weird, one of us will say eww, ginchy. Ginch is a derivation of that classic Canadian slang term for underwear gaunch.

To ask the time we’ll say time diddehhh? - drawing out the second syllable for some reason. We can also ask the time in French, but instead of the simple Quelle heure est-il? we’ll say Quelle heure est-il maintenant ou pas? adding the nonsensical now or not? at the end.

We also invert many things so that they sound French, but aren’t. A CD player will be a player de CD, a paper bag a bag de paper, a hockey stick a stick de hockey and so on.

To say excuse me we say Scoozay-mwah, see-voo-play, that is all my French to-day.

To offer milk to the other we say Would you like some Millek with your Fillem? I was the one who introduced that, because I had a teacher in Grades 6 and 7 who used to prononce film as the two-syllable affectation fill-em.

A helicopter is not a helicopter, it’s a hobbidy-cobbidy, a knife is not a knife, it’s a kaniffy, McDonald’s isn’t McDonalds it’s Flap-doodles but the latter is more Gord’s and I just adopted it.

If you noticed the Monty Python reference in That was never five minutes just now, that’s just scratching the surface. We both know the entire repertoire inside-out, dragging up snippets of skits and sometimes whole monologues to fit various situations. If death comes up on the panel the high point of the Dead Parrot sketch will be played out, if one of us says Could be the other will say, Could be, could be taken on a holiday, and any reference to Christian religious ritual one of us will start reciting the monologue of how the Lord sent an Angel to comfort Victor for the weekend, and entered they together, the jacuzzi.

Here endeth the lesson.

Well, not quite. Because if all this stuff and nonsense has you thinking we do it because we have nothing at all to talk about and it’s just filling dead air, that’s not it. We know how much is too much, had tons to discuss and argue over and contemplate and laugh about, and had been doing for an entire week despite my being ill for half of it, before he left yesterday for London and then home.

Dammit Gord, great funnage. Sorry I was such a wreckage when you got here. See you this fallage.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

99 + 1 too many things about me

One of the things that used to hold me back from starting a blog was the thought of having colleagues read it, slide on over to me and say, hey, you are one bizarre individual… Then one day I said what the hell, I’ll start a blog, and they can read it all they like. I just won’t reveal too much about me.

Now after a year or so of posting, I figure they know as much as you do, so here goes:

