Eh bien, tant pis!
I’ve been making pizza since my friend Bodil taught me, almost two decades ago, in the small town of Brugge. Ever since it’s been a meal I plan on my lazy days. Days when I don’t feel like cooking, since it’s the easiest thing to make provided I have all the ingredients.
It’s Day 49 of the lockdown. All day we were anxious about Prime Minister Modi’s address at 8:00 p.m. The dreaded hour of announcements. But today it was nothing dreadful except that he took dreadfully long to get to the point. Things seem promising here on with him announcing a 20-lakh crore recovery package. Fingers crossed, we’ll have a v-shaped recovery.
Coming back to my pizza dinner. Between finishing ‘Julie & Julia’ and starting my online ‘Travel Art Session’ I decided to quickly make the pizza dough. The multi-tasking resulted in me picking up the ‘rice flour’ instead of the ‘all purpose flour’. Blissfully unaware of my error I mixed the flour, yeast, sugar, salt & water. It’s when I began kneading that I realised my folly. Couldn’t even facepalm as I had the dough stuck to all my fingers. But the art session was about to begin so I covered the dough, with a ‘we shall see’ sigh, and left the kitchen.
As luck would have it. The yeast did what it was supposed to do. Two hours later I had a beautifully risen rice dough. It’s a weird feeling being elated and disappointed at the same time.
I very rarely waste food and I rarely follow recipes. Even my own. I’m a very spontaneous cook. Most of what I add or delete depends largely on my mood. So, I spread this perfect dough, of the wrong grain, evenly on my pizza pan. Smothered it with my pizza tomato sauce, basil and mozzarella. Placed it into the oven and waited.
Peeping repeatedly through the oven window, I was nervous because it looked as white as a huge meringue. As I chopped the watermelon to make a salad Julia Child’s words kept echoing in my head. “I don’t believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make … eh bien, tant pis! (Oh well, never mind)”
Voila, after twenty minutes, dinner was a Watermelon-Feta salad and Falguni’s Gluten Free Rice Flour Margherita Pizza! A little crispier, a little more brittle than a regular pizza but delicious. Julia is right, “Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is.”
