The Spirit Moves Me

I had a good day at church, although looking at it superficially, it would not seem so.

Last night I forgot about the time change (or rather, I didn’t know the date in the first place, because I don’t watch TV). I went to bed at the usual hour, thinking everything was swell. Then a neighbor’s unbelievably loud party woke me up at what I thought was 11:00 p.m. I was not too happy about it, but I try not to make trouble for my neighbors if I can avoid it (Psalm 15), so I did not call the cops. Besides; this party had a loud emcee who was yelling in Spanish between salsa numbers, and from the sound of it, the party was quite a distance away. That usually means a fundraiser with a permit. Unbelievably, Coral Gables–the city which will prosecute you for painting your interior walls without permission–will allow you to keep your neighbors up until three a.m. if you get a permit.

While I was lying there awake, I remembered that the time change was in the news, and I checked to see if it was upon me. It was. That was fabulous. I had thought I was being kept awake until 1:00, on the night before rising at 6:00 to make pizza at church. In reality, I was being kept awake until 2:00.

Drove to church and got things moving. Things get more and more efficient; these days I try to make big batches of everything. I started by making about a gallon of yeast mixture, and as soon as I could, I began making dough with the woefully inadequate and messy Kitchenaid mixer.

I managed to get ten batches of dough done, and then I started making pizza, and things went great, except that very few people bought any. Apparently, I was not the only one who forgot the time change.

Things looked better after the second service, but then I realized the pizza wasn’t getting cooked. We had the same problem on Tuesday. The burner in the big convection oven refuses to turn on after a while, so it gets cooler and cooler, until you’re warming raw pizza instead of baking it.

We had a guy look at it this week, but evidently, he did not look at it hard enough. I managed to make a few pizzas in the smaller oven, but eventually, I gave up, and I had to throw out a gallon of sauce and four portions of dough. Orders were cancelled. Depressing.

He’s going to look at it again.

I wandered around looking for things to do, and down the hall, through a glass door, I saw what appeared to be part of an EMT truck, with a flashing light. I got to the end of the hall, and there were three EMTs working on a girl on a table. One of my fellow armorbearers was there. I helped with crowd control. Church was emptying, and half of the crowd had to leave through those doors.

The girl was about 15 and thin. I could see her bare feet at the end of the table, beside the paramedics. Her feet were shaking, as though she were jerking or seizing. Someone had found her unconscious in a bathroom. She was conscious when I saw her, but only barely. They were trying to get her to answer questions.

Prime opportunity to pray. I always pray when I see an ambulance. It’s a rule I have. If I tried to break it, I think I’d be unable to sleep later. Usually, I don’t know who I’m praying for. But here was this kid, on the table. Three feet away. Lucky for her the oven pooped out. Lucky, or something better than lucky.

While I was herding and praying, I saw a homeless guy I talk to on occasion. I say “homeless” because that was what I had suspected. I hadn’t really known. He’s a thin guy who often shows up wearing fatigues. He has a lady friend who sometimes appears with him.

The first time I met him, he was standing in the parking lot, trying to get people’s attention. I pulled over and rolled down the window, and we talked for a minute, and I gave him some assistance. You can’t turn someone down while you’re driving out of the parking lot after church. He appeared to be what is known as a street person. That gave me something to pray about on the way home.

I thought maybe he was someone who showed up at church on rare occasions to ask for favors, but he turned up again not long after that, in a TV audience at the TBN studio. My pastor was hosting Praise the Lord, so I decided to drive to Hollywood and check it out, and there the guy was. So he does go to church when he’s not after anything.

A few nights back, I saw him again, standing in front of the Wal-Mart across the street from the church. I was there to get olive oil and other pizza supplies. He did not look good. I wondered if he was on something. I did not speak to him on the way in, and he didn’t see me. I felt like I should have talked to him, so I decided to look for him on the way out.

He was still there. He looked almost ill. I don’t know what the problem was. I can’t judge. It could be a legitimate medical thing. I asked how he was, and he said something like, “not too good.” He said he was waiting for friends to give him a ride home. He asked which was I was going. I thought I should turn that around for my own sake, so I asked where he needed to go. He said he needed to go to Opa-Locka, which was out of my way. I said I was going south. I did not want to be in Opa-Locka after dark with a guy with this kind of troubles. I didn’t drive him, but I gave him a little help getting home.

Today I saw him leaving the church while we helped the EMTs, and I felt like I should say something, but he and his girlfriend drifted out with the crowd. I thought that was the end of it. I was glad to see him in church, after the way he had looked in front of Wal-Mart.

I went with a pastor and an armorbearer friend while they carried off the linens the girl had lain on; she had been vomiting. We all washed our hands, and I asked my friend if we were having any post-church meetings, and he inquired via radio while I waited. This all took a while. There was no meeting.

I left the building and turned toward my car, and walking toward me, five feet away, were the guy and his girlfriend. Like someone had dropped them there from a hidden chute. Okay, this time we were going to acknowledge each other. We shook hands. Danged if he didn’t need a ride again.

I had turned him town twice in the past, so I figured this was my day. The three of us got in my truck, and off we went to Opa-Locka.

They were thrilled that someone was giving them a lift. It was as if I had bought them the truck. What was I going to do? Drive off in comfort while these people roasted in the parking lot? His girlfriend was so grateful, she gave me a CD. She’s a Christian rapper. I did not see that coming. I thought it was very nice of her to give it to me, in view of their financial outlook, and I said I would listen to it.

We got to know each other a little. When they learned I was a writer, he said he was interested in doing a Christian book. I said it was a great idea, if he had a good testimony. He said he had one. He said he had been hit by a train and nearly blinded in one eye. He didn’t get around to the Christian part, but I admit, I’m always impressed when an able-bodied person tells me he has been hit by a train.

I asked how they found Trinity. His girlfriend said she had seen the church’s big white emblem over and over, on the side of the building, and that she had wanted to check the place out, so she decided they would go. He said they couldn’t always get a ride, and that on one occasion, they had walked.

That was sobering. I would guess they live six miles from the church.

I asked if they belonged to GAP (God Answers Prayer) groups. They did not. I told them it would make them feel more at home in church, and that it would help them get more out of it. He asked when my group met. I told him it met at 8 a.m. on Saturdays. He said that was right up his alley. So now I had that to think about.

She said she was good at teaching kids to sing. I said they probably needed people to do that at Trinity.