1. See that photo at the top of this blog? Add a bunch of overhead cables and telephone wires, and that was our family’s view out of the front window when I was growing up.
2. When I was born, I was driven home from hospital in a banana box placed on the floorboards of an old Austin.
3. My elder brother wanted me to be a girl. I know because he wrote that in a letter to my mother right after I was born. I don’t hold it against him.
4. Had I been born a girl, my name would be Fiona.
5. I’m glad I’m not a girl.
6. My earliest memory is of me standing up looking through the bars of the crib, that same brother coming in and saying, “there he is.”
7. I don’t know if that was a dream or not, but I can see it clearly.
8. I was only three years and eight months old when JFK was shot, but I remember where I was and what was going on around me.
9. I’m the youngest of four children.
10. My sister, the family’s first born, was killed in a level crossing accident when I was seven. She was 18. Damn that Canadian Pacific Railway anyway.
11. They say she was like my second mother, constantly taking care of me as a baby.
12. I have always missed her. 
13. Not for what might have been, because my memories of her are vague, but for what never could be.
14. For the past six generations, my family has been afflicted with a hereditary skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa.
15. I consider myself to be very lucky, because I don’t have it, nor can I pass it on.
16. We didn’t have a television until I was nearly eight. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for holding out that long.
17. I grew up during the Vietnam war.
18. I’ve been fascinated with that country my whole life.
19. I started delivering newspapers when I was eight. I’d often read ours before starting the route.
20. The Canadian town I grew up in was a one-company mining town. Anaconda -  an American company - owned it.
21. I was skipped a grade. I did the first half of Grade 3, then was moved over to the other side of the room to do the second half of the year in Grade 4.
22. School mates were angry at me because they thought I’d deserted the gang.
23. I also had a terrible time adjusting, because all of a sudden I had to write with a pen, and didn’t know how.
24. I was an overweight kid from the age of eight ’til 12, when I made a conscious effort to lose weight. It worked.
25. Perhaps too well, because when I hit Grade 8, skinny and a year younger than the other boys, I was picked on.
26. Don’t worry, I’m over it.
27. I first went skiing when I was 10 years old, and hated it. I went another couple of times that year, and hated it even more.
    Then the next year, I went skiing again, and was hooked.
28. I am still absolutely nuts about skiing.
29. Photo break:
30. 
31. I wish we lived closer to the Alps.
32. I have a deep scar on my chin from a skiing accident when I was 12. Back in the day, they used to have so-called safety straps attaching your ski to your ankle, so that when you fell and the skis released, the ski wouldn’t flit down the hill and impale someone. I fell badly and my ski whipped around, smashing an edge into my chin.
33. That happened on the Harmony Bowl at Whistler, back when a lift ticket cost a kid like me all of four Canadian dollars.
34. Blood everywhere, six stitches.
35. I spent a year ski instructing at Cypress Bowl, one of the three areas close to Vancouver.  The job’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
36. We used to spend hours either playing street hockey, Canadian football, soccer or baseball until it was so dark, it was dangerous to play.
37. My first real girlfriend had an identical twin. They were beautiful girls, always leaving me at a loss for words not only for that, but because I couldn’t tell them apart when they greeted me.
38. Then on January 27, 1977 at precisely 4:20 pm Pacific time, I kissed one of them.  After that, the difference was unmistakable.
39. I learned to drive in a 1972 MGB, but I have fonder memories of a 4-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite.
40. The first three years I had my driver’s license, I was in five accidents. I haven’t been in once since.
41. If you don’t know what I mean by real girlfriend, then don’t ask.
42. I used to run around in the BC coastal rainforest behind our house from the time I was old enough to be let loose out the back door.
43. It was like a forest village, with a stream to catch frogs and make dams, great hiding places under old stumps and logs, a clearing to play little games of baseball, a hill for a lookout, and patches of huckleberry, salmonberry and blackberry to plunder as Spring slowly ripened to Summer.
44. When I arrived back from my first long trip away from home - a year-long jaunt with a backpack through most of western Europe, Egypt, Israel and Turkey when I was 20 - I discovered they’d clear-cut my forest playground to put in a fucking trailer park.
45. First day back from that trip, one of the first songs I heard was, “The Rodeo Song.” Its first line, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo” didn’t make sense to me.
46. It made me wonder if I was coming back to the right place.
47. I miss Canada a lot, but I think it’s mostly nostalgia not for the place, but for the careless days of youth.
48. I can speak French and German fluently. I prefer to play Scrabble in French, though I haven’t for a while.
49. I sometimes dream in German.
50. The first five words I learned in Cantonese were five, four, three, two and one in that order.
51. I have an extremely good memory for places and dates.  That skiing photo was taken in February, 1992 at Owl’s Head, Quebec.
52. I can be very self-deprecating. That’s a good thing, because it puts me in some good company.
53. I love learning new things, even if some of them are unpleasant.
54. For example, I had to learn the hard way the meaning of narcissistic personality disorder.
55. I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder.
56. I dislike crowds intensely.
57. I have no superstitions save one: I never write anything in red ink.
58. I have climbed to the top of two of the three pyramids at Giza, Egypt. They say you’re not allowed to do that anymore.
59. In the winter of 1980 - 81 worked as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel.
60. I paid my way through university and for that backpacking trip by working for the Canadian National Railway at a job that doesn’t exist anymore thanks to the fax machine, a device now overtaken by email.
61. Thanks to that job, I know what it’s like to live in pretty well every town between Prince Rupert, BC and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
62. I used to work for Overwaitea Foods packing bags and stocking shelves.  One day, the manager came up and asked me to start stocking the frozen food section.  As I was doing the job he came up to me again and said, ”the reason I’ve asked you to do this is we’re serious about training you for management, and this is the job we give everyone who’s starting out in that direction.”
63. Feeling horrified, I looked up at him with a bag of frozen peas in my hand and said, “Well, I’ve registered for university in the fall.”  He looked disappointed, and two hours later, I was packing bags again. 
64. I was robbed in Nice, France in 1980. Two years later, I was robbed in Cannes.  Watch your stuff when you’re on the Côte d’Azur.
65. When I started scribbling things down for this, my goal was to have 100 entries in the list.
66. I believe the secret to boring the crap out of everyone is to tell them them everything, so I’m going to stop here.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Former US Attorney general Ashcroft has heart attack in Hamburg

We have once again roused our reporter out of hibernation for another Definitely Not the Daily News world exclusive.

