Pies of Piety

My church’s first made-from-scratch pizza day went very well. I cranked out 8 Sicilians. The last two sold before I baked them. The pastor made me send two slices backstage after the first service, at ten a.m.! And one of his daughters in law, who bought part of the last two pies, described the pizza as “life-changing.” One of my armorbearer buddies tried it and confirmed what I already knew: “better than Steve’s.”

Steve’s is the place two blocks from the joint I’m tempted to buy. Steve’s is very popular, and there’s nothing wrong with the pizza. But it isn’t life-changing.

I can’t shake the belief that God handed me this recipe. I’ve been making very good thin pizza for a long time, but Sicilian has been a puzzle. I started working on it recently, and it progressed by giant leaps until it was so good, it was better than I had realized pizza could be. The first time I tried to make it was on January 18, and even that first pie was the best Sicilian I had ever had.

We need to make changes at the cafe. We need to time the pizzas to match the ends of the services. We had some people receiving cold slices today. We need to buy some boxes. I sent a friend’s wife home with a pizza in an aluminum pan. We need a second cash register. And we need to be ambitious. I can make 20 pizzas on a Sunday, no problem. We can sell that many, once word gets out. We should be able to unload another 20 on the weekday of their choice.

We also need better communication. Somebody threw out around seven pounds of flour, probably thinking it was a bag of trash.

I think they were worried about working me too hard, but my concern is that they won’t make enough pizza. As long as I’m standing there, they need to make use of me. They don’t pay for labor, so every pie is mostly profit. The more they sell, the more the church makes.

If we could start attracting attention, it would not be hard to sell a couple hundred pizzas a week. That would net the church a hundred grand a year, more or less.

I need to streamline production. I need to start rolling the dough into rectangles and letting it rise in the pans instead of in containers. Doubling the size of the pizzas would help, although not a great deal. One problem with doubling the size is you lose a lot of crust, and the crust is a big feature of Sicilian pizza.

The pans I seasoned worked great. Two of them had a couple of sticky places, but that won’t happen again, now that they’ve been used. I wiped them down and hid them in my prep table. Those things are absolutely vital. I don’t want somebody making scrambled eggs in them.

It’s shocking how fast you can make pizza in one little convection oven. I baked two pies at a time, but I could do six, with practice. Each pie takes around eight minutes to bake, including toasting the bottom. I figure I could do approximately 25 an hour, if I didn’t have to do anything else.

It doesn’t take much room, either. The two little tables they gave me are all I need for preparation. Cleanup wasn’t bad at all. Twenty minutes, if people would get out of my way.

I used the food processor today, but I’m thinking next time I’ll just take a big bowl and make five pounds of no-knead flour at a pop. The food processor is faster and easier for small batches, but I can only do two pounds at a time.

This is a breeze. I can’t believe everybody’s not doing it. Well, yes I can. They can’t. Just like they can’t kill a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. You need to be hooked up.

To run a small pizza place, you need one person during really slow times and two to three when it picks up. This is doable.

I enjoyed the notoriety today. I got a cheer before I left. And now people will be nice to me. In case they need me.

They were already nice, though.

I ate one slice, and I paid for it. I don’t want to set a bad example by cheating. I wasn’t going to eat pizza today, but I skipped breakfast, and I was in a hurry.

Man, I’m looking at what I wrote, above. Two hundred pizzas a week equals a hundred grand for the church. In a store, it would be less, because I’d pay rent and utilities and so on. On the other hand, I’d sell a lot more than two hundred pizzas a week. Today people were happy to pay $2.50 for a four-by-four-and-a-half-inch slice. I wonder what the street price is. The food cost is about $4.00 for six slices, so we netted eleven bucks a pie, or at least we will when people stop throwing flour out.

Let’s see. Flour cost: eleven cents. Sauce: twenty cents. Cheese: $1.65-$2.10, depending on what I use. So the pies cost $1.91-$2.41, plus a piddling amount for the tiny quantities of oil and seasonings. Figure on using Grande cheese in the future, and it’s on the expensive side, so about $2.40 per pie. Sell the pie for $15.00 as slices or $12.00 as a pie. The net on a pie is at least $9.60 before paying rent, employees, utilities, and so on. Add toppings, and you have what amounts to a license to steal. A dollar-fifty (Papa John’s price) for ten cents’ worth of onions or four ounces of cheap meat. The meat may not make you much money, but the vegetables sure will. And then there are rolls and soda. I don’t think cheesecake would be a big profit generator, because it’s expensive to make, but it would get people into the store, for sure.

As for toppings, let’s say mushrooms, onions, green peppers, and ham. Figure a dollar of profit on the ham and roughly $3.50 on the other junk, so maybe $4.50. Now you’re netting around fourteen bucks on the pie. Does that look right? I have never paid the bills at a pizzeria. Surely if you sell fifty or a hundred pies a day, you can find enough gross profit to survive.

The pizzeria I’m looking at now can cook twelve pies at once, and a thin pie takes seven minutes. Call it ten minutes for a thin or thick pie. Seventy-two pies an hour. Something like that. That’s 14″ pies, and my Sicilians are only 9″ by 12″.

I felt good about the convection oven until I wrote that. Three times the pizza, in the same time, with about the same energy cost. Probably.

I think the key is not to compete with the bottom-feeders. Then you end up looking for cheese made from soybeans and guar gum, and your pizza is bad, and the chain next door can sell equally bad pizza for less. If selling bad pizza were a good idea, Papa John’s wouldn’t be struggling right now, and they are. Besides, who wants to be known for doing something really badly? John Schnatter isn’t a chef. He’s a bean-counter. There is value in that–he’s rich–but there isn’t much satisfaction. Not for me, anyway.