I told them about the bus ministry a friend of mine runs. He picks people up in a van and brings them to church. I said I didn’t know if it ran in his area, but that I could find out. I don’t think it does, but I haven’t worked with the bus ministry for a while. I could be wrong. They wrote their names and number on a scrap of paper, and I kept it. He said I should let him know if I knew of any little jobs he could do. Nothing strenuous, because of his condition. I nodded. I don’t really know a lot of people who need odd jobs done, but you never know.

I let them out in front of their house and went on my way.

The first time I met this guy, I was celebrating a victory in my life. That was one reason I had gone to the TBN taping. I wanted to get out of the house and go do something unusual and related to God, and the taping presented itself to me, so I went.

Does it mean anything that he’s suddenly back? Is it a reminder that another personal victory is in the making? It has to have significance. It’s just too weird, otherwise.

I don’t know what to do. I am not an outgoing person, and that is the main reason I don’t do much hands-on charity. When you deal with people who need help, bits of them tend to stick to you. It’s not a clean business. On the other hand, I think the lost are a huge concern to God, and very few people are willing to give them the time of day. Some people sink to the bottom of life, like leaves in a teacup, and they tend to stay there, and we were sent to pull them back up. Only Christians have the means to do it. I have been very conscious of this lately. I think it probably means a lot to people like this, just to be treated with common courtesy and respect.

I am not writing about this to portray myself as a saint. I’ve done almost nothing for these people, and I am not planning to give the man a kidney any time soon. I’m just writing this to document the strange events that took place today, and my impressions of them.

Things are going to get better. God has a good future planned for me.

Opposition is Profit

Okay, so I went to all-church prayer last night. I guess our church seats 1200. I would say seventy people were there. It’s funny, but whenever you show up during the week, when something needs to be done, you see the same people over and over. Over ten thousand people consider Trinity their church. Every weekend, about 3500 attend. But when the church has a need, members of a much smaller group usually fill it. We struggle as we decide how much of ourselves to give to God, and until you reach a certain point, you tend to be a spectator.

I was a couple of minutes late because I couldn’t get on the road until almost 7:30. By the time I got there, an associate pastor was up at the front, getting things going. Music was playing. Not the hard-hitting, loud stuff they play on the weekends. Worship music. The place was very dark.

He had us kneel in various parts of the church and pray individually. I find I can kneel and pray for about two minutes. After that, I can kneel or pray; not both. So I got into a chair after a bit.

After that, we went up front and got papers with transcribed prayer requests printed on them. They listed the first names of the people who had made the requests. I write a request or two on my donation envelope every week. I wondered what my requests had looked like, to the people who prayed over them.

I went down the list of people and problems as quickly as I could, trying to get to everyone giving anyone less than a good effort. There were praise reports at the bottom. People got healed and so on.

A few names and problems stuck in my mind. S. was in rehab in North Miami Beach; he even listed the room. M. had a lump in her breast. C. needed help with her mental health. These people had serious problems man could not fix. Prayer was their only hope. My obligation to them was a big deal. Who knows if they had anything else going for them? Maybe that week, I was it.

I realized I had fallen into selfishness lately. I had become involved in my own trivial problems and interests, and one of the costs was prayer time for other people. When you help other people in God’s name, inevitably, you help yourself. God’s power is like electricity; it works best when it has a completed circuit to flow through. It shouldn’t just accumulate in you like charge on a capacitor plate. It should pass through you into someone else. And like electricity passing through an object, it will cause you to radiate warmth and light. This seems to be true of all God’s blessings. In my church, we are taught, “I am blessed to be a blessing.” Money, power, talent…these things benefit you most when you put them to work for others.

I had been letting that slip. Praying for these unknown people brought it back to me, so even if I did them no good at all, I was much better off for showing up. I had something valuable to take home with me.

Sometimes when I go to church, I feel God’s power and presence very powerfully, like a thick but invisible fog, and I feel his power inside me, rising up and outward from inside me. I didn’t get there by the end of the prayer list, but I did try.

After that, the pastor had us go through the church, praying in the spirit, touching the chairs. The hope was that something would linger and touch the people who sat in them this weekend.

When I got back in my seat, the power was flowing. Finally. I thought I had prayed my way through, but then I wondered…how many people had touched this chair since I left it? Cloths taken from Paul’s body drove demons out of people. Who was to say the touch of some anointed person had not affected me as I sat in the chair?

Faith started to burgeon inside me. I felt wonderful. My worries were gone. Before going to the meeting, I had felt that I was walking in faith, and I suppose that was true, but it had been getting somewhat mechanical. At the meeting, I remembered: God is really here. Ultimately, problems are illusions. The worldly approach to life is full of anxiety and frustration. Remembering all this, I knew I was back on track.

This morning I went to my weekly prayer group. A couple of the guys talked about things they needed to work on, and I realized I was in the same boat. I need to get back to the long, serious prayer and study sessions I used to put in every morning. I need to relax and remember that every situation that seems to be a defeat or a disaster is actually going to work out for my good; God is ordering my steps. I need to do some more fasting, to get rid of some lingering problems in my attitude and behavior. In other words, to rid myself of the influence of some familiar hostile entities that lead me into trouble and postpone good things God wants to do for me.

One of my friends, Dave, started talking about demonic manifestations at church. I hadn’t seen much of this. He said he had seen a good deal of it. He sits in the back, and that’s where these things tend to happen. He talked about a fourteen-year-old girl who rolled on the ground and made growling noises during a service. Then there were two young men who showed up complaining that they heard voices. They said people at other churches had told them they were crazy. The pastor prayed with them for hours, and they had two weeks of deliverance. Not sure what’s happening now, but at least they know where to turn.

When I work as an armorbearer, I tend to stand at the rear of the church. They like to keep some of us up front, but you can’t watch the crowd from up there. Now that I’ve heard Dave’s stories, I think I’m right to stay farther back. I don’t want to be watching the choir when someone is having a manifestation. Those people belong in church. They disturb services, but they can’t get help anywhere else.

I got some great feedback on the pizza effort. I didn’t realize it was affecting people much, but one of the guys said it’s making a big impact on the way people see the cafe. One of the guys came in and learned how to make pizza a couple of weeks back, and he said he had fed off my passion for the job. Another guy said he wanted to learn. It would be great to get a team put together so I won’t always be in the kitchen.

I listened to Perry Stone on the way home. He talked about a revival in which he told people to bring objects in so he could pray over them, to influence the unsaved. One lady brought a six-pack of beer. After her husband drank it, he ended up in church, and he accepted Christ. Another woman brought her husband’s cigarettes, and when he smoked them later, the taste was so bad, he had to go see the preacher who had prayed over them.