By Kathy Kitzler

Hamburg (DNTN) Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has suffered what appears to be a heart attack while on a personal visit to the northern German port city of Hamburg.

Ashcroft, whose brilliant career at the US Justice Department included having a statue’s naked boobs covered up so he wouldn’t be photographed in front of it at press conferences, keeled over just as he was about to enter the tropical aquarium exhibit at Hamburg’s zoo.

“There’s this funny-looking house-like thingy outside the entrance with all this carved wood and stuff,” said a family friend. “John’s a little short-sighted, so he got up on tippy-toes to get a closer look. Poor bastard had a seizure right on the spot.”

The temple was hand-made in Nepal using ancient woodcarving techniques. It is dedicated to Lord Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.

“That Cheever guy must have been one sick and depraved bastard as well,” said a weakened Ashcroft in a telephone interview from his hospital room, adding he thought the temple’s location couldn’t be worse.

“Imagine putting full-colour carvings of people engaged in such disgusting and immoral acts right in plain view at the entrance to a zoo, right where all those kiddies walk by!

What the hell is wrong with German people, anyway?“

The temple has been standing for nearly five years at the entrance to Hagenbeck’s, famous for being the first zoo in the world to come up with the idea of displaying animals in natural settings rather than cages.

Witnesses say they never noticed anything unusual about the building until the Ashcroft incident.

“It’s a good thing he wasn’t watching the boob tube,” said one 10-year-old zoo visitor. “You see this sort of thing on TV all the time here.”

Antipodean reaction to Ashcroft’s apparent angina attack was swift and decisive.

“That’s it, I’m headed to Hamburg,” said one well-known Australian nurse and blogger, adjusting her corset while logging on to a travel website. “I just love all those cute little figurines and stuff. Do you think they’d let me make a few plaster casts?”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

One more thing about that pizza

Last in a series. Part one is here, part two here, part three here, part four here.

The unfinished business: the video and the recipe.

A DVD copy of the show arrived in the mail from the production company today, along with the following note from one of the producers:

Dear Ian,

Here is the DVD as promised. The piece was well received both by the network and the ratings were very good, so it was a great success for all concerned. I hope you’re happy with the final cut, and once again want to thank you very much for the great teamwork.

And if it had been me doing the choosing, yours would have been the winner!

So there you have it. I know a lot of people have asked to see the finished segment, and I said I’d like to post it, but that’s turning out to be not only a technical challenge - it’s a huge file - but possibly a legal one. That means I still haven’t gotten the OK to post it online, so before it takes another few weeks to get that cleared up, if you want to see it, here’s my suggestion:

Send me an email to: kismac (at) freenet (dot) de

Include your name, complete snail mail address and two Cheerios boxtops and I will burn you a copy and send it back to you in the mail. Trust me, by the time I get this uploading and copyright crap all sorted out, it’ll turn out to be faster.

Edit: Please have your request in by noon - European time -  Wednesday March 26th, because I can’t take any more after that.

I hope that works out for everyone. It won’t cost you a penny. Just let me know you got it, mkay?

I guess a screen shot of the now infamous flag fiasco is in order:

As for the recipe, it might be American-style, but its pedigree is truly Canadian. I got it from my sister-in-law, whose parents came over to Canada from Germany. She got it from a brother-in-law, a Greek immigrant who picked it up while working at an Italian restaurant not far from Vancouver’s Chinatown. My sister-in-law adapted it a little for home baking.

It’s really quite simple. As long as you already have the ingredients on hand, you can go from dough mixing to eating your freshly baked pizza in 75 minutes. For two 25 - 30cm thick-crust pizzas, here’s what you do.

The crust:

Start with good, finely milled flour. I use Italian “Tipo 00″ flour - but it make sure it also says pizza flour on the package.

Four cups flour
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup lukewarm milk (should be hot to the touch, but never scalding)
1.25 cups lukewarm water (give or take)
1 tablespoon sugar
Two packages (about 18 - 20 grams total) fast-rising dry yeast.

Mix all the dry ingredients together, then add the liquid. The dough will be very moist and gluey, but don’t worry. Use a sturdy metal spoon and mix it very well. Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and let it rise in a warm place while you mix the sauce and cut the toppings. Our oven has a bread-rising setting, but that’s not critical. Just don’t stick it on the balcony in winter.

