The Long Haul

Here’s a news video featuring my pastor and the Friend Ships Limited freighter Integrity.

Is it Wrong to Seek After Leasing?

I just saw the most amazing Craigslist ad. Some dude is giving away a pizzeria. He claims it’s equipped, but I see ads where he’s selling equipment.

The lease is $1000 per month. You just take over and start baking.

Arrggh.

ARRGGH.

I will not do this. Really.

That’s a tough deal to beat, though. Unless the pizzeria is next door to a plutonium spill, it can make money. And 0 is a very good price.

Say I take this offer. I incorporate so I have no personal risk. I invest three months’ rent. I spend maybe two grand to get the place running. I keep it open for a month. If it works, PROFIT! If not, an interesting month and a very manageable loss.

But HOMESTEAD? I wanted to get closer to church, and this is farther away. Homestead is a much nicer place to live than Miami, but I figure it’s 45 miles from church.

Goes to show what is possible, however.

I’m trying to get my church to buy a slicer. We need to sell toppings, and a slicer will enable us to prepare them. It will also make cheese way cheaper. Once we’ve been through a hundred pounds of provolone, the slicer will have paid for itself. That’s fewer than 300 pies.

Toppings are the secret to wealth. Slice a fifty-cent onion and charge $4.50 to put it on three pizzas. That’s a marvelous piece of arithmetic.

We also need a soda dispenser. It would kill our beverage costs, and we’d be able to charge the same amount and give free refills.

Pastor Marcus, who runs the church cafe, says we’re going to have a second cash register working on Sunday. This will mean volume. So instead of selling 8 pies (like last time), I’d like to shoot for 30. Then the following week, I’d like to make thin pizza, too.

I know a guy who wants to learn to make pizza. I’m planning to train him so I won’t be alone with the work. I hate to give up valuable baking secrets, but I’ve decided to trust God and give what I know to the church. Either someone will steal this from me and open a business with my ideas, or God will help me hold onto what he has given me. But I don’t feel right about hiding things from the church. Pastor Marcus doesn’t care one way or the other, however, so my decision isn’t firm.

How did life get so weird? How weird will it get later?

I’m dying to find out.

Striking is a Sin

This is pretty funny.

Two days ago, I helped some charity-ship crew members get to their ship at the Port of Miami. My last visit, not including random motorcycle rides, had been with another attorney: my dad’s former partner. He represented the Port of Miami, and we were there, basically, to annihilate and impoverish the unions. I considered this God’s work.

Last night at church, Pastor Rich said the union people had decided to donate their time, to load the ship with stuff for Haiti.

Talk about strange bedfellows.

I’m glad these guys don’t know my face.

For Some People, Haiti Effort Continues

Yesterday, as part of my duties as an armorbearer for my church, I was asked to drive three people from Miami International to the Port of Miami. They’re crew members on the Friend Ships Limited vessel Integrity, which is docked at the port right now. One is a Merchant Marine, and he’s a captain. The other two are just lay volunteers.

I got to go aboard the Integrity and look around. I enjoyed that a lot. I only saw the cargo hold. I felt like I was on the set of Firefly.

The captain I delivered told me he had to have a lot of shots before going to Haiti. They have a lot of disease there. He mentioned things like dengue, Hepatitis A & B, typhoid, polio, and malaria. There are vaccines for some of Haiti’s diseases. When it comes to others, I guess you have to be lucky or rely on remedies that act after you get sick.

I hadn’t realized it was that bad there. I knew about their drug-resistant TB, and I know a Cuban my age who has a bad leg from polio, but I didn’t know the disease list was so long.

I met the captain’s son. I mean the main captain, not the guy I delivered. He said he hooked a big marlin on the last trip. You can troll from a big ship, if you use heavy tackle to overcome the resistance of the ship’s forward motion. He said the marlin broke his rod. Bummer. I’ll bet they always have fresh dolphin to eat.

