I Cannot Resist

This is really unfair. A reader mentioned a brand of San Marzano tomatoes he thought I needed to try, and of course, I had to exit my burrow and buy some. This is practically entrapment.

I just got some Cento San Marzano tomatoes, at my local grocery. They’re $2.99 for a 28-ounce can. I tried one. They have more oomph than the “San Marzano REGION” tomatoes I tried last night, but they’re not exactly bursting with flavor. They have some zing to them, which is more than I can say for the others.

I also found a 9″ square cake pan. I can’t tell if it’s nonstick or not. I hope not. I can’t use that around the birds, at 550°. It will give off poisonous gas. I stuck them outside, and I put the pan in the oven. I guess we’ll see what it does. If it doesn’t burn, it’s not nonstick.

It’s a quality pan, which is worrisome. I need an extremely cheap and thin pan. This one is thinner than the steel pan I tried yesterday, but it’s still a little thicker than I want.

I think the relatively high sides will be good for the cheese. They should block some of the radiant heat, which would make the cheese cook slower and give me time to get a nice brown crust. Another possibility: because this pan is small with high sides, I could throw a sheet of foil over it while the crust browns. It won’t touch the cheese and get stuck.

Stanislaus Foods claims it’s almost impossible to get San Marzano tomatoes, but then, they have incentive to exaggerate, since they sell California tomatoes. Their products are jam-packed with sweetness and tomato flavor, so I doubt the Centos will knock them off their lofty champion-tomato perch.

Time to make dough.

Joseph was Better at This

I had the funniest dream this morning, not long before I got up.

I was in an old house that had been converted into a school. A little girl was in a room on the second floor. She was a demon-worshiper. She believed it was possible to be a Christian and worship other “gods” and benefit from all of it.

She was giving a presentation to her class, about the ways she worshiped this “god” and that one. She had colorful costumes, and she wore a different one for each demon. Each one required different rituals, and she demonstrated them, throwing things into bowls and so on.

Her teacher and I were downstairs, and we were pretty disturbed. We noticed that the ceiling was bulging down toward us, from the classroom above. Something extremely heavy was in that room. The pressure of its weight made a circular bulge in the ceiling. It was some sort of spirit, sitting in the room among the kids. They couldn’t see it.

We went up the stairs to help this girl. A black man was with us. I guess he worked with the teacher. We were going to make this kid understand that you can’t be a Christian AND a demon-worshiper. If you have even one other god, you’re not a Christian. Or you’re a Christian, but you’re going to have terrible problems.

When we got in the room, everyone was gone except the girl. She was dressed normally. She was unconscious, but she was standing in a far corner, facing the wall.

While we were there, food was served. It was chicken that had been fried in breading and then covered with sauce. There was rice under it. Someone asked me how it was, and I said it was okay, but the rice was a little overcooked.

When I woke up, I tried to figure out whether this dream meant anything. I prayed for an answer. I have never had a dream that turned out to be a message from God, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Here is what I came up with. The room is Haiti. The girl represents Haitians who worship demons yet think they’re also Catholic or other types of Christians. The problem with the ceiling is a problem with the rock under the island. It’s the reason they have earthquakes. The presence of the demons–their spiritual “weight”–causes it.

People who go to Haiti to provide spiritual guidance will have their physical needs met in abundance. That’s the food. There was nothing in the dream that I could apply to humanitarian aid.

Is this right? I can’t even guess. Maybe I just dreamed about a confused little girl.

The teacher was attractive. I don’t know her in real life. I don’t know the black man. He didn’t seem like a Haitian, although many Haitian-Americans have no accent.

I can only recall one instance of a dream that had application to the future. My friend Ivette gave me a Cohiba Esplendido, from Cuba. That part had already happened, for real. In the dream, I smoked it, and it had a wonderful flavor like cloves. Later, when I smoked the actual cigar, it had that same flavor, only with much less intensity. That was extremely odd. I had never had a cigar that tasted anything like cloves, but some Cubans have that flavor.

That was a pretty stupid dream, I admit. But it came true. And it’s all I have to offer.

My cornet arrived last night. It’s incredible. It’s a professional-quality horn, and it’s essentially new, even though it was made the year I was born. It has had a couple of minor dents repaired, and the seller thought they probably came from being bounced around in the case, but that’s it. Other than that, there isn’t a scratch on it. You could put this thing in a store and claim it was made last month, and no one would know the difference.

It’s too bad pianos aren’t like brass instruments. You can pick up the brass equivalent of a nearly new Steinway for under $500, because so many people buy horns and quit using them almost immediately. I paid $150. I’m sure this thing would cost at least a grand, new.

Now, if only I could play it.

I have practiced my embouchure for two days. I can go about fifteen minutes without fainting or losing my mind. I figure that’s enough. When you’re working a muscle and building a callus, it does no good to overdo it. That’s what I tell myself, because fifteen minutes are all I can stand at this point. I can make the mouthpiece do a few things, but the horn sounds like a cow with the scours.

My dad says I ought to be able to make a sound that isn’t horrifying within a week or so.

That’s all I have for now. I’m just enjoying my coffee and relaxing.