The sauce:

One medium onion, diced very fine
One garlic clove, diced very fine
1 can good tomato paste
1 tablespoon dry oregano
1 tablespoon dry basil
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper

Mix all together and add a bit of water if it looks too thick, because it should spread easily over the dough.

Toppings:

Lots of freshly grated mozzarella. I used the loaf kind, not the one that comes in those pouches in liquid.

I made a simple sliced olive and salami pizza for the show, but would have preferred what I like best: ham and fresh pineapple chunks. Yeah, I know - boring as bat shit, but I like to go with what I like. I wouldn’t use more than three toppings at a time, and if you’re using vegetables, go easy on them, especially with very moist ones like mushrooms.

All that slicing and dicing and mixing will have taken around 35 - 45 minutes, lots of time for the dough to have risen. Take a large metal spoon and divide the dough in two equal halves as you spread it into your well-oiled pans. You can also use a pizza stone, but make sure you put a good amount of polenta (corn meal) down or it will stick to the stone something awful.

Flour your hands and the top of the dough a bit, then spread it out evenly with your fingers. Leave a ridge around the edge.

Spread the sauce out thinly across all the dough. If you have big patches where you can’t see the white of the dough through the sauce, you’ve spread it on too thick.

In building the pizza, the thing to avoid is dumping all your toppings in one layer on top of the sauce, and then the cheese on top. If you do that, the pizza will separate into two layers when you bite into it, burning the roof of your mouth as the superheated sauce finally escapes, and the whole mess ends up in your lap.

Instead, put a layer of cheese down, then some topping, more cheese, more topping, until you’re done with a final top layer of cheese. That way, you have cheese all the way through, holding the ingredients together like glue.

Stick your pizza into a hot oven - around 275 degrees C or 550 F will do for most home ovens. Should be done in about 15 minutes, but watch it doesn’t burn because every oven is different.

Serve with red wine or cold beer and - if you really want to do it right - enjoy in front of a TV while watching Hockey Night in Canada.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

New air date for pizza bake-off

For those readers living in Germany planning to watch the pizza show when it airs on German TV, the producers have just told me that the segment will be delayed.

Not so much longer to wait though: Friday, March 14 at 1910 on Pro7. The pizza segment should come on sometime around 1950, 2000.

Watch it closely. They stuck little flags of Germany, Italy, and the USA in the pizzas to illustrate which country they represent. There’s a story behind those little flags.

Tell you about it after it airs.

‘Til then!

The pizza shoot

Third in a series. Part one is here, part two here.

So after dragging all the ingredients in my luggage down to Munich the night before, the next morning a van is waiting at the hotel entrance to pick me up for the shoot. An hour or so on the Autobahn later, we arrive at Bonny’s Diner, an American-themed restaurant where we’ll film how to make the pizza.

On the way there, I learn who I’m up against that evening.

“The Italian runs his own pizza restaurant here in town,” the producer says, “and though he’s been here for ages, doesn’t speak a word of German.”

“And the German?”

“He’s a professional chef, goes all over the country catering to private and corporate functions, giving cooking classes, the works. He must have been on TV a half-dozen times already.”

And here’s me - duff blogger, regretfully opportunistic forum reader and hobby pizza baker, about to get royally humiliated. First before a live, studio audience, and again a couple of weeks later in front of millions of television viewers.

Fighting off visions of taste-testers slowly crumpling in knee-wilting groans of eye-rolling ecstasy as they take the first bite of the competition - after spitting mine out in disgust - we get to work.

After about three hours of walking in and out of the restaurant several times carrying at first a shopping bag and then a pizza, walking into the kitchen, taking the ingredients out over and over, several takes and re-takes of mixing the dough, throwing the sauce together, cutting up the toppings, grating the cheese, and saying and demonstrating how it is built and shoving it into the oven a few times, the crew is RAVING about the two I bake them.

“Man, I don’t know what the kids are going to say,” the sound girl says, “but that pizza is outstanding.”

They’re all nodding in agreement and I ask them, “can we just do that last bit one more time with the camera rolling?”

The cooking school

We pack up and head downtown to the cooking school where as we walk in, another shoot is in progress. It’s the German, and he’s making a pizza. A square pizza. Two huge, square pizzas, with really fancy dough, and he’s got a pile of ingredients on hand, one of which resembles salami.