He said the weather was nice in Haiti. Mid-seventies and no humidity. It’s so far south of Miami, I had guessed that there were no real seasons there, but it looks like that’s wrong.

The Port has gone nuts on Homeland Security. I used to go for night rides on my motorcycles, and the Port was a good destination, because you get to ride out over the water, and there’s no traffic at night. But last night, on my second trip, I wasn’t allowed to go to the terminal. A cop stopped me on the bridge and had the captain transferred to a car driven by a Port employee. The captain had what is known as a TWIC card, which is a form of ID for shipping industry employees. My driver’s license and carry permit would not have cut the mustard.

I’m glad they’re not playing. The Port would be a great location for a small nuke. But stopping land traffic isn’t very effective. You can still drive a freighter or a big fishing boat or a yacht right into the harbor.

I don’t know much about nuke detection. I like to think we can build devices that will detect nuclear weapons as they pass by in trucks or boxcars or ships. But it’s hard for me to see how that could be done. I would think a little lead around the fissile material would block the radiation well enough to make it undetectable. Hope that’s wrong. Technology is pretty weird; maybe they have a way to do it.

Here’s a link to a photo of the Integrity. I don’t know if they’ll need my help again this week, but I’m here if they call.

Latest Development

Man, this is bad. I’m making pizza all the time, and now I’m getting so fat I’m going to have to go back to the clothes I was wearing last year.

NOT!

Had you going, I’ll bet.

Until recently, I had two pairs of jeans I found comfortable. I put my size 36 jeans in a bag for Goodwill a long time ago, and I’ve been wearing smaller ones. Last week I wore a pair while I made pizza for my church, and while I was there, I made the mistake of pulling on a belt loop because my jeans were sliding. I ripped the ancient denim below the loop. And jeans are cheap cotton. They don’t mend well.

That left me with one pair of jeans to get me through the winter, which has been surprisingly cold so far.

Today I got up, and it was about 50 degrees outside, so I started looking for my remaining pair of safe jeans. I couldn’t find them, but I remembered another pair. A while back, I tried on several pairs of jeans that had been moldering in my closet, and one pair almost fit. I set them aside in a drawer, so I’d know where they were when I got small enough to put them on.

Today I decided to take another crack at them. I showered and dried off, held my breath, and pulled them on. They FIT.

I’m not claiming they’re the ideal size. I’m an inch away from true compatibility with these jeans. But they work. I can walk. I can breathe. I can bend. I can tuck my shirt in without going critical and showering the neighborhood with slow neutrons and gamma rays.

Let’s hear it for God! Richard Simmons has nothing on my weight loss expert. A lot of diets can give you a temporary reduction, but who can fix it so you slowly slim down while perfecting pizza recipes? Only one guy, as far as I know.

One of the worst things about being fat is that you will have several wardrobes. You’ll have your fat wardrobe, your one-month-into-your-doomed-diet wardrobe, and your thin or “real” wardrobe, which you will only be able to wear about one month out of every three years. You’ll call it your real wardrobe because you want to think your lowest weight is your natural weight, and that your fat is a temporary aberration. But your real wardrobe is probably your fat wardrobe.

I want to have one wardrobe. Period. Two wardrobes are one too many. I could not do this on my own. I was able to keep fat off for a year or so, and I was able to avoid truly overwhelming obesity, but that was about it.

When I ate, I felt something pushing me. “One more bite.” “You can do it.” “Starve yourself later to make up for it.”

Now that voice is very weak. And something else–something new and unearned–rises up in me and says, “Push the plate away and enjoy tormenting your enemy.”

People keep using the word “diet” to describe what happened to me. I get sick of it. I’m not on a diet. I’m just not a fat person any more. “Diet” robs God of his glory. He did this for me. A diet is something you do for yourself. I’m middle-aged. If I were able to control my weight through strength of character, don’t you think I’d know it by now?

God willing, I’m going to drop another 13 pounds or so. Then people who meet me won’t even suspect I used to be fat. I’ll have to show them photos.