San Elsewhere

I’m doing something stupid, even though I know it’s a mistake.

People talk about San Marzano tomatoes a lot. The other day, I posted a Youtube of a pizzeria owner using a sauce made from San Marzanos (he claimed), salt, pepper, and oregano.

I’m pretty sure I tried canned Italian tomatoes in the past, and that I was disappointed, but I thought I’d double-check. I’ve decided to try them again. I’m making a Sicilian pizza with half real sauce (Stanislaus base) and half sauce made from Nina brand “Region of San Marzano” tomatoes. I’m only using the tomatoes on half of the pie, because I’m pretty sure the San Marzano half is going to be bad.

People are easy to fool. For example, there’s a company that sells “Key West lime juice.” What does that mean” It means “key lime juice,” right? Of course not. That’s what they hope you think. It just means lime juice which is in some way connected to Key West. I spotted that instantly the first time I saw a bottle of this stuff. If it was pure key lime juice, it would say so, prominently.

San Marzano tomatoes are the same way. According to Stanislaus Foods, real San Marzano tomatoes are virtually unobtainable. They’re heirlooms. The farms that used to grow them switched to hybrids, which aren’t the same. This, surely, is why my can of Nina tomatoes does not say “San Marzano tomatoes.” It just says they’re from that region. If they were the real thing, each can would have a battery connected to it, with a flashing sign screaming “SAN MARZANO TOMATOES.”

I don’t know what kind of tomatoes Nina uses, but they taste like a can. And it’s not the can’s fault. It’s lined with plastic.

Ninety-nine percent of shoppers will buy any can of tomatoes with the phrase “San Marzano” on the side and assume they got the real thing.

Another sad fact: people will tell you their pizza is great, or that the pizzeria near them is great, when they’re totally wrong. You have to put everything to the test. When people make their own pizza, they really wish it were good, so they tell themselves it is, when it’s awful. And when you live next door to a bad pizzeria long enough, you’ll start thinking it’s really good. I don’t know why that’s true, but I’ve seen it. It has happened to me. I fell in love with Pizza Town, a joint near Columbia University. There were a lot of good things about their pizza, but their sauce recipe was very crude. I think it was just Stanislaus Super Dolce plus water.

Maybe the Youtube pizza guy has found a brand of San-Marzano-type tomatoes that’s really good. Or maybe he’s lying, to keep his real ingredients secret. Or maybe his sauce just isn’t good.

I would guess that Nina brand is highly regarded. I got it at Costco, and they have a great track record when it comes to picking quality stuff. But I don’t really know.

You can’t trust anyone (except me and Mike), so you have to test everything you hear. Hence today’s ill-fated test pie.

I plan to use one of my new steel pans. That should be interesting. The seasoning isn’t really developed yet. I hope the dough doesn’t stick.

I’ll come back with a report. I’m sure of this: half of the pie will get an A+.

Tomatoes: Acceptable. Pan: Fail

I just tried the pizza, and man, am I bummed out.

The pans are no good. I’m sure they’re great if you parbake the pie or go through other contortions to make them work, but they’re useless for my method. The metal is apparently too thick. I baked the pizza for 18 minutes, and it never browned well on the bottom. I finally had to put it on the stove, which sort of worked, but overall, it amounts to this: the pans aren’t acceptable.

The tomatoes, on the other hand, worked. I was shocked. It’s not that they taste good. Their redeeming feature is that they don’t taste bad. In other words, they have very, very little flavor, but what flavor they do have doesn’t hurt the pizza. If you like sauce that’s just barely there, these tomatoes will make you happy. If you like tomato flavor, go with Stanislaus.

Musical Stuff Dribbles In

My cornet mouthpiece arrived last night. I started making heinous noises with it almost immediately.

My dad advised me to get the mouthpiece before the horn, and I did so, but only by a day. He says there is no point in touching the horn until I get my embouchure working on the mouthpiece.

How many people here think I’ll be able to leave the horn in the case that long?

Right. That’s what I figured.

I have a Hal Leonard trumpet DVD. The guy in the video says that in order to play the trumpet, you have to smile and pucker at the same time.

Try this. Seriously. It can’t be done. I’m not even sure what it means. Puckering moves the lips out. Smiling pulls them back. In my universe, back is not out.

I know he’s right. Whatever he’s trying to say. But I’m not sure he’s saying what he wants to.

I got my dad to help me out with the mouthpiece. He said I did fine. I thought I sounded like a boiler accident. And I nearly fainted. How are you supposed to stay concious while you’re blowing air as hard as you can? No wonder Gillespie was Dizzy.

My dad reluctantly informed me that he had been wrong about spitting in the valves. He says he learned that these days, the oil they make for valves actually works. Much better than the tar and molasses mixture they sold back in his day, I guess. I have two kinds of oil: Alysin and Five Starr. I’ll let him use it, if he promises not to get spit in it.

I watched Jazz again last night. It’s getting up to the Gillespie/Parker era now, or as I like to call it, “The Death of Fun Jazz.” Before these guys came along, it was possible for a person without a Ph.D. to enjoy listening to jazz. Afterward, not so much. As plummeting concert attendance and record sales show. Go on Youtube and find a video of Gillespie singing “Salt Peanuts,” if you want to see why jazz died.

