Pizza making memories
Say what? Yes, we have some fond memories of making homemade pizza's and we look back at that as a fun and succesful experience. To share this memory with you, we have to rewind to summer 2016 when we went volunteering in the mountains near Sevilla in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere (litteraly) where we ended up staying for 7 weeks in total.
The heat was unbearable and communication was hard in the beginning as we spoke a few words Spanish only and our host spoke 0 words English, haha. We also have some really fun memories about those situations but let's focus on the pizza side of this cool experience for today.
Cooking
Although in the past our host served dinners to the guests, he long lost his passion for this activity and rather tried to do as minimum as possible and hide in his room or smoke outside on the terrace instead. That's probably the reason he hired workawayers, either way, it was clear he had 0 passion left.
We weren't really excited every day either having just a few rooms with AC's and our room (with private terrace, which was cool) wasn't one of them. I remember vividly that my boyfriend could barely sleep and often ended up throwing a mattrass on the rooftop to watch the stars at night, hoping he'd fall asleep.
One of our tasks was preparing breakfast for the guests and afterwards for us. Our host would always put on the news on tv, very loud, and we both remember it was always flooded with negativity, we hated having to sit there and watch and hear the negative stuff this early on the day, what a way to start your day, right?
We got the hang of everything soon
Even though we had our 3 month old baby with us, who was a challenge at that time, with her lot of crying and us being overheated there without a pool in the B&B, we got the hang out of everything rather quickly.
We didn't mind working hard when the rooms were filled, but most of the times it was just a few rooms. We worked together really well while the owner didn't do much himself. But we got a roof over our head and food provided so we were content. We met some cool people there, I still wonder if the little boy who played football for Seville's youth team ever became famous but I only remmber his first name, a real common Spanish name, Javier.
We tried introducing some excitement in the kitchen by making smoothies and offering them to guests to show the owner it didn't have to be very difficult to make some extra profits. It worked well but he just didn't want to anymore it was clear.
Homemade pizza
One of our memories where we got lost in translation was when we were first going to make homemade pizza from scratch. You have to understand that this was such a secluded area that there was just a tiny shop in this village where you could only buy a few common things such as milk, ham and chips etc, it was not meant for your daily groceries for sure.
Therefore a truck with all sorts of items came to the village once a week, bringing either what was ordered by the people living there the previous week plus a basic assortment of fresh items to make sure they had everything they needed. You had to think about what you were going to eat to make sure you had everything in house for the guests and ourselves.
The owner proposed to make homemade pizza one day and when making the grocery list, he said we needed "Triturado", remember, we barely understood a few words Spanish and not having to deal with groceries ourselves until then, we surely had no clue about all the grocery items and their names in Spanish yet. We asked what triturado was, and the best thing he could say and repeat was
"Triturado es triturado" and then we'd laugh because that was not helpful at, lol.
Until this very day every time we are buying this tomato item called triturado in Spanish, we repeat this joke to each other as it was just one of these things that was so funny that we keep laughing about this even 9 years later. We were still so not used to googling stuff simply because we had no clue about the pronunciation of Spanish letters and words so that made it very difficult.
Another example was something he kept saying sounding as "bale bale" it took forever to figure out he said "vale vale". Anyway, the time was a great experience and eventually, we ended up making the best pizza, with some help of the owner showing us the part of making the dough.
Running the B&B without the owner
The owner decided to go on a holiday for 8 days, in the final week before we'd move to our next (and final) host in Granada. Weeks earlier he didn't trust us at the reception due to the language barrier but he then decided that the 7th week he could leave us by ourselves.
We decided to introduce the homemade pizza for the neighbours who often sat there using his internet (leaving us with barely any signal left, sigh) and our pizza's sold like hot buns. They were a HUGE success. We also offered homemade smoothies to our guests and guess what? They also sold well. As we bought all ingredients from our own money, we were able to make some money with these things and that was a good thing because in the end the owner only paid us 70 euros for taking care of his B&B while there was a HUGE wildfire and we barely had any sleep due to fire fighters arriving in the middle of the night.
Homemade pizza with the help of our daughter
Our daughter was just 3 or 4 months old at the time we were making these pizza's but now she's 9 years old so she wanted to help with this pizza we recently made. The only request was no tuna on her part! We cut the pizza in 3 parts, as you can see below, this was before it went into the oven.
The left side has mushrooms and tuna with red onions, the middle part has grilled chicken and cheese only, while my right part has grilled chicken, red onions and corn on it.
Cutting the pizza in three, we all had 2 good slices, this is how it turned out:
Everything looks better with a view, right?
We obviously shared the triturado joke with our daughter while topping the pizza as it will remain a fun memory forever in our lives. This whole workaway experience was something we'd recommend everyone to do once in their lives.
Although it doesn't have to be as drastic as we did it, never returning to our home country, just some weeks or a month, or maybe a full summer will be such an enriching experience for your life you will never forget. On top of that, it's much cheaper than going on a regular holiday having to pay for a roof and food.
We are now getting the hang of these homemade pizza's again and will probably make them more often, it's so much fun and tastes so much better than any supermarket bought pizza!
All pictures above are my own.