Recipe of Pizza in Urdu Sauce in Urdu Without Oven In Urdu in English Without Oven in Marathi Images: Recipes Of Pizzas

Recipes Of Pizzas Biography

source(google.com.pk)

I started the blog in 2006 with no special ambitions, figuring it would last a few months. The food blogs I was familiar with were all by professional chefs, or by people with really interesting stories, or by people who only cooked recipes by their grandmother from a book they found in the attic, or had written books themselves. I had nothing special to offer. I just liked to cook, and I was looking for recipes that really work.

You never studied cooking or worked in a restaurant, so you had no professional background.

No. I studied art therapy and worked in that. I was also an IT reporter. The truth is that I pretty much hated all my jobs.

So you said to yourself: I like to cook and take pictures, so I’ll upload recipes and pictures to this anonymous blog and see what happens.

Yes.

And what happened?

At first, nothing.

And now?

As of now, I have about 5.5 million unique visitors a month and 8 million page views.

You also wrote a cookbook that became a New York Times bestseller. How do you explain all this?

Honestly? I have no idea. I really don’t know how to explain it. I just love to cook, and I think that part of what drove me was the search for the perfect recipe. Most of us don’t do deep research about recipes when we want to make

something. We take the first recipe that comes up on Google, and it might be excellent or a disaster. I became pretty obsessive about that. I always want to arrive at the perfect, most accurate recipe in every category, in terms of both ingredients and method of preparation. I am always looking for the perfect hot chocolate, the perfect pizza.

Yesterday you published a pizza recipe, and within a few hours you collected more than 2,000 likes on Facebook.

Wow, yes. That really went on forever. It took me weeks and weeks to organize that recipe the right way. Every recipe takes a lot of work. This became my only job back in 2008. It’s my day job, and I really don’t have any more excuses for not doing it the best way.

Did you always want to write a book?

The truth is that for most bloggers, writing a book is the golden fleece, the great promise of glory. But for me it wasn’t like that. I had no desire to write a book, and during the writing I complained and grumbled nonstop. I know that sounds terrible, and I really like the result, but I suffered a lot. I received a lot of offers over the years.

Really? I thought it didn’t work like that.

Of course it works like that. Literary agents are always sniffing around and putting out feelers, and if you have a popular blog, they’ll approach you. But I truly wasn’t interested and didn’t want to write a book. I didn’t understand why I needed it. I felt I was really lucky in managing to become known from the site. I had no motive or need to do it. But I decided to give it a try anyway.

Why?

It was a combination of many things, most of them irrational. I got a really good offer, my family started to bug me and I was also pregnant.

What does that have to do with it?

I know that many women go into nesting hysteria at the end of their pregnancy, but I was seized by a kind of career hysteria. Suddenly I felt that I was liable to be drawn to all the new things and neglect everything I was doing. So I decided to start a new project, just when my baby was born.

You were surprised by the success?

Yes, I never thought for a minute that this is what could happen. Not for a minute. I don’t feel comfortable with it. Seemingly I have every reason to sing in the streets, but the truth is that it scares me a little. It upsets me very much that people will think I’m changing; that now, after all these things happened to me, I will write differently or cook differently, and I hate that. I’m pretty much an introvert, even though it might not seem so. I love people, and now that I’ve done the promotional tour for the book, I very much enjoyed meeting them. But still, it felt strange.

It’s a Cinderella story.

In many ways. But Cinderella wanted very much to be the princess, whereas I thought to myself, “Hmmm, I have to think about it.” It’s not necessarily something I aspired to, but I feel very fortunate that it happened, and I’m enjoying it. To be able to choose between things I would like to do is an amazing sense of freedom. When someone makes me an offer now, I don’t have to accept it, I can decide what I want. I can say that I don’t really like the idea or that particular publisher.

Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi declared that he’s a fan of yours.

Yeah, that’s so cool! He’ll be in town next week and I’m wondering whether to go to one of his events. We’ve never met. I’m stunned that he even knows who I am. Things like that always surprise me. I always feel that the blog is something between me and my computer. It’s hard for me to grasp that people really read it.

What’s the strangest thing that’s happened to you or that you’ve understood in the course of this journey?

That those numbers − about hits on the site − represent real people. A lot of times during the promotional tour I saw a line of people who had come to meet me, and that stressed me. I thought to myself, “God, these people have come here to meet me! For sure they’re going to be really disappointed when they find out what a geek I am.”

The design and the language of your blog have become a kind of convention of food blogs.

There were already food blogs when I started my blog, but they didn’t use the format I did. I thought the blog should be based on pictures and headlines, and on a large main picture. Many people actually adopted that language, and it became standard. I like a lot of pictures, especially of the process. So you can see exactly the size into which I sliced the vegetables, or what the density of a particular mash is.

How do you decide which recipes to upload?