It may be the most fulfilling thing an intelligent musician can possibly play, but who can listen to it? It reminds me of bluegrass. I loved playing it, but I couldn’t make myself listen to other people playing it.

I found a Salt Peanuts Youtube. Don’t click on it. I warned you.

It’s so bad, I’d rather listen to Edie Brickell.

I guess Gillespie was on cloud nine while they played that. Go figure. It reminds me of the Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life. He was represented at his heavenly trial by Rip Torn, a being so smart ordinary humans couldn’t understand him. When he missed a day of court, he told Brooks his excuse: “I was trapped near the intercircle of fault.”

They probably play Salt Peanuts there.

My trumpet book features the much-beloved hit “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” Can’t hardly wait to learn that. I remember hearing it in my childhood, when my aunt and my sister used to bang on my grandmother’s Acrosonic spinet. The big hits were Aunt Rhodie and Shortenin’ Bread. Somehow they never got picked up by a label.

Hope this works out. If not, shiny wall decoration.

And his Mighty Pans

My Sicilian pizza pans arrived. I ordered two, in case I have to make more than one pie in an evening.

They’re really beautiful. The steel is very heavy, by pan standards. The wire supporting the edges is probably 3/16″ thick. The pans have that nice cold-rolled finish, too. I guess all I have to do is wash them and season them.

In retrospect, I think a couple of 9″ cake pans without Teflon would have been a better buy, but these will last for a thousand years, and I know I’ll use them.

It’s hard to adjust to having this kind of power. When you can have the finest Sicilian pizza imaginable, at a moment’s notice, it can really go to your head. I’m feeling pretty froggy right now.

I may buy a TELEPROMPTER!

Smell That Fresh Air!

This is an amazing day.

Steady readers will recall the post I put up at the end of August, announcing that after a fast, I found that I had been supernaturally delivered from compulsive overeating. It had been a problem for me all my life. It wasn’t one of the issues to which the fast was dedicated, but afterward, I found I didn’t feel the overpowering urge to stuff myself. I lost 20 pounds, pretty effortlessly.

That has stayed with me over time. The holidays worried me, and after that I got sick, and I spoiled myself. The illness dragged on interminably, and I was afraid that when it was over, I’d be huge. I still have little traces of symptoms. But today I got on the scale, and my gigantic weight gain amounts to 1.5 pounds. And now that the symptoms are virtually gone, I’m back on my routine, so I expect progress to continue.

I still can’t believe God would do something this nice for me. This is just as miraculous as being healed of cancer, even if it’s not as dramatic. I feel like I’ve been freed from a slavemaster. And in my opinion, I have. Either God increased my discipline throught the Holy Spirit, or he drove off something evil that was goading me.

No one cares. I know. No one wants to hear about a guy whose big miracle is a drop from a 36″ waist to 33″. But if you’re fat, and this happens to you, believe me, you’ll be as amazed and grateful as I am. You won’t think it’s a small thing. You ought to listen to me and see if you can get the same kind of deliverance. Maybe your problem isn’t food. Maybe it’s cocaine or booze or women. I don’t think it makes any difference; it’s not like one thing is a bigger challenge to God than another. And he wants everyone to be free.

When I got freed from gluttony, I also found I had better self-control in a couple of other areas. I was less crabby, which was a big blessing. Being annoyed requires energy, and it’s an unpleasant state in which to live. After I got my miracle, I felt peaceful. My mind was quieter.

Unfortunately, the food thing lasted, and the peace did not. I eventually found that some of the irritability had returned. Maybe that was because of some sin I committed. I don’t know. I can’t see the supernatural world. I can’t hear God’s voice or the voices of the angels. I can only guess.

Today during my morning prayers I felt anxious for no good reason, and I took it before God, and I kept praying about it, hard. I exerted my faith. I prayed in the Spirit. I stuck to my guns. I felt as if something foreign was pressing into me, in the region of my sinuses. I know that sounds nutty. But I’ve felt that many times. It’s an oppressive, annoying sensation. I think it’s something that has been with me for decades, and I suspect that it’s a supernatural being.

After I had been at it for forty-five minutes or an hour, I felt that this thing had been pushed back. The anxiety left me. I felt peaceful. There was no hostility or irritability in me. I felt as if something was holding it back, like a bodyguard fending off an autograph hound. The peace I found back in August returned. I felt like I had been released from a stuffy room. And to make it even stranger, my breathing had improved. I generally get some nasal congestion in the early morning, and last night was no exception, but suddenly, everything was wide open.

As I went about my morning routine, over and over, the magnitude of the change came home to me. As it hit me, I would grab things for support and hold on. It’s like I’ve been released from prison. It’s incredible.

I hope I don’t do anything to mess it up. I don’t know what I did wrong last time, but I’m going to watch it. This is a tremendous gift. When you’re under psychological oppression, and it leaves, you resume your normal state, and in comparison, it almost seems euphoric. The difference is wonderful.

It may be that giving in to hostility, out of habit, caused me to lose my freedom. I will try to keep that in mind.