It’s also like a church in there, because they’re filming and he’s explaining to the camera how he’s making them. But because we’re kind of pressed for time, I have still have to gather all the kitchen equipment together in absolute silence and start making three more pizzas, which are going to be whisked away on a delivery guy’s moped to the gang of waiting teenagers.

At one point I get really into the mixing and cutting and forget myself, start humming a song and banging pots around, and a camera assistant comes over and touches my arm.

…shhhhh….

Things start to get a little hectic in the final few hours. We pack up all the pizzas in containers - not those floppy cardboard boxes, but real pre-heated metal containers - stick them into cars and on the back of a moped for an agonisingly slow crawl through Munich afternoon rush-hour traffic to a school way on the outskirts of town, where 30 hungry teenagers are waiting patiently for us to arrive to do the taste test.

The Italian, as it turns out, has also been kicking around there for about two hours, and it takes another hour or so before the lights and cameras are set up and the kids told how everything is going to proceed. They get shoved from one side of the room to the other because this angle didn’t look right, that shot needed to be done over and the other thrown away, but we finally get down to the taste test just in time for me to realise my pizza has hardened, gone semi-cold and shrunk down to half its height.

They select a half-dozen or so from the audience, sit them down in the front row and blind-fold them. Each one, in turn, comes up and takes a bite of pizza, then is led away for a quick reaction Q&A before another camera.

I really hope they keep this one shot: One of the girls is about 17, pretty but in a Goth - lite kind of way, with cleavage down to a point that almost makes you want to ask, “Honey, does your Mum know you’re hanging out like that in weather like this?”

She stands up and is led toward my table and I pick up a plate with what I think is the best piece of the bunch. She picks it up and brings it to her lips, then opens her mouth wider, shoves it in, and…. bursts out in a fit of giggles, uncontrollably so, her laughter spilling out into the audience, and for a second or two there’s this awkward moment where I wonder if she’s going to lose it, if pieces of topping are about to tumble from the sides of her mouth, when suddenly the fit is over and she’s led away.

Before we know it, it’s seven-thirty in the evening and I have less than two hours before my flight leaves back to Hamburg.

This is where it starts to get surreal. In a mad rush, the three of us troop out of the little theatre and into a side foyer, where we quickly go through a bunch of set-up scenes, which I’m guessing are going to be used for the intro. First they ask us to run through a flag as if we were winning a race, but the camera guy says it looks like crap. So then we’re all given oversized wooden spoons and told to make like we’re gangsters, holding the spoons as if they were guns. We all look stern as we walk toward each other, meeting eyeball-to-eyeball and glaring menacingly at one another. They get close-up shots of that and then we each have to walk across the room, turn and fire the wooden spoon at the camera over a flag and walk on - James Bond 007-style.

Then we all pile back into where the kids are waiting, for a truly televisual bit of theatre. Because I have to dash off to the airport - by now there’s a taxi waiting outside - and they still have to stay at least another hour to shoot the taste test with the German - we have to fake the celebrations. Yup. I won’t tell you who won, but before I leave, the audience is told to go nuts cheering and clapping for each of us in turn, so that when the result is known, they can simply use the one that fits.

OK! The American pizza won! Yaaaaay!

OK! The German pizza won! Yaaaaay!

OK! The Italian pizza won! Yaaaaay!

And off I go to the taxi and home.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Reminder: Only three days to go. March 13, 1910 on Pro 7.

my day as an american pizza chef: the prep

Second in a series. Part one’s back here.

So between getting the go-ahead to fly to Munich to bake the pizza and actually getting there, a few things have to be worked out over the phone.

“So-oo….” the producer asks me, “Tell me how your pizza is going to be different from the Italian and the German one.”

I have to think fast. What is a German pizza? As we all know, the thin-crust all-fresh Italian pizza is the perfection we should all strive for, but German? All I can think of is that after harfing my way through a good dozen or so pizza joints throughout this land, it’s a disappointing mess, but in exactly what way, I couldn’t tell you. So with a nod to Italy, I play up mine rather than compare with the unknown.

“Well… you know how Italian pizza is so thin sometimes, you could wrap it up and eat it like a Crêpe Suzette? My pizza will have a thick, slightly chewy but at the same time very bread-like crust almost like a foccacia best eaten within 10 minutes out of the oven, the sauce will be somewhat hotter than what you may be used to, but without dominating the pizza, the toppings limited to two, maximum three. I like to keep it simple, and want to play up how anyone with the ingredients on hand can do the same at home, too. From scratch to table in a little over an hour.

