Not Happening

I give up on store cheese. This is my second pizza topped with bagged dairy-aisle cheese, and they both tasted a bit like vinyl. The deli cheese was much better, and the cost was roughly the same. With toppings, questionable cheese is okay. Without, the flaws are too obvious. The deli cheese was oily, but the texture and flavor were magnificent.

I still can’t believe how much you have to water commercial pizza sauce down. If it’s thick enough to hold a small peak, it will be overpowering. Like ketchup.

Adding one tablespoon of gluten to two cups of flour killed the tossing problems.

Putting whole-milk cheese over part-skim cheese reduced the burning, but it didn’t eliminate it. Interesting effort, in any case.

Now someone, come take the rest of that gallon can of sauce away.

Do I Still Got It?

This will surprise you. I decided to make a pizza for lunch.

I was annoyed that the last two were imperfect. I’m supposed to be telling other people how to do this, so I need to stay on top of my game. I might have told someone to toss a pizza crust with no fat in it, and when it looked funny, my grand reputation would have suffered.

I stuck some olive oil in the dough this time. I’m also going to try my trick of mixing part-skim and whole-milk cheeses, with the whole-milk cheese on the top to reduce burning. Wonder if that will work.

I wish I had Mike’s confidence with tossed crusts. He knows no fear. He throws them around like they stole something. But he had to eat maybe a ton of pizza to develop that skill.

He makes a really neat crust. I can’t remember whether I Youtubed it. His crust has a big roll around the outside, and the inside is a film. When it cooks, the inside part is very, very thin, but you get a big balloony handle to hold it with. I love that. Wimps who refuse to eat crust wouldn’t like it, but I do.

I also consulted my book for the sauce recipe. I’ve tried so many, they run together in my head.

I’ll let you know if it’s any good. I have done well with Sargento cheese in the past, but it was combined with toppings, and toppings make bad cheese seem better.

Catastrophe

I am starting to think this flour is just too low in gluten to form into a decent pizza. I bought all-purpose Martha White, figuring it would be good for biscuits. Ordinarily, all-purpose flour for biscuits makes a fine pizza, but this stuff may be too extreme. I can’t figure it out. The crust started holing on me at 10″.

I give up. I added a tablespoon of gluten to the next batch.

I made a few rolls with the failed dough. Very nice.

Don’t Forget the Oil

It’s amazing how helpful it is to write down your recipes.

On Saturday and Sunday, I made pizza, with hand-tossed crusts. And I had a couple of problems. The main problem was that the surface of the crusts dried out as I worked it, giving a peculiar texture and increasing the probability of holes. I also forgot to add vinegar to the first batch of sauce. It was still very good, but it’s hard to believe I forgot.

I generally like oil-free crusts. I think pizza should be a little leathery, and withholding oil does the trick. But I started making oil-free crusts back when I was rolling pies out with a pin. A pin won’t let the surface of the dough dry and break up. I guess it mashes the dry bits on the surface against the wetter bits inside, and you end up with a smooth crust. When you toss a crust, you don’t get that effect, so you can have problems. From now on, I’m putting oil in my tossed crusts. I think this information is in the book, but I didn’t remember it until the pies were made. The pizzas were still good, but they were not as pretty as they should have been. And I had one crust tear so badly, I gave up on it and made rolls out of it.

I think you absolutely have to have oil in your dough when you make rolls. A pizza has a lot of stuff on it that compensates for a lack of oil in the crust, but you don’t want to bite into a roll and taste oil-free dough.

Yesterday’s pie was experimental. I wanted to try part-skim mozzarella mixed with whole-milk provolone. I made a pizza on Saturday, using whole-milk cheeses, and it was a little oilier than I wanted, so I thought I’d see what cutting the oil in the mozzarella did. It wasn’t that great. The cheese burned in some areas because it lacked fat. And the texture was not as good as sliced whole-milk deli cheese. The mozzarella I used was bagged Sargento cheese, and the provolone was Land O’ Lakes sliced cheese.

Now I wonder: what if I put mozzarella on the pie and then covered it with a thin layer of provolone? The high-fat provolone should prevent the cheese from burning.