Here’s what I think. Over time, prayer in the Spirit fills you with something that overpowers and displaces hostile beings that affect your life. It fills you with something that “binds the strong man” so his house–you–can be spoiled by God.

Every person on earth has demons assigned to him; it’s not just people who bend steel bars and live naked in graveyards. These creatures warp our judgment. They cause diseases. They prevent our blessings from getting to us. They compel us to do evil. They addict us. They give us depression and other mental illnesses. They even cause wars.

These ancient things are far more powerful than unaided human beings. We can’t get rid of them in our own strength. For that matter, our own flesh can be more powerful than we are. It can be impossible to control. The answer is God. He “grows” us, like mustard seeds, to be more powerful than our enemies. He increases our faith. He improves our character so we do more good and less evil, which leads to fewer chastisements and more blessings. He gives us the gifts of the Spirit to fight the enemy supernaturally. And in the Bible, he provides the Sword of the Spirit: his promises, which we can cite, whether in defense or offense. God gives us the tools to get free.

I think we’re going to see a lot more teaching in this vein over the coming years. This is what Satan is afraid of. It’s why he worked so hard to get the church to deny and even ban the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The best way to get rid of God’s servants is to get religious people to crucify them and excommunicate them and burn them alive, and that’s what Satan got the church to do. He even got the church to ban possession of the Bible, which was the Satanic equivalent of gun control (unless gun control is the Satanic equivalent of gun control). But he can’t repress God’s work forever. He’s the weak, limited one, after all.

I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but I got something great, so even if I’m alone here, I have cause to celebrate.

Obama bin Laden, Dalai Obama, Obama Cass…

Can I just say something that will offend people?

I just saw an Internet link to a story about how Obama thinks Osama bin Laden’s latest video shows weakness.

I had to read it twice to figure out which one was the terrorist.

Can’t we just call him “Barry”?

Play it, Don’t Spray It

I should be doing something, but I’m procrastinating. Procrastination is the one thing I never put off. I guess you saw that joke coming. Someone probably saw it coming in 500 B.C.

I’m reading about trumpets. I just bought a cornet, but the word “trumpet” is easier to find on Google, so that’s what I’m reading about.

I think it’s remarkable that you can get a $2,000 trumpet for $200. People must abandon the trumpet in droves, for the used market to be like this. If trumpets were pianos, I’d have two Steinway D’s; one from New York, and one from Hamburg. I’d get a third and hollow it out for a novelty liquor cabinet.

The cornet I got is a Buescher Aristocrat. It was made in about 1961, and it’s in new condition, except for a couple of repaired dents. It’s functioning right.

A few years after it was made, the company was taken over by Selmer, and the Aristocrat name was applied to a crummy horn for kids. When mine was made, it was a professional-quality horn, although not a particularly great one. I paid what most people pay for good used student horns, and it wasn’t hard to find. If I sell it, I should be able to get at least what I paid. But not much more. Because used cornets are cheap.

I figure what I got is about like a Yamaha grand piano. More than good enough, but nothing special.

There are two things about wind instruments that turn me off. One is excess volume. The other is spit. I just don’t like spit. I never have. I don’t let people drink out of my glass (except Marv and Maynard). I don’t take bites out of other people’s apples. If you’re going to do that, you might as well French-kiss them. Anything they’ve got, you’re swallowing. Mucus, germs, pus, bits of decaying food, whatever. I don’t even like to hold papers after somebody licks his finger to turn the pages.

I guess I can learn to tolerate a certain amount of spit, as long as it’s not someone else’s.

My dad says my horn is for losers. He has a Bach. What a snob. I suspect the Buescher is good enough for someone who hasn’t even figured out how to make an embouchure.

Learning the word “embouchure” brought me pleasure, because I’ve been hearing it all my life, and I never knew how it was spelled. People mumble it, and I think they do it on purpose, because they don’t speak French. It sounds like “armature” and “umbrature” and “omature.” It’s actually om-boo-SURE, with the emphasis on the last syllable. How do I know that? Six years of French. And the French love accenting the last syllables of words. It’s what whiners do, in all languages, and the French are no slackers in this regard. They have turned whining into a fixed feature of their native tongue.

Judging from the structure of the word, the literal meaning is something like “in-your-mouth-ment.” Which makes sense.

My dad says I have to spit in the horn’s valves. Oh, man! No way! I can’t stand playing an instrument that always reeks of dried spit. I got some fancy valve oil. He says valve oil doesn’t work, but they may have changed the formula since he learned to play, back during the reign of Thutmose III, the Musical Pharaoh.

I had to fork out big-time for a mouthpiece. You can’t get one in Miami, unless you want one from Home Depot, made from galvanized steel. I exaggerate, but I couldn’t find one that was made by a reputable company. I paid for two-day shipping so I can have the mouthpiece two days before the horn. I want to get a head start on the embouchure, and it’s worth ten extra bucks to me to get two days. The mouthpiece wasn’t expensive, but when you add in the extra shipping, I got dinged.

I’m going to have nightmares about drowning in spit. I just know it. If I were interviewed by James Lipton, and he asked me my least favorite word, it would be “saliva.” I cringe, typing it.