Yesterday I wrote about the stuff God is generously doing in my life, and someone left a nice comment suggesting I have a brain tumor. It left me wondering. Why do people have such a powerful desire to deny God’s work? We’ll do almost anything to find an alternate explanation for a miracle. We’ll make idiotic claims. We’ll say a cure for cancer was psychosomatic, for example.

Give that a try, if you have cancer. Seriously. Sit on your couch for an hour a day and say, “My body has cured my cancer.” You’re still going to die, believe me. I apologize if that makes you feel bad, but you know…you’re still going to DIE, if this is your approach.

And why is a near-magical psychosomatic cure somehow easier to swallow than a miracle? We know of no physical mechanism by which this can occur; there is no direct connection between a positive mindset and a cure. Science has shown that a good attitude is good for your health, but it won’t destroy a big tumor. Psychosomatic cures are a fantasy just as dubious as the fables the lunatic Charles Manson used to make up for his followers. Just as groundless as L. Ron Hubbard’s fairy tales about Xemu and the Thetans. If you can believe something like that, with no evidence at all, why can’t you believe in the power of God, which is supported by the testimonies of countless credible individuals?

A while back, I was instantly healed of a kidney stone, while praying about it in my church’s parking lot. I had no idea a brain tumor could do that! It’s amazing what a brain tumor can do!

FYI, regardless of what you may have seen in B-grade John Travolta movies, brain tumors do not make you brilliant or inspired or cause you to see miracles. They give you headaches. They blur your vision. They make you vomit. You become incontinent. You lose the power of speech. They cause dementia. Look it up. I know someone who is at a high risk of developing brain tumors, so I’ve checked into it. And I saw miracles over twenty years ago. If I have a brain tumor, it’s the slowest-growing tumor in history.

I can think of some reasons why people deny God’s power.

For one thing, people like to sin. Fornication is tremendous fun; let’s admit it. Drugs are a blast. Stealing and cheating bring you great things you otherwise could not get. Violence is cathartic and relaxing. Abusing and dominating other people make you feel strong and important. Selfishness takes a big load off your mind, because you don’t have to worry about other people’s problems.

Sin is enjoyable. And if God exists and has power to act in this world, sin has to be minimized and shunned. No more clubbing and taking a different honey home every night. No more cocaine. No more weed. No more drunkenness. No more materialism. You even have to give up revenge. It’s only natural that people will look for ways to avoid believing in God, with all that at risk.

People also deny God’s power because they don’t see him working in their lives, and they want to convince themselves that this is how it’s supposed to be. It’s not that they’re not doing what’s right in God’s eyes. Their stale denominations and their unproductive doctrines are just fine. The problem is that people like me lie about our supposed miracles. We’re holy rollers and kooks. Christians (or Jews) are supposed to suffer and be defeated in this life, and we’re supposed to be grateful for it and not question it. Nuts like me will be judged for our heresy! Oh, we’ll get ours! We’ll suffer, big time! Hopefully!

Our healings and blessings are either demonic or somehow stolen from God. The real servants of God are the ones who are strong enough to admit that miracles and prophecy ceased permanently a long time ago.

If you admit I’m telling the truth, you may have to admit that some of your doctrine is wrong. I can understand resisting that. I don’t like admitting my doctrine is wrong, either, but sometimes it is. And here I am, losing fat and getting my prayers answered and becoming better able to be a blessing to other people. Am I supposed to quit? Seriously, am I? Are you insane?

I recall the story of the blind man Jesus healed, in the ninth chapter of John. People with bad, man-made doctrine tried to make the blind man condemn Jesus as a magician and a sinner, and instead, he heaped ridicule on them, saying, “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes! Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him. Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”

The book of John also says, “Then they reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.”

Look, perhaps it’s possible for a charlatan to perform self-serving miracles that offend God, yet which are somehow derived from God’s power. Fine. But when that happens, there is an element of sin involved. There is an evil purpose. Someone makes money from it, or someone steals God’s glory, or man’s will is exalted above God’s. Where is the evil in what happened to me?