I can’t remember whether I tried different temperatures when I was writing the book. Some people seriously recommend 425 degrees, which would reduce burning, but maybe their recipes are no good. And maybe they recommend lower heat because they use bad cheese.

I don’t know. Sooner or later, you have to say a recipe is finished. You can’t keep working on it forever. I’ve made one great pie after another. That’s good enough.

I had some interesting thoughts about guns this weekend. Last week I realized that the notion that longer barrels were more accurate didn’t really make sense. At least, the idea that a longer barrel provides better guidance doesn’t make sense. You may not understand this if you don’t think like a physicist or an engineer, but it should be obvious to people with the right background. A bullet is in very tight contact with a barrel, right up to the muzzle. If there are directional deviations in the parts of the barrel before the bullet gets near the muzzle, they will be completely erased by the last inch or so. Think about it. Say a bullet is headed in a certain direction two inches before it reaches the muzzle, and then there is a bend in the barrel, amounting to a fraction of a degree. What’s the bullet going to do? It can’t keep moving in the original direction. It would have to go through the side of the barrel to do that. It will have to change direction and adopt the path forced on it by the last two inches. You would expect the last part of the barrel to determine the direction the bullet takes.

Again, this will be a tough thing for people who gave up science after high school to understand. I’m trying to make it as obvious as possible. Either you see it or you don’t. One of the great frustrations of physics is the difficulty of explaining things to stubborn lay people who are positive their wrong ideas are right. My mother went to high school with a girl who said it was possible to exceed the speed of light, because she was able to turn off her bedroom light and get in bed before the room got dark.

I Googled around, and sure enough, I found a page in which a gun expert said he shot very small groups at fifty yards, using 3/4″ of rifling. I suppose you still have to have a certain amount of length, to get the velocity up, but it looks like added length doesn’t help guide the bullet.

So I started to wonder. What was the point in having any twist at all in the first half of a barrel? You would think it would add resistance to the bullet’s motion. I wondered why it wasn’t possible to make a barrel with rifling that was straight up to a certain point, with the twist added toward the end. You’d think the bullet would gain velocity faster, due to the lower resistance, and you’d get a more efficient gun.

This idea has been rolling around in my head since Saturday.

It occurred to me that maybe a bullet can’t take the stress of a sudden twist, when it’s already moving fast. Maybe it would come apart, or maybe it would slow down to the point where you could blow up a barrel. That led me to wonder whether it was possible to make a barrel with a progressive twist. It could be nearly straight at the breech, and then it could turn faster as you approach the muzzle.

I don’t know. This stuff is really interesting. I know that if I knew where to Google, I’d find that all of these ideas have already been considered.

Anyway, now I believe I understand how my short-barreled Glock 26 can be as accurate as my 1911s.

I think I may get the crown on my Smith & Wesson 686+ done. Since the last part of the barrel is so critical, I would like to have a recessed crown I can’t ding up. And God knows what I’ve already done to it in the past, with cleaning rods.

Nothing with guns is simple, I guess.

Research Never Stops

It’s the Sabbath, but a man still has to eat, so I am going to make another pizza. I think the combination of part-skim mozzarella with a little provolone may be a smart idea. And I’m going to try it with supermarket cheese. In the past, I’ve gotten good results with Sargento shredded cheese, so I picked up some Sargento mozzarella and some sliced Land O’ Lakes provolone.

I had a problem with my pizza yesterday. I now hand-toss my crusts, even though I’m terrible at it. They tend to be thinner than rolled crusts. The one I made yesterday wasn’t thick enough to resist being pressed into the screen, so it stuck in places, and I had to rip it a little to move it to the stone. I lost a fair amount of the pie, but it was still excellent. In fact, the areas where the peel shoved cheese under the pie during the tearing were especially good.

I’m not completely sure the thinness of the crust was the problem; I inadvertently used a clean screen, and they tend to stick. The best ones have grease baked onto them.

Mike is having some kind of hideous food orgy today. I blocked out the memory of most of the things he told me he was fixing. I remember this phrase: “my theme is bacon.”

He said he’d send photos.

Again!