I have to find something else to do while I’m procrastinating. I would write some more, but I’m having a hard time rationalizing it. I hate when that happens.

I’ve Got a Little List

A reader says he’s going to try my Sicilian pizza recipe. Think I’ll hit the highlights, because there are certain points that are of special importance, and it might be hard to pick them out of my ramblings.

1. Use a thin steel pan, preferably seasoned. At the very least, use a generous amount of olive oil.

2. Let the dough rise very high before punching it down, and let it rise again after spreading it in the pan.

3. When you stretch the dough to fit the pan, turn it at least once so you’ll have finger indentations on the underside. This improves the crust.

4. Use at least 0.11 ounces of cheese per square inch of pan.

5. Use twice the amount of sauce you’d use in a thin pie.

6. Bake low in the oven, with no stone, at 550°. After 8 or 10 minutes, start lifting a corner to see how done the bottom is. Pull it when it’s brown.

7. If your broiler is coming on, put another rack in the oven up high, and put foil or a cookie sheet on it to keep the broiler from browning the cheese.

8. Use light olive oil, not the green stuff.

The more fat your cheese has, the less likely it is to get too brown. The risk is that too much fat will give you a greasy pie. Costco mozzarella is perfect.

I put oil on my dough, but not in it. On my next pie, I plan to bias the cheese toward the outer edges of the pan, because it tends to drift inward as the pie cooks. It seems like it’s impossible to put too much oil under the pie.

It may be that you can get a better result at a lower temperature, but I haven’t tried it, so I can’t tell you.

This method isn’t good. It’s perfect. It’s unbelievable.

Good luck.

And When I Die With Them, I Keep Them

Last night I watched Jazz with Marv and Maynard, and I enjoyed some Knob Creek and a Coke chaser. Then I went to bed, and while I was getting ready to sleep, I started thanking God for all the little pleasures in my life.

It was quite a list. It seems like the more mature I get, the better I am able to enjoy things. I eat less than I used to. I drink less. I quit smoking cigars. I try to curb my baser appetites, and I try to be more responsible. And I believe God works in me, making these things happen. As excess disappears from my life, the things I enjoy stand out more, perhaps because they’re not lost in the background noise of constant overindulgence.

Let’s see. I enjoy squeezing my pets and conversing with them. I enjoy the food I cook. I enjoy working on my musical skills. I love listening to good jazz and classical music. I love shooting and reloading. I look forward to having breakfast with my dad once a week. I love using my tools. I smile every time I see the ridiculous diesel pickup I bought. Every time I walk into my church, I feel like a kid running through the gate at Disneyland; I always know something good is going to happen.

The time I set apart for prayer and study is wonderful. Every session is a miniature Sabbath. It’s a sanctuary no one can intrude on, and more often than not, I sense God’s presence, and I feel like I’ve gotten a breakthrough.

You can have too much stuff in your life. You can have so much going on, you can’t appreciate any of it or do any one thing well. That’s very natural for me, as anyone who reads my blog knows, so I’m very glad God is adjusting me. Who knows? One day I might actually sell one of my motorcycles or even my flamenco guitar.

I’m keeping the milling machine and the Powermatic 66, however.

Covetousness. That was my problem. It’s not so much that I wanted what other people had; it’s that I wanted things that wouldn’t really bring me satisfaction. I used to buy stuff and then fail to enjoy it, because I thought too much about the things and not enough about the effort and time involved in deriving pleasure from them, so they sat and rotted. I still like to get toys, but now I get good use out of them, and I think that is because God is changing me and guiding me. It’s pretty unusual for me to regret spending money or time these days. I generally get a good return.

Somewhere in the Bible, it says something about how sad it is when a man has something he can’t enjoy. That’s what life without God is all about. You get rich, but you end up in rehab. You become famous, only to find that the thing you want most is privacy. Things like that happen. We don’t know which way we should go or what we should do, so we turn up blind alleys and end up with things that don’t bring us happiness. On the other hand, God promises us that if we’ll listen, he’ll guide us. He says, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.”

We don’t know what we need or what we want. We can’t know. The world is too complicated, and we’re not smart enough to see all the angles. Only God can know. So he gave us a system in which we obey him and listen to him, and he gives us what we should have. He gives us things that are truly satisfying, and which have lasting value. And at the end of our time, we don’t stand before God poor and blind and naked, which is what happens to people who amass the wrong kind of wealth. The stuff we take wrongly, we lose. We only keep that which we were intended to have.

I wish I could go back in time to about 1971 and slap myself. But like the relatives of the rich man in the parable about hell, I would not have listened.

Long ago, when I thought I was about to have a comic strip syndicated, I cut photos of sportfishing yachts out of magazines, and I taped them to walls and so on, to give me motivation to work. That seems funny now. What if I had succeeded? I’d be a big, fat, conceited (more than I am now) lout who thought he made it without God’s help. I’d have shallow friends who drank all the time and never set foot in a church. I’d have no relationship with God, because I’d think I didn’t need one. The yachting crowd is coarse and venal; I know them. I would have gotten sick of them in two seasons. I’m much better off with the folks who attend church on Saturday night.