1. I made no money from it, nor did anyone else, nor did anyone receive any type of earthly advantage.

2. I credited God and admitted I couldn’t do it on my own.

3. It happened outside of my will; it wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t even ask for it. I’m not like the rabbis in the Talmud who created a calf golem because they were hungry. I didn’t do this. It came as a surprise.

4. I’m trying to help other people get the same thing, even though my only likely reward is contempt.

It’s dangerous to see every ostensibly good thing as a gift from God. You can harm people badly by doing things for them. Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, and he works miracles. Satan blesses people in order to ruin them, and sometimes false doctrine gives impressive short-term results, like the dark side of the fictional force. I know all that. But sometimes you have to apply a little common sense and think for yourself. If Abraham hadn’t thought for himself, he would have taken over his dad’s idol-making business, and the Jews would not exist.

Call it a tumor. Call it schizophrenia. Say aliens did it to me. Sit up nights violating Occam’s razor, constructing elaborate explanations to make it go away. I can’t stop you. But don’t expect me to listen to your nonsense.

Can’t Buy This Nowhere

Here is a Sicilian made with no-knead dough and Provolone on top of the mozzarella.

The crust is fine. The no-knead approach gives it more of a biscuity texture, which I like, and the oil blend gave a very nice flavor. Pure light olive oil is a little better, but this is excellent.

The provolone seems to brown up in a more appetizing way than mozzarella. I prefer mozzarella to be browned as little as possible, but the provolone was actually enhanced. Not sure why.

My new GFS quarter-sheet pan performed flawlessly. This is the first pizza I’ve made in it, and it didn’t even try to stick. And I did everything wrong, mooshing the overly wet dough into the pan and even letting it rise there.

Because the dough was slightly too wet, it tried to stick to my stone, so now I’m doing a clean cycle. Great pizza, however.

Half Perfect

I made garlic rolls using no-knead dough and a 50/50 blend of olive and canola oils. Photos:

They were pretty good. I would not ordinarily use blended oil in rolls, but I don’t want to go to the trouble of making a pizza right now, so I used rolls for research purposes.

When you go from 25% olive oil to 50%, you get enough olive flavor to detect, but not so much it would wreck a pizza. I can’t say whether the blend would have olive oil’s buttery flavor in a baked crust. Maybe I’ll bake a crust to find out.

I used all-purpose flour in the dough. The rolls were on the tender side. I assume the flour is the reason. The lack of kneading might have something to do with it, but I tend to think gluten is at the heart of it. I would have used a different flour, but I had run out.

I guess I’ll give up and make a pizza crust.

Disturbing but Encouraging

This is the greatest campaign ad I’ve ever seen. I stole it from Sondra. Not only does it support my values; it appears to prove that Harry Reid is experiencing some gender confusion.

Those ladies can SHOOT, too.

Grace and Grease

Yesterday I tried my jug of cheap blended olive oil. I slapped some rolls together without kneading the dough. My only fresh garlic had mold on it, so I used garlic powder. Good enough for an experiment, I figured. And no one would ever know.

Oops.

The rolls were surprisingly good. In fact, it’s surprising that they were good at all. I let them rise for a total of 45 minutes, which is ridiculous. But they worked.

The oil blend is not good. There’s nothing offensive about it, but the olive oil content is so low, you can barely taste it. It reminds me of corn oil. It would be okay for pizza, which doesn’t require as much flavor as rolls, but it would not be as good as extra-light olive oil.

I’m going to add olive oil to it, to create a 50/50 blend. If that works, I can save the church cash by buying olive oil and some other oil at Costco and mixing them. I’m pretty sure I can beat the price of the GFS 50/50 blend. Costco sells extra-virgin for about five bucks a liter. I don’t know what they charge for their other oils, but I can get corn oil for five bucks a gallon. I think corn oil would be a little heavy.

Someone is selling a nice commercial slicer on Craigslist for $200. I may snap that up and lend…ow…ow…ow…okay, GIVE it to the church so they can save money on food.