I think about things like that when I make pizza. It’s wrong to turn an object into a relic which people idolize, but God does work through objects. Jesus healed a blind man with mud.

Every week, what do I do? I anoint my hands with olive oil–Biblical symbol of the Holy Spirit’s power–and make leavened dough, which is the Biblical symbol of flesh leavened with sin. Then people buy it and eat it. Does anything go from God to me to the dough to the customers? I wonder.

A while back, a young woman came into the kitchen to thank me for making the pizza. Her face glowed. She seemed to shine like the sun. It was very odd. I realized the sensation I got from her presence was like the sensation of the presence of God; it had the same feel. I wondered what it meant. She kept thanking me, as if I had paid off her bills or saved her house from foreclosure. It was just pizza. Or was it?

When I see her now, she’s still a very nice young lady, but that glow isn’t there.

I know the Holy Spirit is in me. I have plenty of worldliness left in me, but at times I feel the Spirit drop on me like a cloudburst, for no clear reason. Can its power go from me into other people? Why not? It has happened for plenty of other Christians.

When the leader of my prayer group tried my Sicilian, he pointed at it and said, “This pizza is ANOINTED.” I think he just meant it was really good, but maybe there was more to it than that.

Maybe we benefit from being around other Christians, not just because they provide good examples, but because the Holy Spirit works in their vicinities and through their physical bodies.

Christianity is supernatural. Primarily, not collaterally. We forget that. Churches discourage the supernatural. That’s remarkable. We teach about a man who walked on water and a world ruled by a rebellious cherub. We teach about a savior who had conversations with demons. He turned water into wine. He raised the dead, including a man who had begun to rot. But somehow, we’re supposed to shun the supernatural and work things out through hard work and learning.

I don’t get it. Does the Bible say Satan can’t use the supernatural any more? If not, why should we stop using it? Does that make sense?

What good is the form of godliness, if you don’t have the power? The power isn’t a good work ethic or good study habits or strong willpower. It’s the Holy Spirit, working through us. That other stuff is on a par with salvation by works.

A Christian who thinks he can make himself holy and righteous without the Holy Spirit is like a tree that thinks it can turn itself into a chair.

I’m not sure what’s going on. I have inklings and hunches. I’m sure I’m headed in the right direction, and that I’ll get where I’m going. It’s not my location that counts. It’s my course.

My Preoccupations

I trammed my mill the other day. I had to. I knocked it out of tram while using a fly cutter. Guess what? It turns out you have to lock the spindle when you do that. Otherwise the fly cutter can sink into the work, and suddenly instead of ten thousandths, you’re trying to trim off a quarter of an inch, and the mill doesn’t like it.

I can’t be expected to remember these tiny insignificant details.

I trammed the mill using my cheap CDCO coax indicator. Seems to work fine. I also used it to align the vise. I just milled the side of a piece of aluminum using a 1/2″ carbide cutter, and the result was gorgeous.

I was going to use a fly-cutter to test the tramming, but then I remembered how I got where I was. I believe I’ll save that for finishing the part.

The part I was making for my Saiga 12 has to be completed, and the mill was so out of tram, I could not get a good finish. Now that’s fixed.

I have been discouraged from using carbide, but now that I’m using the tables instead of guessing at feeds and speeds, I find carbide pretty exciting. I can mill 1018 steel (of which I have maybe a hundred pounds) at 1000 RPM. That sure beats HSS. Anything that gets you out of the garage in half the time is good. I don’t know for sure, because I’m too lazy to find out, but I’ll bet a regular carbide end mill will rough steel faster than an HSS roughing bit.

I had to quit working in the garage because my bread had risen. I must be honest. I do not have great hopes for this “loaf.” But satisfying my idle curiosity is a vital priority, so here I am, waiting for the oven to beep.

The part I’m making is a replacement for a Magnolia Armory ISA. This is a doodad that fits in the rear of a Saiga weapon and lets you attach a manly buttstock. The one I got from Magnolia doesn’t really fit. It’s probably intended for Saiga rifles. It’s aluminum. I could have made the new one from aluminum, but here I am with all this steel, and if I make it from steel, it will last for eternity. So I’m putting up with the slower speeds.

I can’t do the tapping, unfortunately. I don’t have fine-thread taps. At least I don’t think I do. I’ll check, but it sure looks like the screws I’m using have finer threads than the ones my taps make. Guess I’ll need to pick a couple of taps up.

I have no way of bluing the part, other than Super Blue. I should look into that. If I had used aluminum, I’d have no way at all. I’d have to order something from Brownell’s.

It’s pretty cool to have concerns like these. Three years ago, I had no Saiga, no mill, no drill press, no lathe, and few clues.

I hope I can pull this off on the first try, although I’m already wishing I had gone for a folding design instead.

More

The bread worked fine, but I think it was actually TOO kneaded. The texture was very tight. I think next time I’ll mix it in a bowl.

Loafer’s Loaf

I decided I had to do something stupid. What a novel experience for me.

I’ve been making pizza without kneading the dough. Today I decided to see what happens when I turn the dough into bread. I took a portion of Golden Tiger flour mixed with salt and pepper, blended yeast and water into it, rolled it into a wad, and plopped it on a sheet of nonstick foil.

If it rises, I plan to bake it. If not, bird toy.

Wudan Pizzeria

Even though last night’s pizza session at church did not work out all that well, it was highly rewarding. First of all, people came up to me when they saw me in the building and asked if I was making pizza, and after I got to work, people came into the kitchen to tell me how great it was. That’s always enjoyable. But on top of that, I learned new stuff about pizza.

I usually use the low setting on the convection oven fan, because I’ve been told higher speed means burned cheese. But last night I decided I wanted the crust cooked more, so I used a trick I came up with on my own. I put the fan on high and added olive oil to the mozzarella to prevent it from burning.

I can’t be totally sure, because the ovens acted strangely last night, but it looks like the trick worked beautifully. I plan to do it with all of my cheese Sicilians from here on out. I think butter would be better, because butter brings out the flavor of food and makes flavors mingle. Olive oil can’t do that. Most fats don’t. Chicken fat seems to do it.

I don’t know why people rave about olive oil. It’s nearly flavorless, except for the taste of olives, which isn’t really that exciting. I could eat butter with a spoon, because it tastes so good. Olive oil? No way. I believe the exaggerated response to the very mild and uninteresting flavor of olive oil is an example of herdthink. Chefs say olive oil tastes great, so people who listen to chefs say it tastes great. It’s the same phenomenon that makes people scream with excitement when Emeril uses a pepper shaker.

