Big Love
Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for nearly 15 years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotter with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too hesitant to set something on fire. On FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her each week. This time: love for pizza.
When someone asks you what the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten is, you can be sure you’re not dealing with a foodie, a culinary enthusiast, a cook or a food lover. They would never ask that. You’re probably swallowing the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten right now. I am, at least. I try to make my life a succession of the most delicious things. And I’m doing a pretty good job.
Gun
If I really had to choose, with a gun to my head for example, I’d say pizza. Just as some people can’t imagine life without cheese (no problem at all) or wine (a slightly bigger problem), I couldn’t live without pizza. Flour, yeast, olive oil, tomato, mozzarella. Simple and brilliant. I love pizza very much.
Loser
My very first job was washing dishes in a pizzeria. The owner was a chain-smoking little Sardinian named Nino, who was married to a woman from Groningen named Dini. Dini served pizzas with the decisiveness of a nurse rather than the warmth of a waitress. I had just started secondary school and went there to wash dishes, very shyly, every Thursday evening. By hand, and without a break. The worst things to wash were the lasagne dishes. I thought anyone who didn’t eat pizza in a pizzeria was a loser. I still do, actually.
At the end of the evening, I was always allowed to sit with Nino at the staff table for a moment, with a cola, which I actually thought was disgusting, cola, but I never dared ask for anything else. I never ate a pizza there. It cost what I earned in an evening, so all I could do was long intensely for one. I already loved pizza very much back then. And before long, I loved pizza makers too. My first boyfriend, not much later, was a pizza maker.
Top 10
The first article of mine to be published in a glossy magazine was about pizza. It was a top ten of the best pizzas in the world. Lists and top tens had just been invented and were still taken seriously. Bloggers had yet to be born, and there was only one pizzeria in Amsterdam with a wood-fired oven. I had personally eaten and never forgotten every pizza that appeared in my top ten, from Sicily to Groningen, from New York to Istanbul.
Ed Who Wasn’t Any Good
I still remember almost all my pizzas. The good ones, that is. And where I ate them. The very first Margherita of my life from a wood-fired oven, at Lake Garda, on holiday with my friend Saskia and her parents. Where it all began. The one in the deathly quiet little village of Asolo, near Venice, where I went to eat three times in two days, and ate two whole pizzas on two of those three occasions. The one with spicy sausages at a campsite in France, from a wood-fired oven in a Citroën van. Ed’s pizza from back when he wasn’t any good, in Pingjum, with potato and sea salt. The pizza bianca at Pazzi in the Jordaan.
When I’m happy, I want pizza. When I’m sad, I want pizza. And on all the days in between, really. Ever since I’ve had a garden, I’ve fantasised about my own wood-fired oven. Where the vegetable garden is, I think.
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