Go out yonder, peace in the valley

It doesn't feel like it, but I worked an 11 hour shift today. The sun rises around 6:30 and doesn't set until around 9:30, making for plenty hours of daylight. I was up by 8, which is unusual for my schedule, allowing me to squeeze in quick run before starting my shift at 10:30.

Spending 11 hours straight in the kitchen of a pizza restaraunt makes eating any kind of sensible diet a monumental challenge. My shift today is called "opening pizza" and is considered to be a double shift. When my shift starts before noon, I receive a free small pizza as my lunch. Each evening, the a la carte chefs cook a plated dinner for all the kitchen staff that are working so just for showing up today, I get a small pizza to eat plus a dinner. And you won't find either of these meals in your Zone books. Before I made my lunch pizza, my english mate and co-worker got to talking about good the apple crumble desert pizzas looked. We make these all night but have never gotten to try one. So we came up with the brilliant plan of splitting our small pizzas. I would make us a small meaty pizza to munch on during the day and then he would make us a desert pizza for the afternoon. This proved to make for a wonderful afternoon as the apple crumble pizza with ice cream on top was amazing. When the evening a la carte chef arrived, I suggested Chicken Parmesan for dinner and he catered to my request, even going so far as to some cajun seasoning to the chicken. Now these are just the meals I enjoyed at work today. As a pizza chef, our first duty is to make pizzas for the customers. Pretty simple. But when we do not have any pizza orders, our second responsibility is to prep. We prepare the toppings and ingredients that go on the pizzas. This involves cutting ham, bacon (the bacon here is not what you think of as bacon, i'll come to this dilemma soon), salami, feta cheese....Basically if it goes on a pizza, you prep it in the kitchen and let's just say that we do a good job of quality checking our ingredients before they make it to the pizza.

And yes, I did just type an entire paragraph about what I ate today. Which brings me to my next topic of discussion, The Montanara. The Montanara is the best selling and most popular pizza at Winnie's. It is referred to by both customers and staff as the "monty". I have know idea why it is called a Montanara and neither does anyone in the restaraunt (believe me, I've asked everyone). Quite frankly, some of the pizza names are down right ridiculous. The monty is a very good pizza, but it is definitely not the most tasty dish on the menu. I think it sells very well because it does not contain any ingredients or toppings that people vehemently dislike, such as mushrooms. Let's break it down. First of all our pizza bases are thin, very similar to thin-crusts pizzas back home, and circular. However the way we make the pizzas does not really leave it with a true crust. We try to push the sauce and toppings all the way to the perimeter of the pizza. Since the base is consistent in height, there is no thick ring of dough that you could call a crust. First on the base is freshly made tomato sauce, no surprises there. Then we add some sun-dried tomatos. Next is a layer of cheese, on top of which goes baked chicken that has been sliced. A handful of chopped spring onions are thrown on, mainly for color as you would never taste the difference with or without these. The next step is where it gets interesting. Our next ingredient is sweet chili sauce, which we drizzle back and worth until most of the pizza is covered in it. Before arriving in New Zealand, I had never heard of sweet chili sauce. But this liquid is almost as popular as catchup is to us. In fact, it is pretty much used like catchup. If you order french fries in NZ, they will probably be served with sweet chili sauce. If you order a kebab, you will have the option of getting sweet chili sauce as your topping. Catchup as we know it is very hard to find here. If you ask for catchup, you will receive tomato sauce. I don't know how or why, but tomato sauce IS NOT catchup. So people generally go with sweet chili sauce instead. The best way I can think of describe the taste of it is sweet and sour sauce, just a little bit sweeter. Basically, it's good but not great. To me, it is definitely an odd item to put on a pizza. The final pre-oven topping for a the monty is sliced bree. Now I think this is pretty damn brilliant. I've never seen a pizza in the states with brie on it, but why the hell not. Just think about it. Hey, what can I put on this meaty-cheesy-bready dish to make it better? Answer - more cheese, but make it a fancy cheese. Done. This is what the sets the monty aside....Well this and the nut cream. The monty goes in the oven for seven minutes, comes out with cheese and sweet chili sauce bubbling and then gets an ice cream scoop of nut cream slabbed right in the middle of the pizza. Nut cream is a mixture of sour cream, cream cheese and chopped pistachios. So when you eat a slice of a monty, you grab a slice dip it in the nut cream and bite into the sweet chili brie chicken goodness. Like I said, there's really not too much on the monty that you can dislike. I mean who doesn't like brie?

I can't really think of a pizza back home from any restaraunt that is similar to the monty. If you know of one, let me know. Those 11 hours are starting to take their toll so I will shut it down now. Tomorrow I will explain the correct pronunciation of the word tomato.

Short Circuits

• For the most part I am completely comfortable with the fact that I'm closer to 30 than 25, until......I put on a 311 album in the kitchen today. One of the younger pizza chefs asked "Where are these guys from?", I replied "Omaha, Nebraska, these guys have been around forever". He had never heard of them. I told him that this was one of their earlier albums and probably came out around 1991. He laughed and stated "No wonder I've never heard of them, I would have been one year old when it came out."