“But I wouldn’t expect any fancy theatrics like spinning a floppy disc of dough above my head while belting out the finale from La Traviata or - God help us - God Bless America,” I warn her. “Before it has a chance to rise, my dough looks like a cross between barf and wet ceiling stucco.”

“Hey!” she says. “That sounds great! That’s the kind of stuff you’ve got to say on camera. You’ve got to play things up a little!”

I start to get anxious, wondering how all that would sound in my fractured German.

“Oh, and by the way, the toppings,” she goes on, “Each of you is going to make a salami pizza, so that we can at least have a level playing field there. But other toppings are up to you. Say, what are your other toppings going to be?”

“Well, I was thinki…”

“Oh - and did I tell you? You’ll probably have to make at least five, possibly seven pizzas, so you’ll be busy.”

“SEVEN pizzas?”

“Yeah, well, we’ll be shooting at an American-themed restaurant in the morning, and depending on how everything works out with the camera people, you’ll have to make two, possibly three there, then when we’re done, we’ll be driving into downtown Munich to a cooking school, where you’ll be making three, maybe four more. Those are the ones that will be judged in the taste test, which will be taken another 10-12 km away at a high school.”

I’m starting to think we should have talked a little more about that €100 honorarium.

Then, because I have a list of ingredients which include organic yeast, sea salt, authentic Italian pizza dough flour, tomato paste, salami and Santa Lucia mozzarella cheese, stuff you don’t find at your neighbourhood Aldi, I tell her it might be best if I bought them myself and schlepped them down with me.

“You sure you can take all those ingredients with you?” she asks. “It sounds like a lot to carry.”

“Nah, no problem,” I tell her. “But do you have a pizza stone? I can do it in a pan if you like, but I usually bake it on a stone. Makes for a nicer crust. Doesn’t sweat.”

“Uhh… we really want you to do it in a pan,” she says. “That’s the idea people here have of American pizza - baked in a pan, thick crust, that sort of thing.”

“Ummm, yeah, OK! I can bake it in pan if you like.”

Not that I ever have, mind you.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Next post: the shoot.

My day as an American pizza chef

I go over to Toytown Germany from time to time to check out what’s happening with English-speaking expats living in Germany. I click on View latest posts about a week or so ago and right near the top I see one from a TV producer down in Munich looking for someone to go on her show to bake a deep-dish / American-style pizza. I would be a contest: a three-way bake-off pitting Italian, German and American pizza against each other, with a group of German high school kids doing the judging.

I’m thinking: Tough crowd - but what the hell.

The post is only minutes old. I shoot an email back at her telling her that I’ve been making American-style pizza for my family for ages, that they love it, that the dough is made from scratch using a recipe from my sister-in-law, ditto the sauce, that I don’t go overboard with the toppings, and that I’m reasonably well house-trained.

I also mention I’m comfortable under the lights, having been a TV producer, reporter and anchor for a news station in Hong Kong in the mid-nineties.

“Oh, and I’m Canadian,” I add. “I hope that doesn’t ruin my chances.”

She writes back after a bit to say no problem, they’d love to work with me, but that I’d have to leave my Vancouver Canucks sweater at home, tone down the Maple Syrup and Hockey Stick routine, and that as the designated baker of American-style pizza, I would have to represent the USA.

“You’d have to hold up the American flag for the judging,” she says. “The German will hold up the German flag, the Italian his flag - you can do that, can’t you?”

I thought about this. I thought: sure I can do it, the recipe’s drilled into my head, but …but…. I’m a Canuck! Besides, do people immediately drop everything, phone around to get colleagues to fill in for you and change other plans, just for the chance to be whisked off in a taxi to the airport right after work, flown across the country, put up in a hotel, do a day-long shoot, all expenses paid and a few bucks spending money, then fly home?

Fuckin’ rights they do. Sounds like fun. I tell her: Oh, all right. … I guess so. But can I wear a little Canadian flag on my lapel?

First in a series. The last installment will have a video of the show, which airs on March 13. That is, if I ever figure out how to convert the digital file so I can upload it to YouRube. Sometime over the next few days: the pizza prep, the shoot, the judging, the finale. Maybe even the recipe…

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: The show will air March 13 at 1910 on a show called Galileo.

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