People say the pizza market is bad, but at the good places, customers form lines around the block. That will always be true, unless we have a full-blown depression.

Fun to think about.

I better go shower the deep-fryer smell off myself. Although I will miss it.

While I’m gone, check THIS out. Like you haven’t already. Chris gets better every week.

More Stuff Happens

I’ll tell you what. My walk with God is turning out to be more like a ride at a water park. Don’t push. Just close your eyes and yell.

I saw someone interview Kari Jobe. With a big smile, she said God was “just wrecking” her. I get it.

This morning I hit Denny’s for my weekly prayer group. The guys around the table were ordinary Christians like me. Not pastors or teachers. But every time one opened his mouth, I felt like I was hearing God say, “Now, Steve. About the problems you’re having. Here’s what you do…” It was all on target. To some extent, I get that in the church’s services, but the things I hear in the small group are laser-guided and highly specific.

I talked to one of the guys about pizza. Two, actually, but I only talked to one about the business side. The other guy just wants to help in the church kitchen.

The other guy says he would be interested in getting involved, if I open a pizzeria. This would be a great help to me, because I’m just one person, and you can’t run a pizzeria by yourself. Even a small operation will require six-day-a-week labor, plus all the duties of management.

Right now, pizzerias are folding all over the county. I don’t know if that’s normal. It probably is. People who know nothing about cooking think they can learn it all from going to a food convention or buying a book written by someone who can’t make good pizza. Then they use bad ingredients in order to save money, and they’re undercapitalized, and they go belly-up. That’s my guess. The cheap ingredients have unquestionably been in play at a number of the places that have failed around here, and I’ve only seen one pizzeria with good food go out of business. In my entire life, I mean.

Anyway, pizzerias are available cheap. I can get into one for the price of a nice car, and that includes food, rent, and utilities for several months. That’s just insane. If I go out of business, who cares? I mean, okay, I care. But I won’t be busted.

If the first one works, I could buy two or three new ones. As soon as I can find people to man them, I mean. Eventually, I could run a circuit, consulting at each one to make sure they don’t do anything stupid.

If I did really well, I don’t know what to do with the money I’d be paid; I’d be thrilled just to have my long-dreamed-of armed compound north of Dade County, with a concrete wall and razor wire, plus trained roaming badgers with lasers on their heads. I would need to find good Christian causes to give to.

One of my problems has been the requirement that I only partner with Christians. That’s not negotiable. You can’t discriminate when you hire, but you can definitely discriminate when you choose partners. It’s not the same thing. There are no laws against it. So while I would eventually have employees of every stripe, they wouldn’t be high on the food chain, and I would not expect them to interfere with God’s efforts to make the business work. There would be no rainbow stickers on the doors, and all employees with carry permits would be allowed to provide for their self-defense.

I will not partner with a heathen regardless of whether people hate me for saying it, but I will definitely need management-level people to help me. That means I need competent Christians. Suddenly, they’re popping up. One has, anyway. Extremely solid guy. An excellent prospect.

I’m thinking the best thing is to retain over 50% of the ownership, so I can insist on my vision for the company. I want to keep the limited menu and my recipes and ingredients. But I want anyone who functions as a partner to be compensated well. I want to be a ruthless dictator, but not a stingy one.

I was hoping Mike would be available, but he’s trapped for another year and a half. That’s a bummer.

In months past, I just rolled the pizzeria idea around in my mind for fun, but now I’m starting to feel like I’m on rails, headed for the pizza business. Almost as if I have no choice. Which is fine and dandy by me. I would not mind living like Jacob, finding favor and guidance regardless of what my enemies do.

Waking up after my wedding with a homely girl, however…that I can do without.

I’m up for anything. I feel like I’m seated in the Tilt-a-Whirl car with the restraining bar firmly in place, and God is doing all the work. I could never have made this happen, and without the little shoves and nudges, I would not have made this decision, but if he wants to put it in motion, I’m on board all the way.

My judgment has always been…not spectacular…so if God wants to steer the bus, it will be hard to complain. In spite of my staggering talent for complaining.

Is this really going to happen?

Life is just too weird.

Pizza Tools for Cheap

Here is my new pizza peel.

Sweet, right? Took five minutes on the table saw, plus a little work with the bench grinder and angle grinder. Now I can lift a 12″ x 9″ pizza out of the pan with minimal risk of a disaster.

A few minutes ago, it was a 16″ pizza pan. If I felt like it, I could make a handle for it in about fifteen minutes and then use the peel from now on. Maybe I’ll do that. It will work just as well as the peels I can buy, and the total cost is under four bucks.

Man, I love having power tools.

More

Now improved!

The Workmate was essential to getting the bend right without a press brake. Is there anything it can’t do?

I am a Businessman

It’s turning out to be an interesting day.

I was distressed to learn that GFS charges tons of money to slice their cheese. Their provolone sells for under $3.00 per pound in a block, but it’s way higher in packaged slices. The figure escapes me, but I think it was something like six bucks. I started looking for a Craigslist slicer, figuring we might get a donation in exchange for a tax receipt, but then I decided to check out food service prices.

Costco mozzarella is swell, but you have to go get it. They don’t deliver in Miami. Grande makes wonderful cheese, but it’s wholesale-only. I decided to call Grande and see who the local distributors were. They gave me a rep’s number, and he referred me back to GFS, so I got a quote out of them. GFS referred me to a salesman who does their route business (as contrasted with walk-in), and the salesman said he might be able to do better on the price. That puts me below the Costco/GFS price and at least close to the price of Costco mozzarella by itself.