If the taste of olives is such a thrill, why don’t people stuff themselves with olives all day?

It’s great to be able to make pizza, and it’s even greater to have a bag of tricks I can rely on when I need a certain effect. Professional cooks all over the US tremble when their cheese suppliers vary the fat of their mozzarella, but I can take a wide range of cheeses and make excellent pizza.

You can’t tell the professionals or advanced hobbyists anything. If their pals or heroes didn’t come up with it, it can’t be right.

It amazes me how they overcomplicate pizza. They tell me I have to ferment the dough over a period of days, and that home-oven pizza is a compromise. They use complex calculations to create dough recipes. One guy suggested I use a scale that works in 0.1-gram increments. One portion of pizza dough weighs roughly 5,000 times that much. Do I really need to know whether the oregano amounts to one hundred seven or one hundred eight five-thousandths of the total mass?

Here’s how I make pizza. I mix tap water and yeast, in a fairly loose ratio. I mix non-kosher salt, flour, and pepper, equally imprecisely. The flour is any flour I feel like using, including all-purpose. I mix the water and yeast into the dry ingredients, poking the dough with my finger until it feels right. I let the dough rise until I feel like getting up from in front of the TV, which could be half an hour or two hours. I mash the dough into an oiled pan. I repeat the TV proofing period. Actually, I don’t watch much TV, so I may be at the PC or in the garage, butchering metalworking projects.

I add sauce that contains no crushed or whole tomatoes and no fresh ingredients of any kind. I add cheese from Costco and Gordon Food Service. I bake the pizza at 550 in a crummy GE oven. I flop it out onto a stone and let the bottom of the crust bake until it looks brown.

Then I eat. It’s perfect every time. Best pizza I know of.

No ten-day fermentation, no rocket-fuel-powered oven, no flour sold only by Tiffany’s. I don’t use micrometers, pyrometers, microtomes, electron microscopes, precision scales, hygrometers…nothing. The only time I measure precisely is at church, when I need fast repeatability and complete consistency, and I need to be able to scale things up and down.

I’m not saying their way doesn’t work, but I can’t see my incentive for trying it. The long fermentations, maybe, but other than that, it seems like a lot of bother to go from 98%-perfect pizza to 99%-perfect.

My way: I can have the best pizza imaginable, 90 minutes from now, starting from scratch.

Their way: I can have pizza on Saturday, if I get started today. I have to plan pizza the way I’d plan a weekend trip. What if Saturday comes and I want Chinese?

You can see why I’m not motivated.

I think the problem is that it’s so hard to get pizza right the first time, most people live in terror after that, fearing they’ll lose the secret. I know that fear. But I got over it through practice. The hundredth time you make pizza, you should be able to leave the scale and the hydrometer in the cupboard.

Some people insist on using kosher salt, in a dissolved form! How nutty is that? Kosher salt is identical to regular salt, except that it’s much harder to dissolve, and it costs more. Kosher sodium is just like non-kosher sodium. There is no specialized periodic table just for Jews. I don’t even worry about iodized versus non-iodized. Microscopic amounts of potassium iodide are impossible to taste, and even if they were not, I like the taste of iodine. It’s one of the reasons Scotch tastes good.

Pizza nuts like to talk about “authentic” pizza, dating back to the strange, unappetizing Italian product known as pizza margherita. What they fail to remember is that the people who invented and perfected pizza didn’t own bizarre modern equipment. They did what I do. They slopped it together using, at best, measuring cups and spoons. That’s authentic. Making your pizza at Livermore Labs is not.

Cooking is like painting. The greats don’t do it by the numbers. You have to loosen up and quit being afraid of the food. Precision should serve you; you shouldn’t serve precision.

Mike never measures anything, and his pizza is great. There is absolutely no hope that he’ll ever be able to pass on a recipe, but the food is top-notch.

Anyway, next time I make pizza, it’s going to be better than the last time. I’m glad the church gave me the opportunity to expand my skill set.

This is Like Washing Q-Tips and Re-using Them

Today’s exciting food experiment: cheese dicing.

My church has no slicer. When I told them they could get a good used one for $200-$300, it seemed like they were about to go for it. Then they decided they wanted a new one. Those run $2100. So instead of having a used slicer we can put to work, we are looking forward to having a new slicer at some far-off point in the future.

The problem with having no slicer is that we have to pay for sliced and shredded cheese, which is more expensive and somewhat less tasty than loaf cheese. GFS charges $4.00 per pound for sliced provolone and $2.85 for loaf provolone. I don’t know if Costco charges different prices for sliced and shredded mozzarella.

Yesterday I decided to buy a loaf of provolone and dice it with a cleaver, while running a timer. It turns out it takes 20 minutes to dice a six-pound loaf of cheese. In case you wondered. That includes bagging and cleanup.

Slicing would take three minutes, I’m guessing. You could slice two months’ worth of cheese in hour or two and only have to clean the slicer once.

I suppose that as a dedicated Servant Leader (our church likes this term better than “volunteer”), I could buy cheese once a week and spend an hour and a half dicing and bagging it at home. There is no way I can do this at church, while dealing with pizza demands.

Given the huge cost difference between new and used slicers, I think we should go used. If we burn through ten slicers in five years, we’ll have spent the cost of one new one. And we won’t burn through them that fast unless we buy lame brands. In the meantime, the savings would pay for a new (used) slicer about every 600 pies, or once every 5 months. Faster, if we start using sliced toppings.

A new slicer would take four years to pay for itself, but it would last thirty years.

Here’s what I’m thinking. We’re going to continue buying sliced cheese until something gives.

I bought Bouncer flour at GFS. It comes in smaller bags than Golden Tiger, it’s slightly cheaper, and pizza chefs like it. I doubt I’ll be able to tell the difference. The nearest GFS sells Bouncer, Golden Tiger, All Trumps, and Primo Gusto. Rumor has it that Bouncer and Primo Gusto (the house brand at GFS) are the same thing.

I have to be at church at 4:30 today to get ready for tonight’s service. I have to sell at least 20 pies. It’s my mission in life at this point.

I Need a Diesel Mixer

I can’t help fiddling with pizza-production methods, in order to make things work more smoothly at my church.

Today I did some calculations and came up with a recipe for about 220 ounces of sauce. That will knock twenty minutes out of a typical day.

I wanted to find out what size mixer I would need to make dough using an entire 25-pound bag of flour. The answer? In a vertical cutter mixer, 40 quarts. In a planetary mixer, 60 quarts. A good used planetary mixer runs $3500. Used vertical cutter mixers are hard to find.