I don’t have a rule of thumb for that. I do adapt myself to the seasons of the year. For example, I won’t tell people to run an oven at 250 [Celsius] at the height of summer. I was in Rome last June, and I returned very excited about pizza. I had a lot of ideas and a lot of tips, but I decided to wait with it until October. Or, with seasonal fruits and vegetables, I will upload them in season. I like to wait for the appropriate time − it’s a matter of planning and order.

Did you develop a process for filtering recipes over time?

Before reading recipes, I read the general and categorical approach to the food itself. For example, when I decided to write about pizza, I began by reading all the references to pizza in my cookbooks, to pizzas of all kinds, and also Wikipedia entries. I love that. The people who write there always have a great deal of passion and a great deal of understanding about how a pizza should look, what will make it a good pizza in a southern style or in a northern style.

But if I want to try something new, like pasta caccio e pepe [Parmesan and black pepper]. I start by reading every recipe and every theory, every bit of information I can get my hands on, and start to draw conclusions: lemon sounds weird, it doesn’t go with the flavors; sour cream isn’t needed because there is plenty of Parmesan. Then I start to put together the recipe − sometimes it’s a mixture of all the recipes, sometimes I just feel that I understand how it should be and I start to improvise on the basis of everything I read.

Do you read all the comments about the recipes? Very often that’s the place to discover flaws. People will write, “There’s not enough oil, it completely fell apart.”

I’m wild about comments. Obviously. I read them all.

Experience gives rise to an intuitive database. I find myself reading a recipe and knowing that it’s not good enough.

Totally. Why two cups of sugar? I usually use only one in cakes like that. Or why so much butter? It will come out greasy. Or there’s an ingredient that is truly grating, given all the other ingredients.

What makes a good cooking blog?

I don’t consider myself an authority, I can only say what I appreciate less: those who strive for perfection. I prefer to see untouched photos that show what the food really looks like. I prefer real-life menus that don’t contain exotic ingredients and 40 stages. I also like flexibility, when the recipe writer notes alternatives or recommends variations.

From my point of view, that’s the advantage of blogs over professional writing about food, of the type you can find in magazines, with polished recipes and pictures that were worked on by stylists. The cooking blogs I like truly speak to me in the simplest language. “Wow, you absolutely have to try what I made last night,” accompanied by a nice, unpretentious picture.

You take the pictures for the blog yourself, and you also took all the pictures in the book. Did you study photography?

The only background I have is from the period when I used to paint a little, so I have some understanding of composition. I never studied photography. I take the pictures for the simple reason that there is no one else to take them, and that’s nice but definitely not the biggest desire of my life.

At first it was more complex: I had to plan the cooking according to the amount of light. But I’ve been working in the same kitchen for four and a half years now, so I know exactly what everything will look like at any given time, and I take pictures at more or less the same time of day.

Your whole life project is happening in a very small kitchen: four square meters. That’s more or less the size of Martha Stewart’s dish dryer.

That really bothers a lot of people, and I don’t understand why − if you live in a big city you will obviously have a small kitchen, unless you are really rich.

My workspace is no larger than a placemat, but I have no problem with that. I would rather have a small kitchen and live in New York than live in the suburbs and have a huge kitchen.

I think your publisher realized that this is something that could be leveraged: turning the disadvantage into an advantage.

Yes. I have no problem going with the narrative of “I have a small kitchen and I do things − so you can, too.” I can’t make truly complex things in my kitchen, but I think that’s a good thing for my cooking, too. Most people who read blogs aren’t looking for really complicated recipes that need three workspaces.

How does one get along in a small kitchen?

The most important thing is to have as few items as possible. To start with the truly basic items − bowl, wooden spoon, grater, stockpot − and only then to understand what your true needs are. I think it’s worth buying something only if its absence bothers you three or four times. I often think I need something, and then it turns out it was a one-time need. The most important thing − and this I actually learned from large, beautiful kitchens − is to clear the workspace. The workspaces in large kitchens are generally very crowded, with the result that they are actually the ones that don’t have enough room.

What do you think about the evolution of the cooking blogs?

The food blogs now are very different from the ones I saw when I was starting out. They had a more intimate tone, of a conversation between writer and reader. The ones now are starting to look more and more like magazines, to which the blogs used to be the alternative. I think this is a process that’s happening in all the blogs, not just in the area of food. The political blogs are also turning from being an alternative to the mainstream into the mainstream itself. Many blogs are only carriers for advertisements, platforms for products, and it’s not so easy to distinguish between personal blogs and special projects of magazines.

The trend has been reversed in another way, too. I think that things often become a hit on the Web and then reach the mainstream. All kinds of trends, such as cupcakes, for example. I often see things in magazines that I saw a year earlier in blogs. Possibly the golden age of the blogs is also over.

What do you mean?

From what I see, many magazines that are trying to make the transition to digital are using successful blogs in order to understand the language and extract guidelines. If in the past there was some sort of gap between the readers and the professional magazines, and the blogs flourished precisely within that gap, now this is increasingly diminishing, and maybe has disappeared altogether. It will be interesting to see where it goes. In any event, I am not going anywhere. I intend to go on cooking and writing as long as people are willing to read it.