Oddly, Grande’s shredded cheese costs about what their blocks cost.

Anyway, the cheese problem is fixed. Either we get a slicer and keep doing what we’re doing, or we go with Grande. Week after next, they’ll give me some samples to play with!

I still need a small peel to pull little Sicilians out of the pan. I went to the local Ace Hardware, hoping they’d have steel dustpans, and sure enough, they did. For eight bucks. I bought one and kept the receipt. Then I hit Home Depot to look at their sheet metal. It’s flimsy and very expensive, so I didn’t buy.

While I was at Home Depot, I realized I had $3.99 aluminum pizza pans with thick rims. This is like 10% of the Home Depot cost for the same square footage of really thin, useless metal. So I’m going to put a pan in a clamp and hit it with the plasma cutter or use the table saw. In about two minutes, I’ll have a suitable piece of aluminum, and then I can bend it to suit my needs. I’ll keep the rim on one end to serve as a handle. You can’t beat that. I’m only out the cost of a pan, and I can grab a new one at GFS at my convenience.

Honestly, I do not understand metal prices. You would think the people who sell metal would realize they should charge less for raw materials than manufacturers charge for things made from them. I don’t know where I could get an 18″ circle of thick aluminum, but I’ll bet I’d have to pay thirty bucks.

This is tremendous fun. The people at my church feel like I’m doing them a favor, and that’s true, but I get to polish up my pizza technique and find out about the business. And the pizza is going to be fantastic. It will be a success in terms of sales, although I don’t know if the church will break even. Surely they will, though. No tax and no labor costs. If God continues to be as kind as he has been so far, we’ll do great.

The Bible criticizes people who make sanguine predictions about their businesses without mentioning the importance of God’s favor, so I try to throw it in when I talk about my expectations.

You’ll Never Guess

PIZZA!

It’s on my mind again today. Yesterday I bought 8 quarter-sheet baking pans at Gordon Food Supply, and today I have to season them with olive oil and lard.

I was trying to decide how many pans we needed, and I was afraid they’d cheap out, so I bought enough to give us a total of ten. If they choke when they see the receipt, I’ll chip in. I don’t care. It has to be done.

When I make a Sicilian, I let the dough sit in the pan for a minimum of 15 minutes. Longer is better. Half an hour is about right, unless you can wait an hour for the loftiest pizza in the universe.

It takes six minutes to bake a pie. That means the turnover time for a pan is about 40 minutes. I can realistically cope with two pies at once, tops. That means I can bake something like two pies every eight minutes, so my pans will last around 40 minutes, and after that, I have to recycle. If I have ten pans, I can refill them as I go, and the circle of production should be sort of close to seamless.

If I used half-sheet pans, life would be simpler, but the big pies are more treacherous to handle, and I don’t want any extra challenges right now. When I’m ready to move up, the seventy dollars we spent on the smaller pans won’t really matter.

The seasoning works better than Teflon. Not even a close call. It’s like a layer of hard wax with oil on top. The dough has nothing to hold onto. But you have to get a few layers onto the pans before it will work.

I store my pans inside my refrigerated prep table, because I know if I don’t, some “helpful” person will come in and clean them for Jesus. It will happen, if there is any way possible. That’s human nature.

As noted previously, I just found a pizzeria for sale for $33,000, in a dynamite location. I know why it went out of business. It’s about two blocks from Steve’s, which is a pretty good pizzeria in North Miami. People rave about Steve’s because they don’t know any better. I give it a B+, which is a very good grade for Miami. They don’t scare me, however.

The place that closed is called Keystone Pizza, which is funny, because people refer to Jesus as the keystone. It’s not funny that they closed. That has to be heartbreaking for the owners. But I didn’t really mean “funny.” I meant “weird.”

Mike is eating his liver. I told him about this place. He says he has to stay in DC for another year and a half (or until the ice melts), because his son is dug in there. I don’t see why this matters. Once a week, you Fedex the boy a box of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and you give him an allowance to pay for laundry. Problem solved. But Mike can be very obstinate, even when presented with a brilliant solution like this.

Today I have to get out in the garage and fabricate something to move pizzas with. My small peel won’t be here until next week. This might be a good excuse to weld, although the end product would be more like a weapon than a pizza peel. I guess I could go to the hardware store and pick up a small sheet of aluminum. I may have a piece of steel somewhere.

I can’t wait to see how things go on Sunday. We’re only going to produce 40 slices, which is what I would call super-cautious, but it’s better to sell out than end up with an embarrassing surplus. Always leave them wanting more.

It’s nice to have something this important to work on.

I was About to Lock Up

Late message from Heather:

Hey, could you add my mom to your prayers she has to have a PETscan at 8 in the morning, then follow up with doctor at 1P. I have to follow up with my high risk OB at 12:30. We are asking for a clean scan for her. Thanks!

Propheting Ain’t Easy

In my last post, I failed to point out that I made the test pizza at my church, not here. I had to go talk to a Sysco guy who grew up in Queens. He approved of my pizza.

I do not claim to be a prophet. I am not one of these people who run around saying, “God told me [insert self-serving claim here]” or “God said I should [insert preexisting self-serving intention here].” I think God moves me to do things from time to time, and I think he gives me little nudges about what I should pray for, but I am not crazy enough to claim I’m always sure.

A few months back, I had a weird urge to pray for God to let me give a really big sum of money to my church, to get rid of the mortgage. Maybe it was God. Maybe it wasn’t. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask for it and then move on.