It turns out Bosch makes a very good bargain for pizza chefs. The Bosch Universal Plus mixer with a stainless bowl will allow me to make dough for 14 pizzas at once. It will take nearly nine pounds of flour. That’s not too bad, for the $440 price. That would get me down to two batches of dough per day, which beats eleven.

I’m not sure why anyone buys a Kitchenaid mixer. I wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot calzone. The capacity is low. They’re not durable. They’re messy. I don’t get it.

A dough sheeter would be great. I could fire the dough into it, mash it into oiled pans, and be done with it until it was time to bake. I just need to find one that costs under a hundred dollars. Hey, maybe if I plant some magic beans, they’ll grow into one.

I suppose I could get clever and glue a 9 by 12 frame to a plastic cutting board, dump the dough into it, and roll it out until it more or less fit. That would save time.

I don’t want to lose the hand-forming. I just want to reduce it to a minimum. It doesn’t matter what shape the dough is when it begins to rise. If it’s nearly the shape of a pizza, it will make the job go faster, and it won’t hurt the quality. It would probably improve the dough by reducing the mashing and trauma.

My cheese frustrations continue. I might go ahead and buy a loaf of provolone and see how hard dicing it is. If I can do it in half an hour at home, it will obviate the need for a slicer, and I’ll be able to use cheap cheese from now on. I may also make a pie using only provolone.

I want to start cranking out thin pizza, but unless someone shows up to help, it will never happen.

Last night my old man took me out for dinner, and he said it sounded like it would not be possible to turn the cafe into a serious business. It’s hard to make people think about money when their big goal is saving souls. He thinks I should learn what I can and then open a place.

The pizzeria I visited turned me off because they said they grossed $600-$700 on a typical day. I thought that represented a lot of work and very little money. Now I realize their business was slow. That figure probably represents 40-50 pizzas. I churned out over 20 by myself, with bad equipment. With decent equipment, one cook could easily do 60 pies a day.

That little shop should have been able to produce 24 pies an hour, more or less.

Let’s see. Say I do 24 pies an hour, and the food cost per pie is $3.00, and I sell them for and average of $13.00 (more like $14.00 in practice). That gives me $240.00 per hour to pay for rent, gas, power, and so on. A place with a more realistic floor plan would be able to make 72 pies per hour, so $720.00. Surely a decent place with two full-size double ovens could make $3000 per eight-hour day above food costs, before talking about toppings and soda. That’s over $70,000 per month. You would think it would be possible to make a living.

Whoops, I’m wrong. Their oven holds 12 large pizzas, so figure 48 pies an hour, at full tilt. Two of the larger ovens will do 128 an hour. So you would think you could do maybe $5000 per day, after food costs, if your pizza was good enough to attract customers. Did I misplace a decimal somewhere? Seems like you should be able to survive.

I must be underestimating the impact of the slow hours.

Tomorrow night I cook again. I’m going to do my best to be ready to produce 20 pies over the course of one service. I’ll experiment with the provolone, and I’ll get a container suitable for the big cheese recipe, and we’ll see if things speed up. Maybe I can get them to round up an assistant to spread the cheese.

Better head to GFS.

Volume Volume Volume

I just made about five million pizzas.

I arrived at church this morning at 7:30, and I quit working at around 3:30. I am not sure how many pizzas I actually made. I couldn’t keep up with demand, but then I’m pretty slow.

Judging by mozzarella usage, I made 22 pies. But that sounds high.

I weigh the mozzarella, and I use 7.5 ounces per pie, and I went through over ten pounds.

Anyway, it was easily the most hideous spectacle that has ever been witnessed. Pies were all over the place. Cheese was airborne during much of the day. Fans peeked in to gawk at me. I brought two pies out, and some kid said, “Now that’s what I’m TALKIN’ ’bout! God BLESS you, sir!”

I need a pizza Renfield, to spread cheese and eat spiders. Mostly the cheese thing. Spiders haven’t been a problem.

Even if his name isn’t Renfield, I need an assistant. It’s out of control. And we need a 30-quart mixer, because making dough 58 times in a 5-quart mixer is killing me.

My methods are getting more streamlined. I measure the flour and water to the gram now, and I put the water and yeast mix in the bowl before the flour. That reduces the dry stuff that ends up in the bottom of the bowl, and it makes things mix better and more predictably.

Here, let me give you a present: 580 grams flour, 340 grams water (with 1 teaspoon yeast per cup added), 2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons pepper. That should be nearly 100% reliable, if you use flour like mine. I’m using Golden Tiger high-gluten flour, so I guess any bread flour will be pretty close.

Do I recommend Golden Tiger flour? No, because it seems like every flour makes good pizza. But Golden Tiger works.

If we sold 19 or 20 pizzas today, which should be about right, the church made at least $200. Net. Okay, net not including electricity and gas, but work with me here. I’m talking food cost. If we could get people to come into that cafe every day the church is open, we could bring in $50,000 per year. That’s certainly more than I intend to donate. It’s worth the effort.

If I keep this up, I should be able to make the church $15,000 per year on our current schedule. They need to get with it.

They were trying to discourage me from making more pizza toward the end, because the people who work in the cafe like to clean up and get home early. But I knew the pies would sell. I told Pastor Marcus I “guaranteed” it, although that was a huge lie, because if they hadn’t sold, I would have just dumped the dough in the trash. I had unbaked crusts for three pies left over at the end, and I said a prayer that someone would take them, and one of my armorbearer buddies called and said they needed three pies. Then a fourth guy showed up and said he wanted one, and he was SOL.

Late in the day, I pointed out that we had made a three-figure sum, and that if I had to throw out two entire pies with pepperoni, it would amount to six or seven bucks. But if we sold them, it would be twenty to twenty-four bucks for the church.

It’s hard to make Christians think in terms of capitalism. I think I’m the only person there who cares at all if the place makes money.

The pizzeria I looked at grossed something like $700 per day. That means they sold maybe two and a half times the pizza I sold today, using a huge mixer and a bona fide oven, without a bunch of people getting in the way and selling other stuff and socializing the way they do at church. That place was probably open twelve hours a day. We ran five and a half hours today, and most of the last hour was dead time, and we only had one person making pizza, using pretty bad equipment. This is not that hard. I was there for two and a half hours getting ready, but that time would be greatly reduced if we had the right equipment.