First off, a personal message. A reader sent me an email about his great-grandfather, a Jew who came to believe Jesus was the Messiah. This gentleman came from a family of rabbis, and he studied with the intention of becoming a rabbi, but his belief in Jesus put an end to all that. And as a result, he endured a lot of persecution from his family. His sister went so far as to pay to have him killed. I found the story remarkable, but I was not able to say so, because all my efforts to reply to the email failed. Some technical problem. I wanted this reader to know I did not ignore his email.

I was startled by the degree of antipathy this man’s belief evoked. If the story is true, his family must have been enraged to such a degree that they violated their own beliefs in order to punish him. There is no way a rabbinical court would back that kind of response. Even I know that.

Second, I see there is another sensational news item, purporting to prove Christianity is a hoax. We see these things from time to time. In the end, they generally serve only to prove the dishonesty or ignorance of the perpetrators. Remember James Cameron, making the ridiculous claim that he had found Jesus’s bones? That theory stood up for what? Two days? And what about The Da Vinci Code? Remember how it turned out to be full of outright fabrications? I never did understand that mess. If I recall correctly, the author admitted it was a work of fiction, yet sincerely hoped it would advance his bizarre pagan beliefs, which were reflected in the book.

Now we’re told that the concept of a suffering Messiah existed before Jesus, and that evidence has been found, in the form of an ancient stone with a story written on it. Congratulations, opponents of Christianity. You have confirmed what Christians have said for millennia. The concept of a suffering Messiah is very old, and we see it in the Psalms and the prophets. That the notion should appear in an old work of fiction means absolutely nothing.

It’s surprising how little non-Christians know about the faith. Even scholarly religious Jews can be disappointing; some of the people encouraged by the discovery of this stone are Jews. It makes sense, however. Christians believe the Old Testament is divinely inspired, so we feel comfortable studying Jewish texts and asking questions of religious Jews. On the other hand, Jews consider Christianity a dangerous form of idolatry, worse than Islam. So you can’t expect them to inquire into it as deeply.

Apart from that, they have an interest in disproving the validity of Christianity, so it would be unrealistic to expect them to be free from bias, regardless of how good their intentions are. You wouldn’t expect the Pope to say kind things about Mormonism, would you?

A year from now, this story will be dead, like all the others. Christianity will remain alive.

Non-Christians don’t realize that faith isn’t based purely on the Bible or on social pressure. It’s also based on personal revelation, including, in many cases, supernatural experiences. A Christian’s faith is like a building with many bases. Chip away at one, and it still stands on the others.

This object was found in the region of the Dead Sea, and opponents of Christianity are citing that as evidence that it pre-existed Jesus, as did the Dead Sea Scrolls. Funny thing…you can’t carbon-date a stone the way you can a scroll. When you date writing found on a stone, you have to guess. Wonder why the story doesn’t mention that. This thing could have been carved twenty years ago by a scholar with a warped sense of humor. Christianity has many millions of enemies, and archaeology and paleontology have a long history of hoaxes. Remember Piltdown Man?

In fact, the story says they don’t really know where the stone was found. The Dead Sea claim is just a guess.

Yeah, okay.

Even James Cameron did better than that.

Third, it’s the Christian Sabbath, and once again, I am learning what keeping the Sabbath is like. This week, I’m learning how it feels to need the Sabbath. Lately, I’ve felt caught up in worldly concerns. I have felt as though I were being pulled away from religion, and it has been frustrating. I needed a day to devote to renewal, and now it’s here. Wish me luck.

Pizza

I have an assignment for some loyal reader.

Make my pizza, using my book. And for cheese, use a quarter-pound of aged provolone and three-fourths of a pound of low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella. Preferably sliced, not shredded. I don’t care what kind of crust you use, or which sauce. Tell me what happens.

I just made a pie with that combination, except that the mozzarella was whole-milk. It was excellent, but it was actually a little too rich. Provolone is a fatty cheese, and when you add whole-milk mozzarella, maybe you’re overdoing it slightly. Hard to say. The problem may be due to the fact that I was too lazy to get olive oil, so I used around a tablespoon and a half of melted butter in the sauce.