Today I was thinking about the pizza situation, and I realized I may have something to give the church which is worth a gigantic pile of cash. I might be able to put them in the pizza business.

I don’t know anything about nonprofit law. I assume it’s okay for a nonprofit to make money, if it uses the money to fund its activities. Otherwise, it would be pretty hard for a church to run a gift shop.

If I can draw a customer base, maybe we can get serious. Don’t the Moonies own Worldnet Daily and Kahr Arms?

This would be perfect. I’d love to sell pizza, but I don’t want to do it alone, because I’m not exactly sure how a sole proprietor starts running a multi-employee business from a dead start. And I don’t want to partner with non-Christians.

I’m not worried about the money part. Right now, I can buy a pizzeria in an amazing location for $33,000. But the church already has a kitchen.

I thought I should document the whole thing now. If it amounts to nothing, no harm done. It has never surprised anyone when one of my schemes turned out to be pointless. But if it’s real, I don’t want to be one of these guys who has a testimony he can’t prove. I don’t want to show up three years from now, after the fact, and say, “By the way, God showed me all these signs BEFORE I got it going.” No one believes a prognosticator who only speaks after his predictions have come true.

I am tired of preachers coming to my church and claiming extraordinary things happened to them, without providing any evidence. If God made a lady grow a leg or whatever, can’t you give us her name? Can’t you put up a Youtube, at least? Anyone can show up in church and say God flew him to Mars and back. It takes a real prophet to show up on photos at NASA.

Nutty things keep happening. My recipe gets better and better. People at church are arranging the kitchen to suit me. I got supernaturally delivered from gluttony, so I can cook all I want without exploding. It’s just weird!

Suddenly I wish I had eaten more than one slice. Oh, well. I can go have an orange.

No Need to Knead

I made Sicilian pizza without kneading the dough, and the result was a little disappointing, because as far as I can tell, it was exactly like the crust I make with a food processor. I was hoping for bigger holes. I think I actually worked it TOO MUCH, during the minute or so I mashed it with a spoon.

This is just crazy.

I highly recommend this, for anyone who doesn’t have machinery. Make the yeast and water mix, dump the flour and other stuff in a bowl, add the wet stuff, mash it around until it appears to be dough, and then bake as usual.

I think I’ll still use the food processor, because it’s actually easier. I may shorten the processing time.

I didn’t change my dough recipe. If you like to let your dough rise over a long period, cut back on the yeast.

Might be less safe for thin pizza. Caveat emptor.

Sicilian With Holes

Today The Pragmatic Chef left a comment about no-knead bread, as presented at the site Breadtopia. The basic idea is this: prepare dough by stirring the dry stuff together and adding the wet stuff, then let it sit for 18 hours, then fold it a couple of times, then let it rise, then bake.

He complained of big voids in the finished product, but for Sicilian pizza, those would be a plus, so naturally, I had to make dough.

I just mixed two cups of bread flour with yeast and my other ingredients. I used much more yeast than the Breadtopia people, because I need a product that’s ready to go in an hour or so. We’ll see what it looks like.

This could be a great thing for people without food processors or big mixers. Truthfully, it won’t save me any labor. In fact, it’s harder than using a food processor. But the big voids would be nice.

This is What Good Pizza Contains

I had a fantastic day. I drove to Bed Bath and Beyond and picked up pizza stones for the church, and then I hit Goodman’s and got a great Escali food scale and a dough hook for the church’s mixer. From there, I headed to church, and I fired up the ovens and MADE ME SOME PIZZA.

The church has a Kitchenaid K5-A mixer made by Hobart. This is one of the old ones, before they went to plastic gears. The church got it from a failed business, I think. It’s in excellent condition. I slapped the hook on it and followed Mike’s instructions. The mixer cranked out 2.5 pounds of dough without struggling, but it was annoying to use. The dough climbed up the hook and ended up turning with it instead of being kneaded.

I like adding the water to the flour, instead of doing it the other way. This allows me to adjust the water content to my liking, and it doesn’t throw dry flour all over the kitchen, which is what can happen if you try to add flour to a moving mixer. The problem with my approach (which is also Mike’s approach) is that the dough starts out hard and gets softer as you add water. Hard dough likes to form a knob around the hook. I had to cut it loose with a knife and add water and start over. And the dough process, even if you don’t screw up, takes five minutes.

This, clearly, is lame. A food processor works in a minute and a half, and there is no way the dough can stick to the blade. An added benefit is that a food processor heats the dough, so it rises fast.

I proved the Kitchenaid will work, but it’s not for me. And it would be hard to show someone else how to use it.

Anyway, I made dough, and I waited for the ovens to heat, and then I made some pies. I had taken my pans home for additional seasoning, and boy, did it work. The Sicilian I made didn’t even try to stick. Beautiful. I need a small peel to get it from the pan to the stone, but things worked out.

I texted Pastor Rich, who didn’t get a single slice yesterday. He was in the kitchen before anyone else today. He wasn’t going to be done dirty a second time. He invited a few other people, and the pie was divided, and it was perfect. I had a slice for QC purposes, so I know. It was amazing. I was so glad. I wanted the church to have the best, and they had it.

I tried the hacked conventional gas oven with the new 575-degree thermostat. I had thought it was 550, but it turned out there was a graduation past that, and then there is one that just says “BROIL.” I made a thin pizza in it, and it didn’t seem to brown the crust as fast as my home oven, but the end result was beautiful. The crust baked up harder on the outside, which would seem to suggest the temperature was higher. It was actually a little better than the pies I’ve made at home. I don’t know whether it was the new stone, higher heat, or the mixer, but I have no worries about the oven’s capabilities now.

