A NEW BIRTH OF PIZZA.

I'm trying to be optimistic, and luckily there's some ground to be. Treatment has been good overall, my response was every time they checked positive. I am now in the last phase of the treatment, for the time being at least, since the kind of cancer I have cannot until now be cured completely, i.e. as things stand now it can always recommence. However, the young and competent Dr. F. here at a particular University Clinic near Brussels has assured me I should be able to look forward to, say, perhaps 5 years without worry of it breaking out again. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that in five years research has advanced sufficiently to enable complete healing. By the way, you should know that MASSIVE research IS being done day and night all over the world, covering the entire spectrum of all known cancers, and great inroads are made - I could see that for myself by comparing articles written in 08 to ones written as recently as autumn 2012. I actually think the War against Cancer is being won - slowly but surely.

Thing is, in this final leg of the cure I have to take the utmost care to avoid infection of all kinds, since my immune system is as good as down, courtesy the last chemo. That also means severe restrictions on food in my case. I have to make do with prepackaged sterile bread and yoghurts and one spartan warm meal of only a handful of ingredients. Urgh.

And the weird thing is....

... I find myself thinking of and longing for all day long for... PIZZA.

Sheesh! Never knew I could almost litterally be dying (no pun intended) for pizza so much. Not that spongy stuff they sell you in a Pizza Hut, thank you not so very much. But a REAL, GENUINE PIZZA they actually bake for you right under your nose in the oven in a veritable pizzeria. Up until now I never bothered too much about pizza's names, read I wouldn't be able to identify them judging by their toppings. When ordering some, I always took the one with at least 75 per cent of the toppings I liked.

And now it turns out the sought-for Ideal Outlaw Mike Pizza does not exist!!! Time for adding an annal to the History Of.

Searching the web, and knowing I like, apart of course from the tomato sauce and/or the chopped canned tomatoes, also sweet green or black olives, anchovy (a must), finely sliced ham, and mushrooms and mozzarella, it seemed to me the pizza that came closest to my ideal was the Pizza Quattro Stagioni. However it CAN'T be complete without an egg smack in the middle, and a real FAT, glittering, huge bulbous egg sunny side up at that.

People being dumb the world over in alarming numbers, I of course found no one who had ever had this Groundbreaking Idea of adding the fried egg in the middle before. This also means the accompanying pic is but an effort to convey my important invention to you:




In honour of the Italians - thank God he created them darn spaghettis, and accidents like Belgium's PM Elio Di Rupo happen anyway, otherwise we'd live in a pizzaless world - I have decided to apply a fully Italian name for my invention, so it's not gonna be Pizza Four Seasons with Egg according to Outlaw Mike but Pizza Quattro Stagioni con uovo secondo Fuorilegge Michele. A New Birth of Pizza!!!

No thanks please.


Apart from that, drifting in and out of sleep images of Poland's most famous soup also keep spooking my fuzzy brain. Like with the pizza, it's gonna be at least another ten days before I will taste it again courtesy severe hygienic (pfah!) restrictions on OM's menu. What soup am I talking about. It's called Zurek.

Zurek is basically a sour rye soup made of soured rye flour (comparable to sourdough) and meat (usually boiled pork sausage which the Poles call kielbasa, or pieces of smoked sausage, bacon or ham). The soup itself, though not clear, is quite liquid, certainly not viscous, and, unlike basically all western salt-based soups, tastes sour. You got to like it - I certainly do. Add morsels of boiled potato and halved hard-boiled eggs, and it's delicious. From our travels to Poland I recall that around Zakopane we sometimes ate żurek in an edible bowl made of bread!

Anyway... try it if offered the chance. You're bound to become an aficionado.



Nite. It can't be crazy rightwing stuff all the time.


MFBB.