If I had a real mixer, I could make dough once a day. I could work the yeast amount out so I could make the dough days in advance. If I could do that, I’d kill half of the work. Today I had to make two-pizza batches, what, eleven times? Insane. And every time, I had to wash my hands over and over, because I was doing repetitous jobs involving flour and oil. With a real mixer and a dough sheeter, I could fire out twenty-five pizzas at a shot, dump the doughs in oiled pans, and stack them on racks to rise. I’d only have to touch the dough once, so I wouldn’t spend an hour and a half a day washing my hands. Little things like this add up.

I also had to make sauce, which is a pain. From now on, I’m making one huge batch a week. It keeps forever. It’s stupid to make 75-ounce batches the way I’ve been doing. The sauce cans hold 107 ounces, so from now on, I’ll do 200-ounce batches. Each one will use a whole can.

I bought a huge can of cheap Berio olive oil and I got a 2-liter squeeze bottle, like the ones athletes drink from. Now I have no oil mess to deal with. I used to pour oil out of a jug, dripping all over the kitchen. That’s behind me.

I need a wall clock. The church will never get around to buying one. For three bucks, I can actually know what time it is, instead of guessing when a service is going to end and a giant crowd is going to hammer the cafe. As it is now, I have to remember to fish out my cell phone and check. That’s fun, when I have pepperoni grease on my hands. I could wear a watch, but clocks are better, especially when you’re working with a big mixer that can break bones.

I bought the church a decent kitchen timer. The one we had refused to stick to anything; the magnet was pathetic. I could never read it. And the alarm was horrible, and the controls were counterintuitive. Now I have one I can stick to the stainless steel wall by the convection oven.

This is all tremendous fun. I hope it will make money for the church, or that it will make money for me if I can’t get them to take it seriously.

I better call Mike and make him eat his liver.

I am a good friend.

Cheese Blend Fail

I made another experimental Sicilian pizza today, with around 75% Grande Cheddar Blend and 25% Grande East Coast Blend. I was hoping it would have the baking qualities of Grande Cheese, with more flavor than the East Coast Blend.

The verdict: I can barely taste the cheese. I thought pure Cheddar Blend was sour when I put it on a thin pizza, but on a Sicilian, it tastes like water.

There is nothing wrong with Grande cheese. No one questions the quality. But it’s not working for me yet. I still have to try their 50/50 mozzarella/provolone blend.

Pizza is amazing. Before an experimental pie goes into the oven, I always think I know how it will taste, and I’m wrong all the time. No other food is like that. It makes me realize how blessed I am to have a couple of recipes that work perfectly. I could have spent another five years making bad pizza.

I think I’m going to quit using the food processor at home. Non-kneaded dough is superior to food processor dough, in my opinion. The food processor is so fast, it can be hard to mix the dough just enough but not too much. Now that I’m weighing stuff to the nearest gram, I should be able to make dough with a wooden spoon and a bowl. It’s very easy to adjust ingredient amounts when you use a food processor, but with other methods, it’s a pain. When you have the amounts nailed down in advance, however, you can blend your ingredients with confidence regardless of the method.

I’m pretty sure.

The Grande rep says he’ll drop off some 50/50 when he gets his hands on it. After that, the Grande trials will be done, and it will be time to get started on Sysco cheese.

New Book Idea

I’ve been thinking about the pizza joint I checked out yesterday. It’s an interesting deal, but I doubt it will get any takers. It will probably be available a month from now, for nothing, to anyone who will take over the lease.

The place is so small, the number of pizzas it can produce is limited. The owner said a really good daily gross was a thousand dollars. So if it ran full-tilt every day, it would bring in, what, three hundred grand? It has been suggested to me that I might net 10%, and if that’s true, I’m looking at $30K per year. Yow.

If I had a college-age son, this would be a great project. I could turn him loose with this place and tell him he had a year to make it work. I think that would be a better education (and cheaper) than ten years at a university. But for a middle-aged guy with other fish to fry, it’s not a great move.

I have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe I should put this pizza thing on the shelf for a while. It has occurred to me that one of the biggest problems with Christian books is that they’re extremely vague. They say things like, “Stand on God’s word!”, and, “God is holy, so you be holy!” What do these things MEAN? Imagine yourself as a beginning Christian. The stuff you would find in many Christian books would sound like gibberish.

What if someone wrote a book that was clearer and better organized, without strange Christianese phrases obfuscating the meaning? “This is the story the Bible presents, reduced to basics.” “These are the things you need to do, in order to live a blessed life and experience God’s power.” Nobody writes that way. Christian authors tend to have the same problem mathematicians and physicists have when they write books. Without realizing it, they write in a way that only works for people who already know what they know. I know people have tried to provide help for new Christians, but they’ve been very ineffective.

I used to dream of writing physics texts in plain English. Understanding the writing of physicists is harder, for bright students, than understanding physics itself. I never fulfilled that dream, but maybe I can do the same thing for Christianity.

You can write five thousand words and give new converts everything they need to know, to put a solid foundation under their efforts. But no one does that. Instead, they write stuff that only makes sense to people who are already knowledgeable.

Of course, some people would disagree with what I wrote. But if that was a problem worthy of consideration, how would it be possible for anyone to write a Christian book?

God has a long history of providing us with knowledge in a non-sequential and encrypted way. Our job has been to understand it through the revelation power of the Holy Spirit, and then to present it to each other in a more digestible way. My project would be a prime example of the way this process works.

I wanted to write books for my church, but they’re just too busy, and I can’t wait any longer. Maybe they’ll eventually find time, but while they’re doing other things, I should get busy with my own work.

Intriguing Rathole

I made pizza at church last night. Every Tuesday, they have a big youth-oriented (i.e. “musically loud and annoying”) service, so I was called in to do my thing. I should add that it was a fantastic service, apart from the pain it caused my middle-aged ears.

I made a total of 14 pies, and of course, after they were gone, somebody wanted one. We should have unloaded 18.

I bought a slice for myself; I was starving. I still can’t believe how good this stuff is. Most Sicilian is like wet bricks. Mine is so light it practically floats.

People kept coming in to the kitchen to view the freak of nature who made the pizza. They could not believe it was made from scratch. One girl keeps asking me for tips on making it. I told her my cheesecake was even better, and she asked if I had a son about seventeen years old, so she could marry him.

This morning I checked out the $20,000 pizzeria from Craigslist. It’s a former Jerry & Joes. It makes a Domino’s look like Mama Leone’s. I’d guess the square footage is about 600. Seriously.

Jerry & Joes is a small chain. I’ve only had their pizza once, about ten years ago. It was actually pretty good. They claim they use real cheese.

The place is a real rathole, which makes it all the more tempting. One person could run this place solo. I could open up, limit myself to the lunch crowd, and sell pies four hours a day. If it looked promising, hire lackeys and extend the hours. If not, close the business permanently when I get bored.