Both pizzas got raves. The church’s lawyer showed up, and he tried them. He’s an Italian from New York, and he said it was like the pizza up north. You can’t beat that testimony. Earlier in the day, Pastor Marcus, the guy who runs the kitchen, told a volunteer I made Sicilian better than they made it in New York, and he should know, since he grew up there. He said he would bet the volunteer $20 my pizza would be the best he ever ate. That felt pretty good. People were generally freaked out by the food.

The things that happened while I was making the pizzas were amazing. I felt like I was watching God prepare my path. Pastor Marcus and a volunteer came in, moved a crowded stack of shelves away from the left side of my refrigerated prep table, and put a stainless steel table there. I cleaned it off with Pine Sol and bleach, and I was ready to go. I stuck the mixer, my seasonings and oil, and the scale on it, and I was in business! It was beautiful. Twenty square feet of workspace. I told them I was going to put a mattress on it and stay there.

They’re going to put locks on the prep table so I can keep people out of my pizza junk and my stash of beverages. BAH HA HA HA HA. I OWN THE KITCHEN.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

I called Mike while I was working, and I could feel the waves of envy radiating from my cell phone. He says I’m not allowed to make garlic rolls until he can get here.

Is this what God’s favor is like? I sure hope so. The success I’ve had has been inexplicable. If I had been born with a gift for baking pizza, I would not have suffered years of failure. These recipes were handed to me, like Samson’s strength. Maybe I should stop cutting my hair.

I’ve decided I don’t mind having things handed to me. Pride is okay, but this is better. I felt like I was surfing God’s pipeline. It was bliss. I’ve been cursed, and I’ve been blessed, and blessed is better.

When Pastor Rich tried the pizza, he almost immediately cleared the expenditure for a food processor, so we’ll be getting a giant Kitchenaid Pro Line job. After that, I will be Godzilla, and pizza will be Japan. I’ll be able to crank out enough dough for two Sicilians every three minutes.

This is beautiful. I told Pastor Rich I’d rather be the guy in the kitchen, making the pizza, than the guys on the stage, singing and getting all the attention. I’m thrilled to be doing this.

He seems to think I’m nuts, but he is not complaining.

If I had five days a year that I enjoyed this much, I would consider myself lucky.

Note: I highly recommend the Escali 115C food scale. It weighs in tiny increments, it goes to ten pounds, and it STAYS ON FOR FOUR MINUTES so you don’t go crazy turning it on over and over.

But This is Real

It occurred to me last night that during the day, I had had a peak experience. I got to cook perfect Sicilian pizza, in church, while carrying a firearm with night sights. The guy who leads the armorbearers at my church said something about me being the deadliest cook in the city.

I hope he was talking about my shooting and not the food.

I haven’t figured out how to work tools into the equation, but it’s about forty feet from the pizza area to the church’s table saw, so I can always run back there and hug it as needed.

I called Mike to badger him and tell him about my success, which was largely due to his help (as he reminded me). I told him about my great new discovery: Glad disposable containers for dough. It won’t stick to them. He told me he had been using them for a long time. This must be how Luke Skywalker felt when Yoda used to slap him down.

It’s funny; it’s as if God has given me a number of ways to impact the church, so at least one will succeed, even if I am hindered at the rest of them. I have been delayed in my writing efforts; they don’t even use me to edit copy for their website, which is very odd, given my background. Maybe that’s the enemy working to fragment the church, or maybe it’s God, saying cooking is the right thing to be doing now.

So far, the cooking and the armorbearer work are prospering beautifully. Those are more than enough to make me happy and help me feel useful.

I’m glad they don’t ask me to do legal work. A lawyer is like David: a “man of blood,” even if what he does is right. I don’t want to go through life beating on people.

Obstacles and hindrances and wild goose chases have taken up much of my life, and I think it was because I wasn’t following God. Things that should have worked out for me did not, over and over. That’s great. If you succeed at doing something that is beneficial in the short term but ultimately harmful, you haven’t been blessed, so I’m glad I didn’t make it on my own terms. I can think of people who did. Chris Farley. Elvis. John Belushi. Nero. Hitler. They lived by bread alone, and things went poorly for them.

Satan doesn’t have to kill you to win. If he can waste enough of your time and effort, you’ll lose. It’s as good as killing you. God created you for a mission, and distraction and delay are effective ways of aborting it.

If you’re a worldly person, Satan will wave shiny prizes in front of you. Sexy women. Expensive cars. Glory. Power. Advancement. But if you pursue these things, he’ll yank them away before you get them, or he’ll give them to you, and you’ll wish he hadn’t. You’ll regret it, in this life or when you are judged.

Satan is like a drug pusher. He offers you things you want very badly, and he tells you they’ll make you happy. But they cause pain in the end. I think he loves to make people chase his mirages, and he loves tearing the sets down just when we think we’ve made it. I think he enjoys our despair and disappointment.

The movie Bedazzled (either version) is a great lesson for Christians. Satan shows up and makes deals with a fool, and then Satan finds cruel ways to break the deals in spirit while upholding them in letter. That’s what my life used to be like, except that he often failed to stick to his deals in any respect. He can do that.

These days, things work. I want better things, and they are coming to me, on a sustainable, healthy schedule. I will suffer in this life, but overall, I will live in victory and contentment.

