Pizza Potluck Party #2

Pizza Potluck Party – what the heck is that all about? 4 things:

  • I prepare pizza dough
  • I prepare tomato sauce
  • I have some cheese
  • you bring whatever you want or cannot imagine to work as a piza topping

We’ve done that in the past where we created one sri-lankan-german pizza with combining a sausage crust, lingus and pineapple on a pizza… mmmh still mouth-watering when I just write about it.

This time one amazingly awesoe person started to prepare an 18hour apple-wood smoked pork shoulder to have some pulled pork for the pizza. I mean: some people (including me) would already die for ONLY the 18 hour smoked pulled pork. But coming back to the pizzas – here are some of the creations from that evening:

  • Lingus (raw lingus but also fried lingus, chilies, onions), pineapple, corn and red birdseye chilies
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  • Meat lovers 18 hour smoked pulled pork pizza: the friend lingus combination, pulled pork (only to be added at the very end or last 2 minutes in the oven!), some birds eye chili or orange habanero
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  • Pulled-pork at its best: mango, coriander leaves, orange habanero and pulled pork
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  • For salmon lovers: corn, mango, a mixture of joghurt (better results expected with creme cheese) with salt, long pepper and slightly smoked salmon (to be added at the very end, once the pizza is out of the oven already for 2-3 mins)
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Other hints for pizza stuff: I use the dough recipe from Jamie Oliver who combines e.g.

  • 400gr of wheat flower (ideally italian typo 00 but any bread flower will do)
  • 100gr of semolina
  • dried yeast (1 pack)
  • 1 tblsp brown sugar
  • 1 tblsp fine sea salt

And you HAVE TO buy a stone for making pizzas. Just try it once and you will never want non-stone pizza again. The thing is: pre-heat your oven with the stone to the highest temperature your oven can do for 45 mins and then your pizzas will be ready in max 8-10mins.

Buon appetit.

Ski Dubai flyer, ice cube bbq and car-in-a-box

Thanks to two amazing visitors I came across this epic piece of marketing material. It’s from Ski Dubai. Yeah, the world famous place where you can do skiing in the desert. And apparently you can also meet some penguins.

“It only consumes as little energy as an average sized hotel.”

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Just for the records: of course my visitors did NOT go there 🙂

Talking about winter things in Dubai. Ice cubes. On a bbq. Did not really make sense to me but I was sure there must be a good reason why you do this.

“You know, grill is very hot. And flames would come up – so we put ice cubes”. Well, WTF??

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Dubai is the place for luxury cars (which – sometimes – catch fire). And it’s a little sandy, dusty etc. So what would you do when you have to park your Maybach, Rolls Royce or what-have-you in a basement parking for a while? Exactly – it’s easy: put your car into a plastic tent, air-tight with high pressure so that really nothing can come in. Omg.

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Pakistan

Ok so here’s my take on Pakistan. Based on vast experience watching Homeland and a 2 day business casper trip to Karachi.

Based on Homeland and the usual media coverage, you would expect that whole Pakistan is a simply a huge war zone – a failed state. Ah and then again you have all the drones in the sky all the time destroying hospitals, schools and sometimes even a valid target.

After hearing stories from colleagues who actually went to Pakistan on a business trip (you will sit in a tank, a security guard with a gun next to you), I was not concerned about security so much but rather about a more or less acceptable hotel.

Before my trip, I did some research about Karachi and the latest news about Pakistan and found

Still my employer has several offices there and my colleagues somehow make a living there.

The first big thing to notice after my arrival was the car. It wasn’t a ‘tank’, it was ‘only’ a regular looking, allegedly class-6 armored lexus. And the security guy – where I thought about all those ex-mercenaries, ex-special forces, … – was a random guy from the street with a security uniform and a shotgun. Ok. If someone wanted to do bad to me, they could.

Then all went pretty well – the colleagues were even nicer than on the phone / video conferences, the food was good and hey: since you’re only allowed to travel the streets during daylight hours, you have to leave the office latest at 5pm 🙂 The hotel was also more than ok – it was clean, they had good food (and yes, I actually tried mutton brain – it was yummy!!) and there was even a ‘cigar lounge’ which turned out to be a place where you can get some drinks (if you can call a Korean beer with ‘world famous hop from Germany’ a drink).

Only one time I was a little concerned about security. On the 2nd day on the way from the hotel to the office, our car was making some loud noise and then we had a flat tire. In an armored car. Ok, the driver assured me it wasn’t a flat tire but a ‘worn out stud’ but whatever that means: as a matter of fact, we could not continue our drive in the armored car and we had to change from an armored car to a ‘soft skin’ car where even the seat belts didn’t work. Heyho, at least some adventure.

All in all I always felt safe and would love to explore Pakistan a lot more. If only I could activate godmode somehow…

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Wanna get up early again? You can go fishing. And then see dolphins.

So another great thing to do in Dubai is have friends who own a boat. Then you can bug them and somehow get them to get up at 5:30 in the morning for ‘fishing’. Of course they have fishing gear. Of course you will not catch anything. But if you’re lucky you see dolphins. Like quite a lot. And do fun stuff with the crazy 8.

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Welcome to Dubai

So far my experience here with the police was good. Only the procedures are sometimes a little annoying (then again, I dont want to know how annoying they are in Germany…). But now I got surprised a little.

This morning when I was commuting, I had a chat with a colleague about the police, how friendly the Dubai police is as long as you stay calm and relaxed.

Then I got a text message from Dubai police saying I got fined on September 1st and need to pay 200 AED (50Euro). I didn’t really recall doing anything wrong (except for exceeding the speed limit by 20km/h probably…).

Then I checked it on the internet and found that:Inquiry and Payment of Traffic Fines - Google Chrome_2015-09-09_10-44-55

And when paying it, another 10 AED ‘Knowledge Fee’ was added. Knowledge what? Are they teaching me a lesson?

“it’s how they recover their investment on IT”
Well. Thanks. Welcome to Dubai.