I thought I knew what I needed, but I wasn’t even close.

I don’t know where I’m going, and I admit, I wish God would hurry up, but I know that things are better than they used to be, and the trend is positive, and it’s a trend I can trust. I’m not building on sand.

I don’t know if buying a cornet was a good idea, but it will be fun for at least two months, and it will cost very little. I actually prayed about it, and I really felt like I should try it. Weird.

I feel like a piece of rough lumber somebody is jointing and planing and sanding into shape. Life gets more enjoyable all the time. I even appreciate the problems and setbacks. Now they seem to have meaning, and every one ends up blessing me. It’s hard to harm someone who walks with God, because God takes everything you throw at him and makes it a help to him.

All that stuff Jesus said; it looks like it’s actually TRUE. That’s wild. I never thought he was lying, but it’s still impressive when I see his words confirmed.

Not for Me

People are sending me links to a story about making pizza in a cast iron skillet.

I appreciate the information, but my Sicilian literally could not be any better, and I don’t have to go through all those gymnastics to make it. I do it the same simple way pizzerias do it. On top of that, I can make it any size I want and any shape I want, as long as I can find a thin pan in the desired size and shape. With a skillet, you’re stuck with skillet-size, skillet-shaped pizza. Would you serve a 9″ pizza to four friends? I’d probably be killed for that. I can make an 18″ square pizza, just like the pros.

The skillet pizza reminds me of the “mom hamburger” Eddie Murphy used to talk about. His friends would go to McDonald’s, and his mom wouldn’t let him go. She’d make him a burger at home, with Wonder Bread. He’d be in the yard with his mushy bread, trying to keep the meat from falling out, and his buddies would be at McDonald’s, having what they actually wanted. This is what most homemade pizza is like. I’ve made many bad homemade pizzas; I know the pain.

If you use my methods for Sicilian and thin pizza, you’ll do very little work, you won’t use up a lot of time, and you’ll get pizza just like what you buy on the street in Manhattan, only–in most cases–better. It’s hard for me to see any reason to try another way.

I belong to a pizza forum. These people use language I don’t even understand. They talk about “hydration,” and how you have to have a certain precise amount of water in the dough to make it work. You know how I measure the water in my dough? I poke it with my finger. It’s always–ALWAYS, I’m saying–perfect. Making pizza is extremely hard; why make it worse by requiring people to buy burettes and gram scales?

Here’s something I’ve noticed in life. When people obsess about the equipment they use for a task, and they get drawn into a thicket of details, very often it means they’re not getting good results, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Oscar Peterson could make fantastic music on an upright piano; it’s the amateurs who think they have to have a Fazioli.

When I was wandering lost in the pizza wilderness, I worried a lot about equipment and so on. Now I know that stuff doesn’t matter. I have a screen, a stone, and the right ingredients. I’m golden.

Try my method. All you need are a stone, a screen or some semolina, a peel, and a food processor. Get Stanislaus sauce. Get Costco or Grande cheese, or buy sliced whole milk mozzarella at a deli. Use my recipe. You’ll win every time. Well, you might have a few false starts, but you’ll win every time, after that.

Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something. If you use my pizza recipe, follow it to the letter at first. Don’t ruin it the first time out. Once you get it to work, THEN you can change it to suit your tastes. It really works. If not, you’re the problem.

You don’t need special flour. It doesn’t matter what your tap water is like, unless it’s truly disgusting. You don’t need a special oven. Just make sure you have top-notch tomato sauce and cheese, and you’ll be fine.

Maybe the skillet pizza is great. I have no motivation to find out. When you have Sophia Loren at home, why go on a blind date?

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“Sometimes people complain that they tried one of my recipes and it didn’t work. This almost always means they thought they were smarter than me, and they changed something.”

I read that, and it occurred to me that God probably says the same thing all the time. Often, about ME.

Gap in Skillet Collection Filled

I finally have a decent #7 skillet

I got a #7 Griswold large logo skillet a year or two ago. The finish on the inside was not perfect, and I delayed in sanding it down, and one day I somehow managed to put another pot in the skillet while the pot was wet. Some kind of electrolysis occurred, and the skillet pitted in two places.

After that, I ordered one from some dealer, and I got a good price, but it had a tiny wobble in it, which is no good for a glass range. Also, the handle had some odd sort of pitting on it.

Last week I Ebayed a third skillet, and it’s perfect. I have it in the oven right now, at 550. I’m hoping I can get most of the crud off without resorting to the clean cycle, which could warp the skillet.

I’m thinking I made a mistake when I concluded that cast iron skillets were wrong for Sicilian pizza. I reached that conclusion after baking with the skillet on a stone. Now that I bake Sicilian on the bottom rack with no stone, I’m inclined to try a skillet again. Maybe the pitted skillet would be good enough to use for this. A #7 skillet is a good size for a one-person Sicilian. It’s about 64 square inches, so about the same as an 8″ square pan.

I called Mike about my latest Sicilian, and he went to the store while we were on the phone and made me give him the particulars. I don’t know if it will work. He’s using store cheese and Pastene sauce, which is not comparable to Stanislaus. The cheese can be made to work, if he tosses it in a little olive oil before he cooks.