I became a Spirit-filled Christian around twenty-five years ago. Then I backed away because I was offended. Since then, I’ve never fit into the world. I’ve been excluded and blackballed, over and over. When I’ve tried to shoehorn myself into the worldly scene, things haven’t felt right. There has always been tension between worldly people and me. I could only follow them so far. They could only get so close to me. Then the barriers went up.

Now I know people I can relax with. People I can work with. That’s a new experience for me. More accurately, it’s an experience I haven’t had since I left the church. If I meet a woman I like, I won’t have to worry about her telling people she thinks I’m gay because I didn’t jump on her when she removed her underwear under the table at a bar. I won’t have awkward social moments when I have to turn down drugs. If I decide to do the godly thing instead of the obvious thing, at a considerable short-term cost, I won’t have to fight with people who don’t get it. If I marry and my wife gets a dubious amniocentesis result, I won’t have to explain why I don’t want to kill the baby. I’ll never face a paternity suit. I won’t have a business partner who insists I work on Sunday or withhold my tithes and offerings. My friends will improve me instead of pulling me down. It’s shocking, how much power you can get from friends who build you up instead of holding you back. A lot of wives should think about that, when they deal with their husbands. A lot of parents should think about it when they deal with their kids.

This is freedom. It’s oppressive to be chained to unbelievers. We’re supposed to lead, and when we’re shackled to worldly people, they lead us. And guess who leads them? The Church Lady could tell you. The chain of command is supposed to go God-pastor-congregant and then on down to Satan, at the very bottom. When you have to follow a worldly person, God can end up at the bottom, with Satan at the top. Then you lose the blessings God intends you to walk into through obedience and faith.

One of the things that makes the biggest impression me is my interaction with Christian women. They are a breath of fresh air. I was so tired of sleaze. I was tired of being told I was obligated to “make a move” by a certain time or lose the woman. It’s bizarre for a man to find himself in situations where he’s the one who has to apply the moral brakes. Women are supposed to carry a lot of that burden; God wired their brains and set up their hormones so they would be suited to do it. Instead, they’re downright coarse. “Ladettes” are everywhere. They’re the norm.

You know what? There is nothing wrong with a man who hasn’t gotten your pants off by the third date. If that’s the only way you can tell you have a strong relationship with a man, you are very, very lost. If sex is that important to you, hire an escort so you’ll only waste a man’s time for an evening, instead of a lifetime. Why should I have to fight preexisting background temptation, as well as the woman I’m with? If she’s not on my side in this battle, why should I expect her to be on my side in any other fight? Support is a wife’s primary function, whether the feminists want to hear it or not. A man can’t fight the world by day and his wife by night and expect to do well.

Life has gotten so sordid; it’s sad that women have become one of the chief mechanisms of the change. Worldly women have given up. Many of them are like the hairnetted ladies you see in grocery stores, calling out to strangers to get them to try free samples of their products. Wow, that’s an inspiring way to live. That’s dignity.

I’m sure there are Christian women who are too weak to do what they believe in, but there are also women who have enough backbone to put love before sex. What do you want? A husband, or a good, reliable goat? It’s easy to whine that all the other women are coming across with the goods. That’s fine, if you think you don’t deserve anything better than the bad results most women get.

I’ve said it before: I used to find worthwhile women hard to locate, and I found it hard to motivate myself to ask anyone out, but now the more likely problem is trying to figure out which worthwhile woman is the right one. I meet great women when I’m among Christians. Aaron said it best: “fish in stocked ponds.”

Life is cleaner and more focused now. I’m glad I don’t have to think about designated drivers any more. I don’t have to go without my carry piece in order to enter a bar legally. I don’t even smell like cigars. I go to bed early, and I rise early. It’s a good way to live. My character is improving; I disappoint and annoy myself less. The things I gave up to get here are garbage. Paul said the same thing.

God did all of it. He worked inside me and changed my desires and strengths. It’s the best deal imaginable. You don’t have to be strong or pure to get this; God will clean you up over time and make you what you should be. You don’t have to deserve it.

I’m going to work on the Sicilian pans and get some pizza stones today. I am going to wake this church up with my cooking on Sunday, or they are going to find me on the kitchen floor, passed out from trying.

God’s Own Pizza

I am back from the pizza experiment!

I would say it was a success, but that would be like saying Barack Obama is conceited and incompetent. It’s an understatement, by several orders of magnitude.

It turns out a commercial convection oven will make outstanding Sicilian pizza. I think it’s better than a home oven. You have to shorten the cooking time, but other than that, it’s swell. And it has about eight racks, so I could conceivably bake eight pizzas at once; two per rack, with stones on the racks between them.

As for flat pizza, I don’t recommend a convection oven. The crust was like Papa John’s, so by my standards, it was FAIL. Everyone who tried it thought it was great, but why not have the best?

When people sampled the pies, there was all sorts of moaning. I have to admit, that was fun. I have no other means of making women make those sounds.

I know all you atheists think I’m ignorant and superstitious. I would never dream of contradicting you. I will just point out that the amazing “coincidences” continued to mount today.

While I was waiting for dough to rise, I met an older gentleman in the church’s workshop, which is…RIGHT BEHIND THE KITCHEN. The walk-in boxes are actually in the workshop. He turned out the be the pastor’s uncle. Guess what he does? WOODWORKING. He showed me a bunch of beautiful cabinets he had made. We talked table saws. Then he said he used to teach ELECTRONICS, which is another thing I love to fool with. And he used to have an RV with a CUMMINS DIESEL, so we got to talk about my recenty acquired truck! Let’s see. They’re letting me cook. I made a friend who turned out to be a jazz fan and horn player. And now I have a friend who loves tools!