Sometimes when God pushes me to do something, I feel like Cliff Clavin getting zapped with his psychiatrist’s electric behavior modifier. But I’ve mentioned that before.

I had a remarkable experience this morning. At church this week, my pastor mentioned Psalm 127. I guess I might as well publish the whole thing, since it’s short.

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.

Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

He was talking about children, but the part that interested me was the first sentence. This is a belief I hold very firmly. The things you do in this life, no matter how worthy they may seem, are of no value unless God is behind them. You can build a big company, raise successful kids, help the poor, support the church, and still fail to please God or accumulate wealth in heaven, because the things you did were not part of his plan.

The things God builds stay built. Even if the things you do for him don’t last in this world, the reward will be eternal. And he is the only force that can permanently set you free from your problems. Jenny Craig and Betty Ford can set you free for a time, but only God can make you “free, indeed.” To accomplish anything of eternal value, you have to find out what God wants you do to.

That first sentence would be great on a T-shirt.

I decided to look that up today, in my King James Bible. The only King James I have belonged to my mother; my main Bible is the New King James, and I also like The Complete Jewish Bible. I opened her Bible to the 127th psalm, and in the margin next to Psalm 128, I saw my mother’s handwriting. It said “Steve, Dec. 12, 1987.” And she had bracketed the following verses:

For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

In this life, I will never know why she put brackets around that language. She died in 1997.

Now that I think about it, this happened at about the same time I received a miraculous healing. Late in 1987, I decided to find a church, and I got sick immediately. I developed something resembling a severe cold, but it refused to leave me. It hung on for weeks. I prayed and exerted my faith, never relenting. One day I saw a dark shape fly away from me and out through a closed door, and I was instantly healed, and my mother witnessed it.

Strange things were happening to me back then. Maybe when I left the church, I put off receiving the blessings that caught my mother’s eye.

Olive plants would be children who are full of the Holy Spirit. That’s what olives symbolize in the Bible. A vine produces fruit; maybe that’s the significance of the reference to a wife, who bears children.

If you do what God intends for you to do, you will be blessed. That’s what Psalm 127 says, by telling us what happens when don’t seek his will. And one of the blessings is named in the second verse of Psalm 128. You will eat the labor of your hands. The things you do won’t be futile. You will profit from them, in a lasting way.

It was encouraging to read that. I’m old, but I still have enough potential in me to get a few things done before I die.

I’ve written about my trip to Israel. I traveled there in 1984 and lived on a kibbutz for four months. I have written a lot about the way God guided me on that trip. Things were put in my path. Doors were opened. I never had to worry about what would happen the next day, or where I would go. This, I thought, was “walking by faith” in a very pure form.

Now I find that my current experiences exceed my experiences in Israel. It’s getting downright strange.

My prayers are being answered, right and left. And I don’t just mean stuffy prayers about God increasing my holiness or whatever. I mean even mundane prayers. I pray for the neighbors’ dogs to shut up while I’m praying, and it happens, every time. If you don’t think a thing like that will freak you out the tenth consecutive time it works, wait until it happens to you.

I was instantly healed of a kidney stone in my church’s parking lot. I have been permanently delivered from overeating; I can work on pizza recipes all day and not gain weight. My church had to fire its cook, and suddenly, I make the best Sicilian pizza I’ve ever eaten. I went to church to make it, and people unexpectedly appeared and started moving equipment around, and in a few minutes, I had the perfect pizza prep station.

There’s more to it than that. I physically feel things taking place during prayer. And it doesn’t always happen during the most intense moments. Sometimes I’ll pause, and I’ll literally feel something happening inside my head. I’ll feel something touching me; lifting tension off of me and easing my mind. I think this may be the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding,” because I definitely don’t understand it. A couple of nights back, I prayed about my gallbladder, which seems to resent my weight loss, and I felt my gallbladder open up. Once you’ve had pain in your gallbladder, you know exactly where it is, and you can feel what happens to it. From time to time, with increasing frequency, I feel something dropping over me, and I believe it’s the Holy Spirit.