Should be interesting. He and I used to hog down Sicilian together by his parents’ pool table. When I think of the food our parents let us buy, I wonder if they were trying to kill us. On Friday nights, my parents used to go out, and they left me enough money to get a large pizza and a whole bag of garlic rolls, and you better believe I ate the whole order, every time.

I hope he gets good results. I owe my pizza success to his tutelage.

The [Greg] House of Pizza

I can see I’m going to have to throw out my mozzarella.

I’m going crazy, wondering whether I need to remove the stone when I make Sicilian pizza. I intended to go a few more days before my next experiment. I’m waiting for some smaller pans to arrive. I don’t want to go through a pound and a half of cheese every time I want to do a trial run. But curiosity is too strong for me, so I’m going to make a half-size pie in a full-size pan. I can’t make myself stop.

I hope it will work. I think it should. I’ll cram it into one side of the pan, and only one side of the pie will be unsupported. It should be firm enough to stand up and not collapse.

Unless it isn’t.

I’m starting to think Stanislaus Saporito may be better, for my purposes, than Super Dolce. The flavor is a little different. The biggest difference is that Super Dolce is sweeter, and they make a product that corrects that. It’s called “sugar.”

I have to get a nine-inch square pan. I’ve decided that’s the perfect size for lunch. It’s actually slightly bigger than the perfect size, which is 7.5″, but I don’t think anyone makes a steel pan that size. To roughly equal the calorie content of a thin 12″ circular pie, I need a square Sicilian pie 7.5″ on a side.

Wait, that’s wrong. That pie will have the same amount of flour but less cheese, since the cheese on a Sicilian isn’t twice as heavy. It’s only one and a half times as heavy. Man, this is going to take some algebra.

Hmm…it turns out a 9″ square pie is pretty close. The bigger pie has 1.4 times the area, but you use 1.5 times as much cheese per square inch on a Sicilian, so you have to factor that in, and it looks like you get about 7.5 ounces of cheese, which is within spec for a 12″ pie. The sauce calories are negligible compared to cheese and flour.

I still have to do the flour calculation. Looks like it’s 1.4 cups, instead of 1 cup for a 12″ thin pie. That adds around 160 calories.

Okay, whatever. Nine inches is about right. Probably.

I wonder if thin Sicilian is any good. If I halved the dough, it would still be thick enough to be Sicilian.

They probably don’t even eat this stuff in Sicily. It’s like English muffins. Here’s a tip: don’t bother buying them if you have British houseguests.

Okay, I’m wrong. Wikipedia says they really come from England, where–no kidding–they call them “American muffins.”

In any case, I’m making a half-size Sicilian today. I don’t even care if I get to eat it. I just have to know if it works.

I care a little.

Peace

My soul is finally at peace. I just made the best Sicilian pizza I have ever eaten. In fact, it’s the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. It’s almost exactly what I would dream of, if I dreamed I was eating Sicilian.

Here’s the crucial info, in brief. Bake your Sicilian at 550°, on a lower rack, in a thin steel pan with baked-on seasoning. If the top starts to get too dark, put a cookie sheet or a piece of foil on the rack above it, because your broiler may be kicking on. To get a darker bottom crust without burning the top, go low in the oven. If you like your cheese brown, go higher.

This pizza took a surprising 13 minutes to cook. I had it too high in the oven during the first 8 minutes (bottom too rare when I lifted up a corner), so I put it on the bottom rack during the last five minutes, and that baked the crust. It wasn’t quite as well-done as I would have wanted; I underestimated by maybe 30 seconds. Next time, I’ll put the pie low in the oven from the beginning.

Using half the pan did not cause any problems. I was afraid it would burn the seasoning off the empty side, so I stuck part of a broiler pan under that side, but during the last 5 minutes, I had nothing under it, and it was fine. The unsupported side didn’t bake against steel, so it wasn’t quite as tasty as the other four sides, but it was very good.

To help you out, I’ll give mathematical information. The pie was 9″ by 12″. I used two cups of bread flour. The base of the sauce was four ounces (by weight) of Saporito. I used 12 ounces (by weight) of Costco cheese. These proportions are just about perfect, but you might want to go to 14-16 ounces of cheese.

The cheese will try to migrate to the middle, so make sure you pile it high around the edges. I ran the sauce to 1/2″ of the sides, which was perfect, but I should have worked harder to make sure the cheese covered the sauce completely, and I should have fixed it so there was a little more near the edges than in the center, to compensate for drift.

That Costco cheese…you haven’t had street-pizza cheese until you’ve piled Costco mozzarella high on a pizza. It’s chewy and buttery, with tons of stretch. Honestly, I think it’s better than the Grande cheese I bought. Might be better if they aged it longer, but even with the pre-shredding and the cellulose powder, it’s a dream come true.

I would say I am now like the Vladimir Horowitz of Sicilian pizza, and that in time, I’ll be the Sviatoslav Richter. Right now, I’m the Oscar Peterson. Later, I’ll be the Art Tatum. After that, people will build statues that look like me, and some day, they’ll name a tomato after me.

