I love the Internet. Have I mentioned how much I love the Internet? I love the Internet because my memory for details isn’t always the world’s greatest, and I’m a bit disorganized, so writing down details often doesn’t help (my current brain, a small spiral bound notebook that stores everything from book recommendations to my aunts’ email addresses, is … somewhere, in this house). However, when I store things online (and remember to tag them properly) they’re easy to find, which means that in preparation for Thanksgiving this week, I can read about TDay 2.0 from this year, and be reminded of important things that I’d completely forgotten about (such as the fact that the turkey took twice as long as it should have to thaw, and that it had innards tucked inside that needed to be removed before cooking. Luckily, this was a holy water blessed happy organic bird, and the giblets were packed in paper, not plastic.) So, far anyone who is cooking a big meal for the holidays this year for the first time, that’s my first bit of advice: write down everything, from how well dishes went over to how long things took to cook, so that the next year, you can make new and more interesting mistakes. :)

My family has generally gone up to Baltimore for Thanksgiving with my mother’s family. However, the matriarch of the family, my grandmother, passed away this fall, and so we decided to stay down here for this Thanksgiving and just do Thanksgiving with our immediate family (mom, dad, me, Jeff, my two sisters, and our cousin-that’s-more-of-a-brother). I suggested that we split up the cooking so that no one person was going crazy with all the cooking, and everyone agree that was a good idea. So, we’re having:

pre-dinner gaming and cooking munchies

chex mix (my mother makes the best chex mix on the planet. One day, I need to remember to get the recipe from her)
sausage balls
spinach balls

dinner
turkey
stuffing
French bread (one of my sisters doesn’t care for stuffing, so yes, we’re having both bread and stuffing. If the bread doesn’t vanish during the cooking and gaming stage of the day)
green beans
corn
mashed potatoes and gravy
stuffed mushrooms
yams with brown sugar and marshmallows
cranberry sauce

dessert

pumpkin roll
pecan pie
whatever else my mom makes - she loves dessert, and is good at it, and I doubt she’ll keep to a pecan pie. :)

Jeff and I are responsible for the pumpkin roll, the turkey, the stuffing, the sausage balls, and the French bread.

I need to make a grocery list and a plan of attack for the day itself, so we don’t end up eating at 9pm. :)

… though my thesis, my semester, and other various and sundry events occasionally conspire to try.

We’re still here and still cooking away, though I haven’t been posting. Most of it has been the same meals we eat a lot of already: tacos, homemade pizza, tofu teriyaki, salad and roasted potatoes, chili, pasta. There hasn’t been anything terribly interesting in the last month, because I haven’t had the brain cycles for it.

However, we have fixed a couple of things that stand out as having been very tasty:

- pizza topped with potatoes and country ham. It sounds odd - potatoes on top of bread, more or less? - but it turned out to be very tasty. We used less cheese, too, because the potatoes provided a lot of bulk. Very tasty, indeed.
- barbecue beef sandwiches: Cook stew beef on low in the crock pot for 8 hours or on high for 4 to 5. Shred the meat with a fork and knife, either right in the pot or on a cutting board. Add in enough barbeque sauce to cover, and cook for another 30 minutes to an hour, long enough to heat the sauce through. Serve on hamburger buns with a bit of sharp cheddar. Good stuffs.

So. I just wanted to post that I’m still here and I’m going to try to get back into the habit of posting, though when school starts getting crazy, blogging (and the internet in general) is the first thing to go. (Luckily, cooking is not.)

Saturday: dinner at my mom’s and dad’s
Sunday: tofu terriyaki
Monday: beef ribs, twice baked potatoes
Tuesday: tacos, squash
Wednesday: pancakes
Thursday: salad
Friday: roasted chicken, salads, something with potatoes

We had used the same pizza crust for quite awhile. However, it makes a very thick, bready crust, even on our 16 inch pizza pan. So, we started looking around at other recipes, and eventually tried a recipe from a Moosewood cookbook. It was tasty, but didn’t freeze very well; it stretched out too easily and came out very thin. So, next, we tried this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. The first time, I doubled it, since our pizza pan looked quite a bit bigger than theirs. It was good, but thicker than we were aiming for. I tried a single recipe on a vegan pizza with some friends, and it was tasty, but too thin; it didn’t hold up to the toppings very well, even without the cheese (again, I emphasize that I was using the dough on a pan probably twice the size of the one pictured. The dough being too thin was not the recipe’s fault.) Last night I tried 1.5 times the recipe, and, presto! It was perfect. Not too thin, not too thick, yeasty and chewy and everything I like a pizza dough to be. I think we have a winner.

