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An oldie, but a goodie; always appropriate on 3.14!Life is Good! 

An oldie, but a goodie; always appropriate on 3.14!Life is Good! 

Thank heavens I got the pizza’s baked last night, I sure won’t have the energy tonight. And a 72 hour ferment? Absolute perfection. I don’t think I can go back to an overnight ferment. Everything from taste to texture is much better with the longer fermentation, and shaping/stretching is much easier as well.

I think these crust shots speak for themselves. This is the last dough formula I posted, and I love it. The dough is mixed and worked with stretch and folds over the course of the day, then refrigerated until ready to use. It ...

I felt mostly good yesterday, and back to a hundred percent this morning. I’ll be getting my walk in again after three days of skipping it. Jim had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and had no side effects at all from it. Yay!

I did manage to finish getting all the threads buried in the churn dash quilt yesterday at least, although I probably missed a few and will have to bury them as I find them if so.

I’d planned to work on the binding, but Siri cat had other ideas. It’s about halfway done. Of course ...

Yesterday was cloud covered and very windy, and absolute beautiful day to walk at the lake after lunch, despite being over eighty degrees. It felt fabulous!

I met a couple of the girls and we got our six miles in, but while walking we almost stepped on a large copperhead, noticing it just in time to step well back and chase it off the trail with a branch and some rocks. Scary, as it was quite angry and jumping.

Further up the trail we came upon a snapping turtle.

Now mean humans don’t scare me nearly as much as ...

Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded in the world’s worst nuclear accident, fission reactions are smoldering again in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside a mangled reactor hall. “It’s like the embers in a barbecue pit,” says Neil Hyatt, a nuclear materials chemist at the University of Sheffield.

Thirty five years ago, on April 27, 1996, a DAY after the disaster, I was outside with my son, who was playing in the grass, while I was on the patio listening to AFN, the military radio station for Hahn AFB and we were living ...

Saturday, in my funk, I decided making pizza on Sunday would help move my mind to a better place. I decided to up my dough hydration to 75%, but everything else being the same. Same method, mixed the night before with 4-5 stretch and folds before a bulk ferment overnight on the counter, dough split into two balls in the morning, and refrigerated until two hours before I was ready to bake. The first hour is to let the dough come to room temperature, and the second is for stretching the dough.

50g 100% rye hydration starter
15g olive oil ...

My iris beds are beginning to pop. I have so many purple irises of the old variety, found along ditches and abandoned home sites. I also have quite a few of the white ones, which are my least favorite, but they were here at the house when we bought it and I have split them many times over the years.

Irises are my favorite flower, and they were loved by my youngest son as well. April is a bittersweet month for me, as they begin to bloom I’m equally torn between joy and grief. The specialty irises I planted ...

For all of you fans of the Divine Miss M, she now has her own Pinterest board. Anything she poses for will be added there. I was a bit surprised when she made the request, and you know what she told me? “I’m famous! I can have a cult following and people all over the world will love me!”

Hmmm… I am but her obedient slave.

The more I work with Spelt, the more I see why it has such a following. While Einkorn is my favorite for taste, Spelt is sooo much easier to work with. Yesterday I ...

Look who crawled downstairs? I think Miss Myrtle smelled cheese. I don’t know how, the aroma of freshly shaved garlic surely overwhelmed it, combined with the rosemary!

The potato pizza was a bit of a hassle to make. I soaked the potatoes (Yukon Gold’s) in salt water for a couple of hours, then drained, pressed, and squeezed the water out of them, before lightly coating them in olive oil and tossing with pepper, freshly grated parmesan and garlic, and some rosemary out of our garden.

The 65% hydration sourdough crust performed beautifully again, despite the amount of heavy ...

What a gorgeous day it’s going to be as well! I will be spending it with my mom, and we will be eating…

PIZZA!

Yesterday’s 65% hydration pizza dough was such a success that my mom and I decided to repeat it again today to make sure it wasn’t a fluke! LOL

The lesser hydration amount made for a dough that was very easy to handle, and it had nice puffy and airy edges with a perfectly thin crust under the toppings.

Oh but let me tell you about the toppings! I use marinated artichoke hearts, sliced ...