I think I can physically feel faith going up from me to God. Seriously. I think it’s a substance. I believe it rises up to him, and I believe this may explain why the Bible describes our prayers as incense and so on. The 141st psalm says, “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.” That’s just one of many examples.

I just remembered: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Perhaps “substance” has a literal meaning.

I’m starting to wonder exactly how much power God will allow a human being to have. And whether I should have it.

If I’m right about these things, this is a wonderful way to live. Maybe I won’t have a yacht and a mansion and a fleet of limousines and a herd of eager-to-please consorts, but I’ll have the ultimate power on my side. I will be able to lose battles from time to time, but it will be impossible for me to lose a war. Can it be that this is what we’re intended to have?

I’ll tell you my secret. It’s not complicated. You don’t have to buy a DVD or get a ticket to a seminar. I pray in tongues a lot. At least an hour a day. As far as I know, this is the fundamental thing that changed my life. Everything else flowed from it. And it’s consistent with what Paul said. He told us this would build us up. Few of us, even among charismatics, pay any attention. But the Bible does not contain idle words, so it must be true. I think it’s like working out or watering a plant. And Perry Stone says it will bring you revelation. Robert Morris, I believe, compared it to going to the gym.

Believe me or don’t. I am not a scholar; I don’t study the ancient church fathers, I don’t speak Hebrew or Greek, and I don’t pretend I can decipher the entire Bible and provide perfect doctrine. I’m just telling you what worked for me. I’ve believed this since about 1990, and now other people are confirming it.

It’s not from hell. I’m not getting the base desires of my flesh satisfied. I’m becoming more disciplined and mature, without turning into an ascetic heretic. I’m not spreading hate or telling people God wants them to give me money so they can drive Bentleys. I think this is the real thing.

If you really want to give me money, however, don’t let me discourage you. Think of it as a seed gift, which I will plant in order to harvest a nice spray-on liner for my truck bed. Or some more expensive tools I will rarely use. Godly stuff, I assure you. God probably won’t give you a hundredfold return or anything, but my truck will look swell. “How beautiful is my truck with Vogues and a hood scoop.” That will be my slogan.

I’ll give myself a plug, here. If you give money to a TV minister, he’ll just blow it on stupid things like orange Rolls Royces or bad hair transplants. I’ll get cool stuff, like a two-deck pizza oven. Think it over. I don’t want to be a pest. But you’ll feel really good about it. I’m sure of it.

I promise not to send you a miracle prayer cloth or dirt from the Holy Land. I will refrain from praying over your offering, and I assure you, I will blow every last penny on myself. That’s integrity, right there.

I better put up a Paypal link.

You Want Olives? I Got Olives.

I can’t resist a food experiment.

I just got back from Gordon Food Service. I picked up a bunch of pizza boxes, which I am going to foist on the church whether they ask for them or not. You can’t tell people to take pizza home in a bag. I’m sure commenters will make Steve Martin references. I also got some interesting ingredients.

First, I bought a jug of canola oil mixed with olive oil. I realize this goes against my visceral hatred of canola (properly known as “rape oil”), but hear me out. Extra-Virgin olive oil is too strong for street pizza. It’s fine on rolls, but it makes pizza taste bad. Right now, I’m using extra-light olive oil, but for some reason, it’s more expensive than extra-virgin.

I want to make the finest street pizza possible, but I don’t want the church to eat high ingredient costs. I use around a tablespoon of oil per pie, which means the oil costs more than the flour! It’s something like fifteen or twenty cents per Sicilian. If the cheap stuff works better, the cost goes down to something like four cents.

If this stuff doesn’t work, I can use it to freshen up the blacktop in the driveway.

My second purchase was a big jug of Kalamata olives. Pitted. They sold me about 70 ounces (dry weight) for nine bucks. Curiosity is killing me. GFS-brand black olives are more expensive than this. I have to see what they’re like. I may swipe about a third of them and give the rest to the church.

