Love and Calories!!

I have already praised a lot about Pizza in my previous post "Basic Pizza Dough" , so am not repeating it again. In this post, am going to share the recipe of three main variants of an authentic "Pizza Alla Napoletana". Pizza originated from the region of Naples in Italy and it dates back to the 1800's. Later, some Italian migrant went to New York & started his own pizzeria & from then on the Pizza's triumphal journey around the globe started. I read in some magazine that 40 hectares of pizza is consumed every day in the United States..Holly Molly!! American food joints like Pizza Huts & Dominoes started deking lavishly with a variety of ingredients but when I tasted the true Italian Neapoletan Pizza, it stood apart from these cheap American imitations. An authentic Neapolitan Pizza must be: made of dough that is kneaded by hand. its crust must also be formed & flattened by hand & it must be round. The dough consists...

Now there is probably no other word that can be a synonym for "Italian Cuisine".......PIZZA! Who doesn't know about Pizza & who doesn't like Pizzas! And what a great joy you will experience if you know how to make these perfectly at home. If you asked me a decade back, would you try making a pizza at home, I would have said..."Crazy or what!!...Its a fast food dish, best eaten at Pizza Hut or a Dominoes! It is not & cannot be made at home & it won't be as delicious as you get in one of the fast food joints". But when I saw for the first time how my mom-in-law made some delicious pizzas at home with her own luscious toppings, I was spellbound. I slowly started to have a liking towards home baking. It was when I visited Italy, that I found the true taste & look of the authentic pizzas. My previous notions were all wrong. I got a whole different picture of this beautiful dish called PIZZA! An authentic Italian pizza dough is smooth as b...

"In love with Spain" continues & I cooked up another popular dish from the sunshine country, Espana. The world famous "Paella" pronounced as Pa-e-ya is a popular Spanish Rice dish cooked with mainly seafood. It is cooked in a special pan known as La paella (from where the dish gets its name too), which is a wide mouthed thick shallow pan made of iron that helps in quick heat absorption and helps cooking the rice really fast. The authentic paella takes a decent amount of time to cook but nowadays who has time for those elaborate sessions in the kitchen so here is one quick paella recipe which you can make in a jiffy (well about a maximum of 20 minutes). :) The image below is that of an authentic paella pan & the paella rice. You can swap these two with any of the wide mouthed shallow pans already at home & long grain rice respectively. Vegetarians need not be disappointed as they too can substitute the chicken stalk with vegetable stalk & prawns with...