The crust was perfect. The sauce was perfect. If you can’t get Stanislaus sauce, Bonta will not disappoint you.

The sauce was this, more or less.

1/4 cup Bonta
1/4 cup water
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. sugar

I forgot the pepper, I think. And the salt. But it didn’t matter.

Reflective of my Healthy Priorities

Here is what I call a productive day of running errands. I went to Home Depot to get stuff to add more shelves to the garage. Then I swung by Publix to get deli cheese to make a pizza.

I felt I had gone long enough without nature’s perfect food. And since I now make better pizza than any restaurant in Miami, there was no point in buying it ready-made. I had two gallon cans of Bonta sauce slowly aging in the cupboard, and as much as I wanted to hoard them, I knew it was time to let one of them go.

Bonta is good sauce. Not my favorite, but good. I don’t think anything can touch Stanislaus Super Dolce. When I finally give up all pretense of willpower, I will sit on the couch eating it out of the can with a cooking spoon. I estimate I’ll be there by mid-2009.

I bought Boar’s Head cheese. Three-fourths of a pound of whole milk, low-moisture mozzarella, and a quarter-pound of aged provolone. Just for fun. Your best bet in a grocery store is the cheese they sell at the deli counter. The other stuff tends to have too much water, or it’s full of cellulose powder, or it just tastes bad. But as I have said, I made a very good pizza with Sargento bagged cheese.

I’m making a fat-free crust, simply because I prefer the texture.

Crap, I’m out of olive oil. I may have to hit the store. I like a little oil in my sauce.

Hope your fifth of July is going well.

AB Comes Through

Agent Bedhead, keeper of the sacred words “Pete Doherty,” has once again demonstrated her kindness and generosity by putting up a free ad for me. Thanks, AB. I would fix you a steak and a peach cobbler. If you werent in Oklahoma.

I hope she has given up that insane vegetarian nonsense. What would Jessica Simpson eat?

In other news, my tasty new old Smith & Wesson 27-2 in blue with the 5″ barrel has arrived in Miami. Hopefully I’ll be able to connect with my dealer this week, before Range Day.

Save Toontown from Global Warming

I feel like tempting fate once again.

Here’s a quotation from Jeff Masters’s blog at Weather Underground:

Tropical Storm Bertha has maintained it’s strength overnight, but is having trouble with Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) of 25°C–one degree below the threshold of 26°C considered beneficial for tropical storms.

One overstuffed European degree–almost two REAL AMERICAN degrees–below the threshold! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Weren’t we supposed to have super-hot sea temperatures due to global warming? What’s up with that?

What happened to the worldwide environmental catastrophe we were all expecting? Did it get lost at the UPS hub? Maybe we should have asked for a tracking number.

Tropical Storm Bertha is getting old, and it still can’t break 50 miles per hour. And it’s headed north, toward colder waters. Pardon me if I chortle.

But there’s another, stronger storm building right behind it, right? NO. There is NOTHING going on.

If I understand what I have read correctly, even the greenies generally admit the world is getting colder. And of course, like all intensely religious people, they have an explanation. The world is getting colder…while it’s getting warmer. We’re having a momentary dip during an overall upward trend. And how do they know this? Okay, they haven’t come up with THAT explanation yet. But they will.

Hey, stop thinking about the dropping temperatures! Remember the drowning polar bears in An Inconvenient Truth! I mean, yes, they were computer-generated bears which did not actually exist, and real bears don’t drown, because they’re semi-aquatic mammals. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the plight of CGI wildlife. If we don’t stop global warming, other imaginary animals will suffer, too. How about Tennessee Tuxedo and Chumley? They’re both from frozen polar regions! What’s going to happen to them if the world of fiction keeps heating up? They’ll have to climb into Phineas J. Whoopee’s freezer!

Potential Victims of Global Warming

I know what we need! We need to venture into C.S. Lewis’s closet and go get the Ice Queen, from Narnia! She froze Narnia, didn’t she? Can’t she do the same thing for us? Or we could just ask Hillary Clinton. She’s not busy. And she has already been referred to as “the White Witch.”

One thing is for sure. Whether global warming exists or not, we need to pass ridiculous laws and cripple the world’s economy, just to be on the safe side.

