Pizza and breadsticks, part II

My regular readers know that I recently made some pizza with minced garlic in the crust to see if the garlic would retard the rising of the yeast. Here's part II of this fascinating series. Take a chug of vodka and yell Whoot!

Oh, sorry... wrong series there! Earlier this week, I did see that episode of SHCWSL where Sandra looks deep INto the camera and says "Baking is my absolute specialty"which had me giggling like a five year old at the absurdity of that woman. If baking is her specialty then I'm a ninja!

*Composes self and attempts to look very serious*

Okay, well I decided to try making pizza again and not delete the pictures with my itchy trigger finger. I'm using Rosie Hawthorne's pizza crust recipe for this experiment in case anybody wants to try this at home.

I'm using my bread machine to make the dough here. INto your bread pan, place the following in whatever order your machine specifies:
1 egg
1 packet yeast ( or 2 1/4 tsps if you buy yours in bulk)
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 cup bread flour
****1/2 Tablespoon garlic powder **** Hairball's addition

Set your bread machine to the dough setting, turn it on, and watch it knead for a few minutes.Then add in more bread flour a Tablespoon at a time till a nice dough forms that the three bears would love. (Not too wet, not too dry, just right.) Let your machine go through the dough cycle.


This is during the rise, about ten minutes before the cycle is over.




Once the dough cycle has finished, remove the dough and pour a little olive oil on your pan and plunk your dough on your pan. Do you like a thin crust or a thicker one? If you like thin then cut your dough in half and follow Rosie's directions for thin crust pizza with bread sticks and if you like thicker crust then omit the bread sticks while following her directions.



I browned some fresh Mexican chorizo. Okay, some of you are saying you've never seen chorizo that looks like the above picture. Homesick Texan has a great post about making your own fresh Mexican chorizo if you are interested. Dr.Bacon also sells it frozen and we got some of his to try once we eat up what I still have in the freezer from the grocery store.





I baked the pizza just until it got a little color, (especially on that left side! LOL) and then pulled it out to do my toppings. I made my pizza sauce from a can of tomato paste and mixed in some olive oil, salt, and pepper. Next, I nuked some pepperoni for 40 seconds like Rosie recommends.( It really does help reduce the grease on your pizza! )I used a semi-ho bag of grated mozzarella and some Parmesan that I buzzed up in the food processor earlier. Then I put the pepperoni and browned chorizo on top and slid the pizza into the oven as per Rosie's instructions. Watch it more carefully than I did though as mine got a bit toasty on the edges! It looks like the chorizo burned on the top but that was actually okay it just looks funny in this picture.



For the bread sticks, I followed Rosie's instructions except that my dough already had olive oil on it so I didn't use any butter on them before sprinkling on some of the Parmesan. Next time I'll do the butter. If you like your bread sticks on the salty side, you may want to put a little salt on top before baking them.

Once again, the garlic didn't seem to retard the yeast. Just how much garlic does it take?!?

Pictures and assorted ramblings...

Went out to the meat lab and bought some more beef bacon, tenderized round steak, and summer sausage. Mr Hairball wanted to try the summer sausage so I got some of that. There is one really nice meat science professor who usually waits on us when we go out there and I always think of him as Dr. Bacon. *grins*

The round steak will be used for chicken fried steak, the beef bacon is for our Saturday brunches, and the summer sausage will be for Mr. Hairball's "party trays". He loves to make up a plate of munchies like olives, cheese, nuts, crackers, some kind of processed meat, etc... and calls it a "party tray".

I made a simple chicken stir-fry earlier in the week. Mr. Hairball doesn't like most cooked vegetables so he fished out all the chicken and ate that with some of the rice I made. He said it was good but, I sure wish I could get him to eat more cooked vegetables. He will eat small portions of certain roasted vegetables so in the summer, I pretend I'm Ina Garten and make roasted green beans or asparagus.

I'm tried out my 'new to me' bread machine, and it seems to work just fine. Mr. Hairball has requested that I make him some cranberry walnut bread so that is on the plan for next week. I'm thinking again about saving up for a grain mill as I've read about how freshly ground flour is more nutritious and that items made with such flour are mighty tasty.

We only have one piece of cake left so I think the next thing I bake will be Chocolate Dipped Orange Butter Cookies from Joanna's Kitchen. I ran into some good sales on butter so I'll use some of it up on some cookies.

Now from what I've been told, I should already be in the fetal position sobbing hysterically about the "birthday of doom" that I have coming up on 01/20/2009. The thing is I am as they say in my neck of the woods, "ornery" and just plain refuse to waste time gnashing my teeth about getting older as there is not a blessed thing I can do about it. You either get older or you die and I'm not ready to jump off this merry-go-round just yet. Every year I live I'm hopefully a little bit smarter than I was the year before.



There was a big sale on canned soup at the grocery store today. I had coupons so I really stocked up. I think 74 cans of soup should last us quite a long time! I also stocked up on peanut butter and frozen veggies. Knowing that I have lots of stuff squirreled away in the pantry and in my little freezer, means that I don't have an excuse to eat out on those nights when I'm sick or just don't feel like cooking. I think of it as "budget insurance" since stuff from my pantry or freezer is much cheaper than ordering pizza or going through the drive-through.



My MIL gave us an aerogarden for Christmas. Mr. Hairball is the gardener. One day we will have a real garden but, this is nice if you are in an apartment like we are.


This is the cat we adopted back in February of '98. She was pregnant when we adopted her.Twelve hours later, she had six kittens. It was a wild time trying to corral the kittens so that they didn't destroy the apartment while we were out. We found homes for the four boy kittens and kept Momma Cat and her two daughters. Sadly one of her daughters died in June of '08. Here's a picture of her. She is dearly missed.




This one is nicknamed Momma Cat Junior (MCJ) because she fawns all over Momma Cat just like Chester did to Spike in the old Merrie Melodies cartoon.

Tree for Two Scene
Uploaded by thadk

Momma Cat also smacks MCJ with her paw when she's had enough of her being in her face. I feel bad for MCJ but, it is also really funny as Momma Cat just has this look of complete exasperation on her face.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!