Saturday: I was out with a friend, so Jeff had meatball sandwiches
Sunday: big fat salad
Monday: bbq tofu, twice baked potatoes, salad
Tuesday: chili pie chili and corn muffins
Wednesday: date night! We have coupons to Moe’s tacos.
Thursday: salad
Friday: pizza

Hey folks -

I’ve hit the point in the semester when school starts taking over every spare brain cell (I’m a grad student) so posting is probably going to be sporadic until the end of April. I’m planning on doing some catch-up this weekend, but I just wanted to let you know that we’re still here, just busy busy. :)

homemade pizza

Meal: Homemade pizza topped with cheese, meatballs, and garlic
Approximate cost: $5.60 for a 16 inch pizza
Leftovers: 3 slices (each 1/8 of the pizza), which will make lunch today for the two of us
Actual hands-on time: 30 minutes
Total time needed: About 2.5 hours (depending on your bread machine)

I’ll admit, I was too much of a wimp to make homemade pizza until the advent of the bread machine in our lives. However, homemade pizza is now just about easier than anything else, and it’s certainly cheaper than ordering pizza (what does a 16 inch 2-topping delivered cost these days, anyhow? And with tip added on?) I’m told that pizza dough from scratch without the machine isn’t that hard, and maybe I’ll give it a try sometime soon just to see. However, most of the advantage of the bread machine for us is that there isn’t a spot warm enough in our kitchen to rise dough in any reasonable length of time. There’s a trick you can use where you warm the oven for a bit and then let dough rise in it, but I’ve not had much luck with that. The bread machine makes turning out consistent bread, roll, and pizza dough much easier.

The dough recipe we use comes from America’s Best Bread Machine Baking Recipes.

• 1 cup warm water
  
• 3 cups bread flour
  
• 1 tbs sugar
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1-1/4 tsp yeast (Note: Most bread machine recipes call for “bread machine yeast”, which is supposed to be faster acting than regular yeast. However, I’ve been successfully using normal yeast in our bread machine recipes, and since we buy it in bulk, it’s much cheaper than “bread machine yeast.”).
  

Add ingredients to your bread machine pan in the order specified by your manual, and run on the dough cycle.

When the dough is done (the dough cycle on our machine is 1-1/2 hours), preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, pull the dough out of pan and let it rest, covered on a plate. When the oven is preheated (or after about 10 minutes, whichever is longer), mush the dough out into your pizza pan or pans, stone, or whatever you care to use. This dough recipe makes a thickish crust (about the kind of crust you would expect if you ordered “hand tossed” at a take-out place) for a 16 inch pizza, so it would easily make two smaller ones, or even more individual ones, if you have topping disagreement in your house.

Once the dough is in the pan, pre-bake it in the oven (just the dough - no toppings at this point) for 10-12 minutes (depending on how brown you like your crust and the size of your pan or pans.) If you skip this step, you will end up with soggy pizza crust. Trust me.

While the crust is baking, prepare your toppings. We generally just do cheese, but last night we used leftover sauce from the spaghetti, complete with meatballs. I pulled out the meatballs and chopped them up into small bits. I also chopped up several cloves of garlic and shredded up about 7 ounces total of cheese. We like our pizza cheese heavy, which adds to the cost; if you’re trying to make a cheaper pizza, go heavy on the vegetables and add just a scattering of cheese, or none at all. Top different halves or quarters of the pizza in different ways to suit different people. The great thing about making pizza at home is that you can get exactly what you want.

When the crust is done baking, top the pizza with whatever you want, then put the whole thing back in the oven for about another 15 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and starting to brown. Leftovers keep well in the refrigerator for a few days.