I’m not going to get hit by a hurricane this year. The fun we had a three years ago doesn’t change the basic odds. I may be wrong, and I might also be wrong if I bought a lottery ticket and predicted I would lose. But probability is heavily in my favor. Think I’m mistaken? Bet me a hundred dollars there will be hurricane-force winds in Coral Gables this year. If I had taken bets like that every year since my family moved to South Florida in 1969, I’d be a billionaire, in spite of two bad years.

The threat of global warming is a fantasy, and liberals are willing to drive working people into poverty in order to stave it off. The threat of Muslim terrorism is as real as dirt, and liberals tell us it’s an alarmist scam we ought to ignore. Maybe we need to make them a CGI world in which their wacky claims seem true. Then Phineas J. Whoopee could be President, and socialism would actually work.

Home Depot Fails Again

A while back I broke down and ordered a Ridgid sliding miter saw on the Home Depot site. Chinese tools (i.e. nearly ALL tools) are getting more expensive, and they were offering it at a price over a hundred dollars lower than a Bosch. I have some jobs I need a miter saw for, and as much as I love my Ridgid 10″ non-sliding saw, I have found that it’s just too small for a lot of projects. If you never cut anything wider than a two-by-six, this is your dream saw. Otherwise, grit your teeth and get a slider. Or try to find a way to cut long boards to length on a table saw. I am not willing to fool with that.

The new saw was backordered, and damned if Home Depot didn’t cancel on me. I am so mad. In the stores, the saw costs $50 more. And I have been waiting for it so I could fix more things an idiot contractor ruined. Honestly, you can scream at a lying boob and get nowhere, you can waste your time in small claims court, or you can buy materials and follow behind these pinheads and move on with life. I choose the third option.

I guess I’m going to have to pay the extra money, unless I want the rain to continue pouring through the two-year-old doors Mr. Professional Contracting Genius built.

But homeowners who do their own work are jerks. Remember that. Contractors say so, so it must be true.

You Can’t Help Others Without Helping Yourself

Got several things to talk about today.

First of all, let me apologize to all the people who have patiently tried to make me part of their Facebook and Myspace experiences. I just can’t seem to get into social networking. I don’t get it. Maybe there is something wrong with me. I will log in today and try to catch up.

Second, someone emailed and asked about good gun shops in the Miami area. I can’t recommend any of the local places all that highly. I’ve bought guns at Garcia’s National Gun, and they’ve given me good prices and competent service, and I have nothing critical to say about them, but I wouldn’t say the experiences were inspiring. Bass Pro Shops has a store in Miami, and the gun area is pathetic, probably due to the yankees who still exert a disproportionate influence here. Their Hollywood store, however, is much better. I think I’d consider going there, if I needed advice or smithing as well as a good price.

Third, happy Fourth of July! Enjoy your burgers and don’t even mention Cinco de Mayo.

Fourth, I saw an interesting guy on Fox News today. He’s some kind of shrink. He was talking about the heartbreaking Brooke Bennett story. This young girl was apparently lured into the hands of murdering perverts by another girl who is only fourteen. And that girl had stated that she wanted to see Brooke suffer.

Megyn Kelly asked the shrink how a girl that young could have that attitude, and the shrink said that people from abusive environments learn to shut off their feelings in order to avoid feeling pain. Then later on, the same trick prevents them from empathizing with the pain of others.

I had never heard it put that way before. I had heard the phrase “cycle of abuse,” but it always seemed like a platitude. Now I see how it could make sense.

I had a miserable childhood, and I learned to put off feeling things that upset me. I’ve written about this before. After I became an adult, I realized I was not responding properly when I was presented with the suffering of others. For example, I remember watching footage of Nazi concentration camps. I disapproved of what I saw, but I didn’t think of each person–each body in the mass graves–as a human being with a name and relatives and a history and so on. I thought maybe television and movies had desensitized me. That was probably true, but I now wonder if the defense mechanisms I used as a kid were also to blame.