The pan is totally non-stick. The crust could not be better. The cheese and sauce are flawless. The recipe is simple and foolproof. What a day. I feel like I was just crowned Miss America. I’m even against gay marriage.

Maybe now I can quit making pizza for a while.

Pizzumentary

Today I’m documenting my Sicilian pizza. Here is the pan. Seven bucks at Gordon Food Service. I seasoned it with lard before I used it for the first time, but it stuck a little. Since then I’ve been adding layers of baked-on lard, and you can see how much has accumulated. It’s very clean. There is no oiliness to it. The baked fat is like varnish. I’m hoping to build up a nice thick layer over the years.

Here is the dough. That’s four cups of flour. I was low on bread flour, so I used regular all-purpose flour and added around a tablespoon and a half of gluten. I’m sure it will be great. I used the small plastic blade in the Cuisinart, because this load of dough was really too big for the main blade. I want to get a Robot Coupe commercial food processor with a bigger bowl, but maybe it would be smarter to get a stand mixer. It would be a lot slower, but what’s an additional four minutes?

There is no oil in the dough, but I oiled the outside. The outside of the crust on a Sicilian pizza should be fried, more or less. When the pan gets hot, it fries the crust a little, giving a little crispness to it. I plan to oil the pan pretty heavily. Worked last time.

I don’t want this much pizza, but the small pans I ordered aren’t here yet. I can freeze the excess. I suspect you could get a good result with a disposable aluminum pan and PAM, but I don’t feel like experimenting.

I’m using Saporito sauce, plus water, vinegar, salt, sugar, garlic powder, and oregano. Fresh garlic is too good! The cheese: COSTCO! It really works!

More as the pizza develops. I hope I don’t do something stupid and ruin it.

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The dough rose like crazy, so I oiled the pan and spread the dough out. This may be too much oil.

Here’s the dough in the pan. I think this stage is called “proofing,” but I know more about cooking than jargon.

Here is the cheese I love. I know pizza snobs will sneer, but I use what works, and this is it.

I used 6 ounces (weight) of Saporito sauce. I don’t know if I’ll apply all of it, but I mixed it. I have a pound of cheese weighed out. This should be spectacular. Assuming I can pry it off the pan.

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Here’s the dough with sauce. You could eat that sauce as an entree. Stanislaus tomato products are incredible.

Here’s the dough with sauce and cheese.

Have to run.

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I’m an honest man. I admit it; I still have a little work to do. The sauce is perfect. The cheese is perfect. The dough is perfect. But I need to fine-tune the cooking technique, and I need to use more sauce and cheese. I think the magic numbers are 8 ounces and 24 ounces. This pie was a marvel, but the crust was not done as well as it should have been, the ingredient balance wasn’t optimal, and the cheese got browner than I like.

Here’s the pizza. I had no idea what to do with it, so I cut it right on the stove.

Here’s the underside. It’s done, but just barely.

The answer is probably to give up the stone and bake on the rack. That will get the bottom done faster. Right now I’m going 12 minutes, and I need to be down around 8 or 9. I thought the stone would bake the bottom faster, but it doesn’t. If I can bake the dough faster, the cheese will not be as brown.

I could throw foil over the top after a certain amount of time, to prevent browning while the bottom cooks, but that’s stupid, if I can just remove the stone.

I’m surprised how much cheese and sauce this thing needs. You can’t just use the same amount you put on a thin pizza with the same area.

The flavor is right on the money. No pizzeria could do better. And the parts of the crust that are fully done are sublime, so I know the rest of it will taste the same, once I get it to brown more.

One other interesting thing: I need to form the dough into a large rectangle before it rises, so I don’t have to stretch it so much. I stretch the dough and then flip it and stretch it some more, and this gives desirable finger indentations in the bottom of the dough. They improve the texture and flavor. But if you stretch it too much after you flip it, you end up pressing a lot of these indentations out. Much better to start with a sheet of dough that doesn’t have to be worked as much.

Anyway, the best Sicilian you ever ate can be made in your home oven with great consistency and no special equipment. That’s news the whole world should want to hear.

Horn

I get crazier every day.

I’ve been watching my Jazz DVDs all week, and I’ve been encouraging my dad to pick up the trumpet again. And while this was on my mind, I thought about the horn and woodwind players in the documentary. These guys play one note at a time. ONE. No chords. No sustain pedals. No supporting one hand with the other. I keep thinking that has to give them a lot of freedom, compared to a pianist, and it has to make sight-reading easier to pick up.

Maybe I’m wrong. But I am going to take a whack at the cornet.

My dad can give me a lot of help. He knows how to play several horns. He says real men play the trumpet, not the cornet, but Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong played the cornet, so I want to see what it’s like.

Maybe it will be a stupid idea, but finding out will be cheap. It’s amazing how cheap used horns are. You can get a professional-quality cornet for two hundred bucks, if you don’t care how it looks. The worst professional-quality grand piano on earth will run you ten grand, and that would be a good buy.

One nice thing about a used cornet is that even if I hate it, I can get rid of it without getting dinged.

We’ll see what happens.