But it’s all superstition, right? Nothing to see here. Move along.

One of the church’s volunteers is an appliance repairman who COINCIDENTALLY happens to maintain ovens for a bunch of the local pizzerias. No, nothing out of the ordinary there. Happenstance! He was working on the conventional and convection ovens I was going to be using. He heard me say I was worried about the ovens only going to 500°, and that I really wanted 550°.

Long story short: the convection oven worked beautifully at 500°, but the thermostat on the other oven was bad. He left and got a new one and put it in. He showed it to me. It was a 550° thermostat! He had heard me talking, so he replaced the old busted thermostat with a hotter one! Now I have a convection oven and a conventional oven, to do everything I want!

All luck. I assure you.

They gave me a little space where I could work. It was a refrigerated cabinet with a granite counter. They picked it up used. It’s a PIZZA PREP TABLE. Three feet from the ovens I’ll be using. Ten feet from the corner, around which are the woodworking tools.

The sub-pastor I’m working with–Pastor Marcus–told me I could put my own lock on the cabinet and put my supplies in it! It’s empty!

“So what?”, I hear determined atheists saying. Right, it’s all imaginary.

BUT…I’m also part of the armorbearers group, which means I help with church security. One of our big problems is that we need to have water available, because we walk around all day and get dehydrated. The church wasn’t providing a solution. This was especially important to me, because I had a kidney stone a while back.

Okay, GUESS WHERE I’M GOING TO KEEP MY WATER NOW? In my locked pizza cabinet! I won’t have to worry about people grabbing it! I can make room for water for the other guys, too.

Man, it’s amazing how much divine action you can perceive, when you’re a primitive theist determined to see the hand of God in everything that happens. In order to be an atheist, I’d have to be as hard-headed as the Black Knight.

John, the guy who leads the armorbearers came in to try the pizza. He said it was “anointed.” I told Pastor Marcus I’d have to ask John if I could take time off from the armorbearers to work on Sunday. He yelled across the room at John, who wasn’t fully able to respond because he still had his mouth full. The message: “Just take him.” He packed up the rest of the third pie and took it home.

This is just crazy. The best pizza in Miami will now be available only at Trinity Church.

I still have stuff to do. I have to pick up some stones for their ovens. Maybe a dough hook for their mixer. I’d like to see them spring for a Kitchenaid food processor. I think I would enjoy seeing one of those arrive more than Moses liked watching the Egyptians drown. Three hundred bucks…it’s doable.

Here’s a tip: I used Glad disposable food containers to hold the rising dough today, and guess what? They’re ideal. The dough just won’t stick to them. Hey, what wonderful LUCK.

I’m sure glad I’m not smart enough to be an atheist. Look all the blessings I wouldn’t be imagining.

View Only Through Smoked Glass

I’m headed to church to do pizza research! I’ll make dough here and take it up there. Their mixer may or may not have a dough hook, and I don’t want to get up there and find out I can’t make dough.

Pray for success. I’m hoping I can give them a product that will knock them out.

Hiatus

I was going to shoot up to my church today to see if I could make pizza with their equipment, but I forgot about our 40-day thing. During the first 40 days of the year, people are doing various things to get closer to God. Most of it is fasting. I’m doing a pretty wimpy variation: Mondays until 6 p.m. If I bake pizzas, I won’t be able to try them until this evening. That won’t work.

I suppose this will work out well, because I need a dough hook for the church’s mixer. Maybe I can find one today.

Here’s my take on the Super Bowl: glad it’s over. On Saturday night, the traffic was unbelievable. Just what Miami needs more of. The Super Bowl is like Hip Hop Weekend. A good reason to stock up on food and stay indoors.

On Saturday night, I saw thousands of cars trying to get to downtown Miami. I can’t figure that out. There must have been an event. Ordinarily, there is no rational explanation for trying to go downtown. There is nothing there, except bums. We have a contrived waterfront mall called Bayside Marketplace, but it’s about as authentic as the Country Bear Jamboree and nearly as exciting as Walmart.

I have to wonder if clueless people went to downtown Miami, assuming it had to be the focal point of a huge celebration, only to discover nothing was happening. And that there was no place to park.

People have a lot of misconceptions about Miami. I’ll help.

1. When you reach the Florida border, you’re almost there. Wrong. You have about 400 miles to go.

2. Miami has great nightlife. Wrong. Miami BEACH has great nightlife. Miami is a different city, several miles from Miami Beach. Miami smells like wino pee, and there isn’t much to do there at night unless you like Denny’s or emergency rooms. There used to be some nightlife in Coconut Grove, but the Beach pretty much killed it. Even the gays left. We still have a Hooters, though.

3. Miami has great beaches. Wrong. Miami BEACH has OKAY beaches. Miami is not on the ocean. It’s on Biscayne Bay. All of the waterfront land is covered by buildings, seawalls, and mangroves. The really good beaches are about a hundred miles away, on the west coast. And Eleuthera’s beaches make our west coast beaches look like landfills.

4. Miami is beautiful. Well, maybe, compared to the place you came from. But Miami is almost completely flat, the coastline is boring and straight, and the beaches, as noted above, are very ordinary. Because of the geography, you won’t see much of the ocean, anyway, unless you’re driving across a bridge or paying a thousand dollars to experience our very average offshore fishing.

5. People who live in Miami will be glad to see you, because you’re contributing to the economy.

Oh, boy. I won’t even touch that one.

I could not care less about the game. I’m glad I wasn’t required to watch it. The older I get, the more unpleasant TV football games are for me. I grit my teeth until they’re over. The crowd noise is like coarse sandpaper on the eardrums. I’ve tried to like football, but it’s like pretending to enjoy Kenny G. to please your girlfriend. The only things I like about football are barbecuing and the funny commercials.