When I realized I wasn’t feeling the distress a healthy person should feel, I started making a point of trying to think more deeply about other people’s suffering. Today, for example, if I’m watching the History Channel and I see that old concentration camp footage, I look at the faces and I wonder about the lives of these dead individuals. I wonder if they were married. Whether they had kids. What their achievements had been. And what I feel is much more appropriate. The other day I saw a show about the B-29, and they showed footage of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs going off. I thought about the people burning under those clouds, and the fact that the gas was partly composed of human beings.

It’s a better way to live. Not as comfortable, maybe, but more likely to lead to constructive thoughts and actions. I find it helpful as I try to improve myself. For example, many times in my writing, I’ve said things that were unbelievably stupid and seemingly cruel, and I’ve been trying to pick up on these things as they appear, instead of being bitten in the ass by them later.

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I knew of a way other people could protect themselves from becoming jaded and insensitive. Charity. I think this is one reason God demands that Jews and Christians give money to charity and take care of the needy. It’s not just to help others. It helps the giver as well. When you decide to give, and you start looking around for a good opportunity, you will find yourself presented with a burdensome smorgasbord of human misery. Babies with worms. Jews trapped in Muslim countries. Girls forced into prostitution. The list is virtually endless. And when you try to decide where to send your aid on a given day, you can’t help but feel empathy for the people you try to help.

If you, too, feel as though you’ve become calcified from movies and television and Internet rage, and maybe from the bad things that have been done to you during your life, consider charity as a way to heal yourself. You might try the links on the left side of my blog. World Vision and the IFCJ are especially good; they will present you with specific opportunities that may touch you in special ways. You might buy a family a few chickens or help a Jew leave a squalid camp in Ethiopia.

The Internet is making all of us less sensitive and civil. Maybe charity can help you fight back.

Final note: Russ Emerson put up a review of my book, Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. Thanks, Russ. Your loyalty means a lot to me. Hope the physical therapy is going well.

Short and Sweet

I kept trying to think of a good domain name for a site for the cookbook. It has to be short and easy to remember, and it has to be descriptive. Codebluecooking.com isn’t that great.

After Googling to see what has already been taken, I am thinking I’ll just make it ManlyGrub.com.

Thoughts?

Ethiopian Ambrosia

Dan from Madison lost his mind and decided to try a recipe from Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. And it wasn’t something everyone seems to like, such as brownies or blueberry cheesecake. He chose doro wat, which is Ethiopian chicken stew.

Ethiopians cook very spicy food, and they dump it on giant sour pancakes and use them to pick it up and eat it. You really have to try it. I corrupted it by putting sour cream on the side, but you can be more orthodox. Dan ate his doro wat with rice, and nobody arrested him.

Dan took it easy on the peppers, and he couldn’t get fenugreek. I think buyin fenugreek over the web is worth the aggravation. It has a unique flavor. But as Dan will tell you, doro wat is fine with or without it. It looks like he did an excellent job.

Here’s the first part of his two-part doro wat photoessay.

Positive Review

I am getting excited emails from a reader who is trying my doro wat (Ethiopian chicken stew) recipe. He didn’t bother making injera or rotis, and he was not able to get fenugreek, but you can always cheat and eat it over rice, so that’s what he’s doing.

Rather than bloviate about how great I am, I will wait for him to post a review. So far it sounds favorable.

I think I had to go to Penzey’s to get fenugreek, and the seeds are so hard, I used a coffee grinder to grind them. I have one grinder I only use for spices. Fenugreek is pretty neat, but oddly, it’s not essential.

He’s using chicken thighs with the bones still in them, and I think that’s a good choice.

Gun or Walking Stick?

I have a question. The Smith & Wesson 27-2 is pretty cool. And it seems like the model with the 8 3/8″ barrel always sells for less than the shorter-barreled models. I have never been tempted to buy a revolver with a barrel that long, because my guess is that the balance would be awful. And it would be awkward to carry and store.

So what I want to know is, what is a barrel that long good for? I think 4-5″ is perfect. You can carry guns that size if you have to, and they have a decent sight radius for accuracy, and they’re not hideously ugly, like snubnoses. I suppose you could say the longer guns are for hunting, but that doesn’t make sense, because you’d use a scope, which would work just as well on a 4″ gun.