Pizza Margherita Experiment


July 22, 2012

I mentioned a problem earlier that I had looked at my expenses. That post had to do with my attempt at breaking my addiction to going to the nearby corporate coffee shop, which I still enjoy doing. I like to sit and watch the people there, aside from drinking the coffee. At the same time that I looked at how much I spend on coffee and covert people watching I looked at how much I spend a month on food and clearly I should weigh 458 pounds by now. The lesson from all of that is that I've been broke for the past 6 months and didn't realize it and that I will be broke until the 2nd week in November. I don't know how this works out, but I did a basic budget and that's what it tells me. This is assuming, of course, that I keep within my budget, which allows for much less money being spent on food.

I've been eating at home. Sandwiches, salads, chicken, sausage, rice, pasta... things that I have in the house already or don't cost that much. I do allow myself fresh vegetables. However, I've also felt the need to be more creative with my food because, while I buy good deli meat, sandwiches get old after a while.

I have a basil plant, so I did a search for things that I could do with it. The most popular was a pizza margherita. There a zillion different varieties of recipes so I read a few and decided to do something that would work for my home.

First is the crust. I'm not about to buy yeast and begin making bread. One of the ideas was to do something quick, so making a crust, though it would be immensely fulfilling, would be too involved at the moment. Maybe later. I decided to buy a crust, but when I got to the store a focaccia bread in the bakery caught my eye and it was about the same price, so I picked it up. Of course, it's almost universally understood that pizza margherita is supposed to use a very thin crust, but I'm not trying to be traditional here.

I wish, I WISH that I had had homegrown tomatoes. I picked up a vine-ripened tomato. I already had mozzarella cheese in the fridge. It's not the balls of fresh cheese, though that would have been even better. Again, we're thinking budget and I already had this ingredient.

So, I cut the bread in half. It was slightly over a foot long, and that's a bit much for one sitting. I brushed the half with olive oil – after drizzling it from my Jason Hooper hand-thrown ceramic olive oil bottle. I put very thinly sliced tomato, I put kosher salt and fresh ground pepper on the tomatoes, and added mozzarella sliced about 1/4 inch thick. I tore up pieces of basil, sprinkled it across the top, and drizzled the whole thing with more olive oil. Then I put it into on a cookie sheet into the oven, preheated at 400º. Almost all of the recipes called for 8 – 9 minutes, but this was done in 6.

Once I took it out of the oven, I added more fresh basil to the top.

Result: I would probably skip the basil before cooking; I think cooking it killed the flavor. Again, using home grown tomatoes would make it SO much better (I just LOVE home grown tomatoes) and I can see that a thinner crust would be good, but this bread toasted and was slightly crunchy and was wonderful to eat even without anything on top. Another thing that is almost universally agreed is to be spare with the ingredients – don't cover every millimeter of crust with stuff.

The tomatoes cooked down to be like a sauce and I had layered mozzarella on top of some of the pieces, and basil on some. I did a pretty good job of mixing up the stuff on top for a variety of flavors in each bite.

I will definitely do this again. I will also try to find a market for homegrown tomatoes because there's just nothing like fresh homegrown tomatoes to make life better.







Thank you for reading.

eArnie

Finishing with a Kick in the Pants


July 19, 2012

I have finished Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I very much enjoyed the book, but I have mixed emotions about it.

Most of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I looked forward to getting off work to read it, the way I hear people at work getting excited about watching the TV show they're currently keeping up with. Contrast that with the book I'm reading now, which I put down regularly and wonder if there's something else I could be reading, Fried Green Tomatoes is definitely a keeper. I spent many hours sitting on the patio reading while my cats nibbled on grass, and in the recliner, which one cat has pretty much claimed as her own and I have to ask special permission to use. I went a long time without using it and they've gotten out of the habit of sitting on my lap. I need to get back to that. I need more books like this one.

A buddy of mine who is a teacher once gave a few of us a minor lecture about the difficulty of writing a narrative by jumping back and forth in time. It was a warning and a suggestion that we not try it unless we were seasoned writers. In a side-by-side with the movie, I can say that the movie went back and forth from present to past (depression era). The book – much more so than the movie – jumps around in time. It doesn't just go from present day to the past; it jumps from present day to two main points in the past and a sprinkling of other temporal locations. Each chapter begins with the date and place, but it was fairly easy from context to figure out where in the century I was, but that might be because I saw the movie first and I knew what was going to happen in one timeline, so I could tell when I was reading in the other.

I thought that she handled it very well, but I felt that there was perhaps a bit too much of it; too many different times. Not that I lost track (I didn't) but it just seemed a little too much. Along the same lines, there seemed to be more characters than one is used to reading about. I didn't feel, necessarily, that there were simply too many characters, but that possibly too much time was taken in following up on so many of them. Taking time to digress and give history about a couple of key minor players is good, but we seemed to be all over the place at times. And while she tied most of it together in the end, I'm not sure that it all added to the story, enough to justify the erratic flow.

As I said before, a lot of it is about a woman in the 80's waking up and discovering that she's no longer a young woman and that perhaps all of the rules she's been following so closely weren't as important as she had thought. Similar to Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind in that respect.

The other part, now that's a real kick in the pants. What's hinted at in the movie is just stated flat out in the book. I don't like to write spoilers, so I'll be vague. But, there were a couple of fabulously unexpected things toward the end of the book/movie. I loved reading about the love and loyalty that Flagg expresses, even though I could feel my more orthodox Catholic friends squirm a little in my mind while I read those parts. Clearly, I'm not one to judge anybody, much less fictional characters or the author who writes them. And the disapproval that my mind projects onto my unsuspecting friends only makes it more delicious.

This was a book well worth reading. I purchased it on my Nook, but I would actually like to have it on my bookshelf. Thank you for reading this review. I look forward to writing more soon.

Until then I remain

Your friend in books,

eArnie


Not Quite Right


7/11/2012

This afternoon two coworkers asked if I wanted ice cream. I mean, do you even need to ask? Before we went to the break room Donna was picking cat hair off my shirt and Annette asked if I had my shirt on inside out. I said no, it was just some cat hair. Annette pointed out the buttons and Donna put her finger on the seam between the torso and the sleeve and sure 'nuf the shirt was on inside out. But oh well; let's get ice cream.

So, I got home and decided that I want coffee. Two days ago I made the mistake of calculating how much money I spend by going to the corporate coffee shop every day, so I proceeded to make my own coffee. I ground the beans for 15 seconds and poured the grinds into the reservoir. Something seems slightly amiss, like in the back of my mind, but not enough to pay attention to. Then I got the coffee cup, filled it with cold water from the refrigerator because I read that using cold water makes better coffee. I poured the water into the Mr. Coffee coffee maker and saw sludge swimming around in it, then I noticed the coffee filter, which was still white. As in, there were no coffee grinds in it. I had put them into the reservoir and then poured the water right in on top of them and presto I had cold sludge in a very difficult part of the machine to reach.

It's what I get for calculating how much I spend a month at corporate coffee houses.

eArnie


Update to Fried Green Tomatoes


7/2/2012

Update: I went to my local bookstore this afternoon and purchased a cup of coffee. But, more to the point, I looked at their copy of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. The chapter I was referring to in my previous post is on page 40 in their copy, which is a trade paperback published by Ballantine Books. 

Thank you.

eArnie