I am told people paid $5000 each for seats yesterday. I must not be the same species as those people. I’m sitting here trying to imagine what, about Super Bowl whatever-number-it-was, would justify that kind of expense, and I’m drawing a blank. Even if I wanted to go, I think fifty bucks would be a king’s ransom. I went to see B.B. King once, and I think I was in the fifteenth row, and I believe I paid thirty dollars. Something like that. I paid $25 to see Maynard Ferguson in a small club, and he came out in the crowd and shook my hand. If you’ve ever spent more than a hundred bucks on a sporting event, your brain needs an MRI.

I have never cared who won a football game. Why should I? It’s not like I know these people. I found out the Colts and Saints were playing the day before the game. Who was I rooting for? Tim Tebow. Although I wouldn’t know who he is, if he weren’t making hippies mad. I enjoyed his commercial. I saw it a few minutes ago. On a blog.

Apparently the Colts aren’t in Baltimore now.

I need to call the church and find out the model number on their old Hobart Kitchenaid. I have this nagging feeling that I’ll have to examine it in person.

Maybe God will provide a Cuisinart.

By the way, Kitchenaid makes a 16-cup food processor that is supposed to be much better than a Cuisinart, and it’s not that expensive. Something to think about. If your machine can handle four cups of flour, as this one should, your pizza needs will be no problem.

New Sensation for Me

I had a spiffy time at church today. I am finally starting to blend in. Every so often, I realize it’s a little weird for white Southern lawyer to be part of the cast of characters at a church comprised mostly of Haitians, Jamaicans, and Cubans, but the sensation only lasts for a second.

I think the kookier Christians get, the more post-racial we are. Charismatics are pretty far-out. Now that I think about it, there are a bunch of interracial couples in the church, so maybe my theory holds water.

When I was in law school, there was an annoying level of tension between blacks and whites. It was really bizarre. I guess I found it strange because of my past experiences in an Assemblies of God church, where people were just people. Sometimes I treated black law students as though they were just like everyone else, and they did not welcome it. Many of them separated themselves from the rest of us. Crazy, given that this was in the late 90s.

I’m part of the church’s “armorbearer” team, which is a group of men who do everything from basic security to getting the pastor his Altoids. We had a swell meeting after the service. We’re really coming together. We’re getting our firearms policy straight, and we’re taking steps to get professional security training so we don’t screw up too much. It’s a wonderful club to be in. These guys get it done; that’s what they’re all about. We don’t get to hop up and down on the stage or star in the church’s videos. We just wander around behind the scenes, trying to make stuff work. The people in the more glamorous jobs have their own problems to contend with, so we try to make life easier for them.

There are other volunteer branches in the church that keep things moving. The parking guys. The ushers. The kitchen people. If I try to make a list, I’ll leave half of the volunteers out.

I finally got to root around in the kitchen and make pizza plans. If I can work it out, I plan to go up there tomorrow and try to make a few pies with their equipment. This is just R&D. I have a feeling it won’t be hard to find test pilots.

Their ovens only go to 500°, which is troubling. I’ll have to see if it causes a problem. My guess is that it won’t. I would think thick pizza would actually benefit from a lower temperature.

They have a weird commercial convection oven which could conceivably bake several big pies at once, and they have a traditional gas oven. I’ll just have to see what works.

I think the best approach is to sell slices. This place is not efficient, and to sell whole pies, you need to move fast. And you need to have lots of trays and screens and containers for dough. That would be a pain. And most of our customers won’t want a whole pie anyway.

I want to train the customers to like Sicilian. It’s less messy, and you get much more food for the effort and time. You can cut one pie into eight slices, and every slice is a meal. Except for the gluttons. A 16″ circular pie will only serve four, assuming you cut it in eight slices.

I’m really excited. I’m happy to volunteer in any area, but it’s nice to do something I’m actually gifted at.

It turns out there is a Gordon Food Service four miles north of the church, and there’s a Costco not far off. That means I can get everything I need, nearby. We may be able to get quality stuff delivered by Sysco, but we’re not there yet.

I picked up some starter items. Cutter. Cookie sheet. Tray. Screen. Sauce. Cheese. Yeast. Vinegar. That will make getting started a lot easier. They’ll still have to get a peel and a food scale, and we have to figure out how to make dough. They have a Kitchenaid stand mixer that says “Hobart” on it, but I don’t know if they have dough attachments, and I have to figure out how to use them. A big food processor would be nice.

Light olive oil is a problem. Everyone squeals about extra virgin so much, I assumed the light stuff would be cheaper. But I haven’t found a good price on it. I’m considering mixing extra virgin with safflower oil. You really don’t want a heavy olive flavor in your pizza oil. It works fine in rolls, but extra light is perfect for pizza crust. GFS has a blend I might try. Sometimes the cheap stuff works better than the good stuff.

I sure hope this works out. It would be something for us to take pride in, and it would give people from the neighborhood a reason to walk in the door. And the cafe has been a real challenge for the church, so anything I can do to make it work will be a good thing.

Today I learned something interesting about one of the armorbearer guys I hang around with. He’s an accomplished musician. He plays the trombone. He used to tour and perform when he was a kid. My cousin’s husband is a classical trombone virtuoso, and this guy actually knows who he is. Can you beat that?

I can’t believe I know another person under 60 who knows who Lester Young was. Man, I feel less alone.

Another of those funny God “coincidences,” I guess.