Provolone is an annoying issue. A loaf costs $2.80/pound. Sliced, it runs around $4 per pound. And we have no slicer. I can make excellent pizza without provolone, but if I really want customers to roll on the floor and hallucinate, provolone will help.

I bought two pizza trays. They’re more expensive than I thought. But I needed to replace the one I cut up for a pizza-serving tool, and I need to make a second tool for myself. Still a bargain compared to commercial peels, and they work much better. I got a quarter-sheet pan to replace the one I left at church. Those quarter-sheet pans are dynamite.

On the way home I picked up Cento cherry tomatoes and Cento “Italian” peeled tomatoes, which are supposed to be their best sauce tomatoes.

I have learned that some pizza ovens are better than others. It looks like the winner is a company called Veroforno. Their ovens, made in Italy, consume much less gas than ordinary ovens, and they don’t have hot spots, so the pies are easier to cook. I have been wondering what the big expenses of making pizza are, and it turns out gas is one of them. People who use Veroforno ovens claim one oven can save them $500 per month on gas. If that’s the savings, the whole bill must be pretty bad. So if you open a pizzeria and start making money, a Veroforno oven might be a fantastic upgrade. But a real man can make great pizza in a Kenner Easy-Bake, so it’s not like the perfect oven is a big priority.

I’m so glad I’m packing my head with such important facts.

Razor Wire to be Installed Soon

Cell photos of my pizza area at the church. I can’t figure out why this phone needs 1600 by 1200 pixels to produce blurry photos.

Dubious Marketing Leads to Window of Opportunity

I’ve been tormenting Mike about pizza for weeks now. Today I think he snapped. He says he’s considering getting a small oven and partnering with some guy who has a panini shop. He says the guy opened across the street from a big high school, and he has no parking, and he sells panini and coffee, and he wonders why he’s going broke.

A puzzle.

Ordinarily, hungry high school kids will make a beeline for the nearest panini and latte.

Mike will do great, if he manages to do five lunch hours in a row. People will say what they always say. ” I can’t believe it! I finally found a good pizza place!” Then a month later, he’ll have to turn customers away, because he has no capacity for crowds.

I hope he doesn’t tell the other guy how to make pizza.

I’m reading up on ovens. I really don’t care about high-temperature pizza. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made–wait, I was going to say it was made in conventional Bari or Bakers Pride ovens, but that’s not true. The best pizza I’ve had in my life was made in my GE Best Buy oven and my church’s convection and regular gas ovens. After that, Bari and Bakers Pride. After that, I suppose the fancy ovens fit in somewhere.

I understand what they do. They burn the crust a little and make the outside of it hard. Whoopty-doo. What if your customers are among those rare individuals who don’t really care for burned food? Right now, my big worry is excessive browning. I have a wild suspicion that this will be a bigger problem in an oven that burns hot enough to melt foil.

I’ve had lots of pizza from wood-fired ovens. It’s not particularly good. I know that’s heresy, but I don’t care. I’m used to the majority being wrong. A yuppie/metrosexual oven is a lot of aggravation, just to get a niche taste that isn’t all that wonderful.

We have a chain here that advertises coal-fired ovens. That sounds disgusting. Coal is full of tar and weird chemicals. I’m surprised it’s legal to cook with it. Coal has kerosene in it, doesn’t it? They call kerosene “coal oil.” Coal doesn’t smell all that great when it burns. I guess they must have a way of keeping the fumes away from the food.

Anyway, I haven’t tried the coal pizza, but I’ve been told it’s not as good as the best conventional pizza available here. And the best conventional pizza is about a letter grade below my pizza.

This is the craziest city. It seems like almost everyone knows what good pizza tastes like (except Cubans who have never left the county), but almost nobody can make it.

If I end up doing this for real, it will be in big fat stainless ovens powered by gas. Let the metrosexuals reinvent the wheel. I just want to make good food.

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?