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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Things more important than food
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Things more important than food

Flatbread pizzas are perfect for born-again culture-vulture Pamela Timms

Garnish the pizza with a handful of rocket leaves. Photo: Pamela TimmsPremium
Garnish the pizza with a handful of rocket leaves. Photo: Pamela Timms

Every year around this time in Edinburgh, it feels as if the whole world has come to stay. Hundreds of thousands of visitors descend to take part in an incredible month of culture. Well, it used to be a month. This year, it has been a whole summer of fun, starting with the Film Festival in June, followed by the Jazz and Blues Festival in July, the International Festival, the Military Tattoo (complete with a Bollywood section this year), the Festival Fringe, the Book Festival…

To give some idea of the scale, this year there were over 3,000 events in the Fringe alone, everything from comedy shows and circuses to obscure physical theatre and student productions. It’s an exhilarating and hugely enjoyable time to be in the city, although sometimes the impact of a million visitors on a population of under 500,000 can make many long for September.

This year the International Festival was kicked off by an extraordinary event called The Harmonium Project, a visual representation of what happens in people’s brains when they sing. The event was the brainchild of a company called 59 Productions, which also created the light show for the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. The company was asked to create an artwork to accompany composer John Adams’ Harmonium, a choral setting of poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson.

In collaboration with academics at the University of Edinburgh’s informatics department, they collected data from the members of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus while they were singing, recording heart rate, eye movement and brain activity. A team of animators then transformed the data into an ambitious light show that was projected on to the exterior of the city’s main concert centre, The Usher Hall, for the opening night of the festival.

The event brought the city centre to a standstill as thousands of people flocked to the streets nearby to watch. No one was disappointed. The effect, wrote one critic, was “mesmerisingly beautiful: there is a sensation of seeing the human body as it experiences a great piece of classical music, turned inside out". On Twitter, somebody reported that even the bunch of rowdy drunks next to him had been awed into silence.

I think it’s fair to say it was one of the most not-to-be missed events of the entire summer. So how come I did manage to miss an exquisite piece of culture taking place less than half a mile from my house? Very simple: food. I was fiddling with a new recipe and watching chef Rick Stein’s new TV show—the first I knew of The Harmonium Project was on my Twitter feed the next morning.

I was furious with myself and vowed to reduce kitchen-related activities to the bare minimum for the remainder of the festival. Sometimes, I decided, there really is more to life than food. Sometimes eating is just something to squeeze in between more exciting activities, and these almost instantly ready flatbread pizzas are perfect for a born again culture-vulture.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see Little Bulb Theatre’s Wail, a show that “takes inspiration from cutting-edge scientific research into the song patterns of humpback whales and explores the mysteries and motivations behind both human and animal song in a cabaret-style performance using their trademark multi-instrumentalist approach".

Yikes, you never know, I might be ready to spend a bit more time in the kitchen by next week.

Artichoke and Prosciutto Flatbread Pizza

Serves 1

For those times when life gets in the way and you need to eat something tasty and sustaining, fast. There are good ready-made flatbreads available in most Delhi markets, although if you have a little time, you might like to make a batch of simple flatbreads like the ones below as and when you need them.

Ingredients

One flatbread—whatever you have to hand (leftover naan or chapati would also work)

50g mozzarella, sliced—if you can get hold of Scamorza (smoked mozzarella—Flanders Dairy makes a good one), it would be delicious

25g mature Cheddar, grated

3-4 marinated artichoke slices from a jar

1-2 slices prosciutto

A handful of rocket leaves

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Lay the flatbread on a baking tray. Place the mozzarella and Cheddar evenly over it. Put the artichoke pieces on top. Bake for 5-7 minutes. Tear pieces of the prosciutto and drop on top of the hot pizza, followed by the rocket leaves. Devour immediately.

Flatbreads

Makes 6 perfect pit-stop sized breads

Ingredients

150g wholewheat flour (atta)

1 and half tsp baking powder

Half tsp salt

150g plain yogurt

A little oil for frying

Method

Mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add the yogurt and mix to form a dough. On a floured board, knead the dough for a minute or two until completely smooth (you may need to add a little more flour to stop it sticking). Wrap the dough in cling film, then refrigerate for an hour or so.

Divide the dough into six pieces. Knead each piece into a smooth ball and roll out as thinly as possible. Put a little oil in a frying pan or tawa and heat. Put the rolled out flatbread into the pan and cook lightly on both sides. Put aside until you’re ready to make the pizza.

Watch The Harmonium Project as it happened:

The Way We Eat Now is a fortnightly column on new ways of cooking seasonal fruits, vegetables and grains. Pamela Timms tweets at @eatanddust and posts on Instagram as Eatanddust.

Also Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 29 Aug 2015, 12:23 AM IST
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