The oven is an old Blodgett. It holds six 16″ pies or eight 14″ pies. It goes to 650°, so it will satisfy my temperature needs. The stones are cracked; I don’t know if that matters.

They have a three-door wall refrigerator about nine feet long and seven feet tall, plus a home fridge in a corner. They have two stainless prep tables, plus a three-door refrigerated prep center. The mixer is an ancient Hoover that will accept 22 pounds of flour. That’s irritating, since the smallest commercial bags are 25 pounds.

There is no range, so if I made garlic rolls, I’d have to prepare the sauce at home. Not a major issue. I could make a few gallons at one weekly session and refrigerate it.

The kitchen is pretty filthy, and it’s not what you would call aesthetically pleasing. The tile is messed up. The suspended ceiling is grubby. The whole place needs a good scrubbing. The owner left the coolers full of rotting stuff. That will start smelling nice in a few more days. I’m surprised it doesn’t reek already.

The shop is divided into two areas. The outer area is about ten feet by twelve, and it has a counter and two small tables. The rest is kitchen and staff bathroom. One nice thing about this place is that there is no way for diners to see the beat-up kitchen in any detail. Pretty up the outer area, and you have a fine dining experience. The rear part has to be clean, but it doesn’t have to be cute.

I found the real poop on the lease. The owner’s son speaks English, and he gave me the lowdown. The rent is $975, and it can’t go up, because there are seven years left on the lease. They considered that a selling point. I consider it a negative. Commercial rents are going down, and it’s hard to find tenants. If I take this place, I’m stuck with that lease. I guess I can incorporate and skip out if the business fails, but that seems lame. I suppose it isn’t, though. The whole point of incorporation is to limit liability and encourage people to run businesses without risking their personal wealth.

Here’s how I see it. It’s not worth $20K. The only value comes from the equipment and the community’s knowledge that pizza can be found at this location. I don’t get their recipes. I don’t get franchise support. I don’t get the benefit of their reputation. I have to buy into what may well be a sucker lease. I think this place would be a good buy at maybe $5K, assuming everything runs and that there is some way to avoid getting hooked on the lease.

This is a lot of fun, but I also have an idea for a Christian book, so maybe good judgment will win the day, and I’ll be satisfied making pizzas at church.

For a while now, I’ve felt as though I were on rails, traveling toward pizzeria ownership. I wondered if God was in it, because so many strange pizza-related things were happening. Maybe he’s behind this, but maybe he’s not, and if he’s not, it’s a very stupid idea. I’m going to try hard to determine his will and follow it, regardless of where that leads.

Like Psalm 127 says, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” I don’t want to get involved with any more activities that God will not bless and cause to succeed.

Cheap Pizzeria

This is what I call temptation.

Pizzeria. Exactly the type I wanted; basically a Domino’s plus a few seats. Cost: $20,000 (asking). Equipment included. Gas, power, phone, web, water, trash, and rent: $1615, max. Located in a busy area near a mall and lots of apartment complexes. And it’s near the county line, so it’s in the direction of AWAY FROM HERE, which I like. In fact, it’s ten minutes from my church, via a major traffic artery.

Arrghh.

Arrrrrrgggghhhh.

I may have to drive by this place.

Production Increases

I really enjoyed making pizza at church yesterday. It was my biggest day so far. I made either 14 or 16 pizzas, I think. I’m not sure. I was too busy to keep count.

I’m streamlining the process. I used to let the dough rise in plastic containers and then plop it into oiled pans. After that, I stretched it and covered it and let it rise again. This approach is not good, because you get oil all over a bunch of plastic containers that are hard to wash. You have to scrub each one three times to get it clean. Yesterday, I put the dough directly into the pans, stretched it once, and let it rise. Much better.

The problem with this approach is that you need a lot of pans. We only have ten. Fifteen would be better.

We still have no food processor. I’m not sure they understand why this is a problem; they seem to think their mixer is no good. The mixer is excellent; it’s an old commercial Kitchenaid made by Hobart. It’s just no good for making dough. It’s extremely messy, it mixes flour and water very poorly, it won’t mix dry ingredients at all, it’s a pain to use, and the dough turns into cement between batches.

These things are popular with people who don’t know any better, but a food processor blows them away. It contains almost all of the mess. It mixes all the ingredients thoroughly in about fifteen seconds. You can close it up to keep the residual dough from drying out between batches. I should be able to make three pies’ worth of dough in under three minutes with a big food processor. It takes ten minutes to make two portions in a mixer, and then you have to worry about keeping the residual crud from drying, and then you have to clean up a big mess.

I don’t know what I’ll do if I open a pizzeria. Pizza chefs tend to use commercial mixers, but I don’t like them. I’ve looked around, and it’s possible to get huge food processors with 24-quart bowls. Let’s see. A 3.5-quart Cuisinart will do 4 cups of flour, and that’s two Sicilians. You would think a 24-quart job would do about 14 Sicilians at a time. Is that right? I think so. If you were doing really good business, you’d only have to make dough a few times each day.

Another possibility is to start weighing ingredients precisely so I can come up with a very reliable formula. One of the problems with using a mixer is that it’s very tough to get the proportions right. For some reason, you can add three or four teaspoons of wet ingredients to dough that looks dry, only to discover you’ve made it too wet. The food processor doesn’t have this issue. Precise weighing might fix it, but then I’d still have to fix the other problems, and there would be no way to avoid the mess. That’s just the nature of a mixer.

Three of my friends bought entire pies yesterday, and the pastor ordered three slices at 10 a.m.! You can’t beat that kind of support. One of my friends had never tried this stuff. His comments? “It lives up to the hype.” “It’s the best pizza I’ve ever had.” I love it. It’s great when something works.

I now have people offering to assist me. I already taught one guy how to make Sicilian pizza.

I may run up to Tamarac this week to take a look at a place that’s for sale. I have to think about it.

Gun Show!

First up today, two prayer requests.

I guess everyone knows Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake. This defies comprehension. The Port au Prince earthquake measured 7.0, so the Chile earthquake was ten to the power of 1.8 as intense. According to an online exponent calculator, that means it was 63 times as strong.

What earthquake intensity means, when measured numerically, is not clear to me. But this was an extraordinarily powerful quake.

When you get done praying for relief in Chile and the safety of all the people who are now threatened by tsunamis, consider adding a word for my friend Linda. She works for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Tomorrow she is having a cataract removed.

Today I went to a gun show with my prayer group. I enjoyed it a lot. I tried to give good advice to a couple of guys who were considering buying pistols. I steered them toward Glocks and Springfield XDs. One friend of mine was looking at cheaper guns. I think that’s a mistake. You save money up front, but then you don’t know what you have when it’s time to face a burglar. Will it fire? Will it jam? Bad time to have to worry about things like that.

I saw some okay gun prices, but ammunition was ridiculous. Twenty bucks for 9mm. Forty bucks for primers. The Obama ammunition bubble is behind us, or at least the peak is. I can buy 9mm for between ten and eleven bucks a box, and primers are back down to $30.

I saw a Saiga-12 for $489. That was a good deal. But it occurs to me that Saigas are only worthwhile for gun nuts, because you have to take off all the estrogen-oozing Hillary hardware and convert them back to real AK47s.

At breakfast, before the show, our group leader talked about the concept of fences. This is what our pastor is covering in his new series of sermons. The idea is that we have barriers in our lives, to keep us from getting into things we shouldn’t be messing with, and to keep evil out. Some barriers are intangible–rules–and others are physical.

We begin our lives in cribs, with bars around us. Then our parents expand the space we’re allowed to move around in, as we become better able to control ourselves. As we grow, the rules also change, and our freedom increases.

I find this concept interesting, because it ties into the concept of strongholds. We talk a lot about Satan’s strongholds, such as addiction and abuse, but we don’t talk much about God’s strongholds, such as the family, the home, the physical body, and the church. We are supposed to be like walled cities, and we should monitor our “gates,” which include our eyes, ears, and senses. We should control the people and things that go in and out of our homes. We should try to keep our churches pure.

A lot of people think an adult can’t be harmed by exposure to bad ideas and immorality, but that’s not true. You’re never too old to be subject to negative influences.

On the way back from the show, I stopped by church and grabbed some pizza cheese. I want to do an experiment. The other day I made a thin pizza in the church’s conventional gas oven, and it was very, very good. But judging from the time it took to bake, the temperature wasn’t as high as the temperature in my own oven. So I want to bake a pie at 500° here at home, to see what the result is like.

Pizza “experts” always yammer that you have to have a ten-thousand-degree oven to get a good pizza, but they’re wrong about all sorts of things, so I want to give this a shot and see what happens. The oven at my church was set on “Broil,” which should have been over 600°, but the pizza took eight minutes to bake, so clearly, it was not that hot.

I’m making the pie with non-kneaded dough. It’s a pain to make, because it’s hard to get the water-to-flour ratio right, but I think it should give a better texture than kneaded dough. I need to start weighing the ingredients so I can come up with exact amounts. That will make the corrections and additions unnecessary. When that happens, non-kneaded dough should be faster than kneaded dough.

I’m also considering giving up activating my yeast. I recently learned that there is a difference between active dry yeast and instant dry yeast. Supposedly, anyway. The directions on my instant yeast say you can mix it directly into the flour. I’m a bit wary of that advice, but it can’t hurt to try it a few times to see how well it works.

Eventually I’ll reach the point where I throw three ingredients into a bowl, stir it for ten seconds, microwave it for fifteen seconds, and eat it.

Maybe not. But the process does get shorter and simpler with time.

My Busy Agenda

It’s another exciting day. I just got a new lead on Costco mozzarella.

I use Costco’s Kirkland shredded mozzarella in my pizza. It tastes fantastic. But I can’t get it delivered to my church.

Today somebody on a forum told me a company called Foremost supplies the cheese Costco uses in its retail pizza. It’s not unlikely that this company also makes the cheese Costco sells in bags. I’m going to give Foremost a call.

I’m also going to run by Costco today or tomorrow and buy a slice of pizza. If the cheese they bake is the same as the cheese they sell, I should be able to tell.

UPDATE: I called Foremost, and while I can’t get them to tell me much, they did say they sell cheese to Sysco. This is pretty funny, because I already told the church’s Sysco rep their cheese did not interest me. I said I’d be happy to try a sample, but he hasn’t come across with one. I better fix that.

I am told that the big advantages of Grande cheese are that it bakes well and reheats well. The reheating thing is something I never considered. I make small pizzas at home, so reheating is rarely an issue. I don’t know what it means when a cheese reheats well. Does that mean it stays rubbery and crunchy, or does it mean it softens up? My cheese blend is softer after reheating than when originally baked. Maybe that’s good.

I’m also told I’m supposed to add other cheeses to Grande to compensate for the mild flavor. But that jacks up the cost. Grande runs about $2.75 a pound right now. Grated cheese costs maybe three times that much. Not a bargain.

Right now, using Costco and GFS, I can average about $2.50 per pound, and the taste and texture are perfect. Nothing to add.

Tomorrow I’m going to a gun show with my prayer group. That will be fun. My gun show motto is, “Look, but don’t buy.” I haven’t seen many good deals at shows. But I’ve seen fun products and hilarious T-shirts.

I have amazing news for Second Amendment believers. I guess I’m late to the party, but I just learned that Classic Arms is selling beautiful Czech Vz58 rifles for under $500. I paid way more than that, and I felt like I got an okay deal.

These things are similar to AK47s, but they’re lighter, and they ship with 30-round magazines. Unlike AK47s, which are miraculous bargain rifles mashed out of sheetmetal, these are real guns. The receivers are milled. Czechs make good stuff.

When I got mine, there weren’t all that many accessories available. Now you can buy sweet aluminum foregrips with rails. It ruins the funky “Guns of Navarrone” look of the original Czech fake wood furniture, but you can put a flashlight and laser on the gun, without screwing anything to the barrel. I tried a barrel-mounted rail thing, and the screws came loose at the range, even with Loc-Tite. I guess the shock of firing was too much.

Bonus: you can get a foregrip made in Israel. Strike a blow against anti-Semitism.

Maybe I should just screw a rail to the fake wood. It’s not like I’d be defacing a Rembrandt. I could keep the look and still have a laser. Or I could give Loc-Tite another chance.

This is the kind of gun you would expect to see Steve McQueen carry in a war movie. That alone makes it worth carrying, even if you get killed by someone with a more modern gun like an AR15. Although the AR15 is probably not as useful at close range. This baby folds, and it has that big magazine. When you fold the stock, it doesn’t interfere with firing.

Gun nuts will yell at me now. “MY AR15S NAME IS LURLENE AND SHE WIL WASTE YU AND YUR PUNEY COMIE HAND ME DOWN.”

Another interesting gun: Classic Arms has a Polish AK with a US milled receiver.

As you can see, I have many important things to think about today.