Baking is a Blessing

In the days of fast food and reheated frozen dinners, there is something inherently satisfying about making your own food. Because of this great new blog I have stumbled on (see the link at the left) I have been experimenting with pizza, lately. The first one I made turned out perfecto! It rose in the fridge for about 3 hours, it was fluffy and had a great flavor and it was pretty thick like take out pizza. My sauce is my own creation. I make this big batch of tomato sauce and put small bags in the freezer. Its a concentrate so when I pull it out I add a can of diced tomatoes to it and run it through the blender. The results have been incredilbe. The pizza in the picture was a different recipe and it said it would make 2 12" pizzas. I made just one and it was still really thin. I thought this would be an improvement because I rather like a thinner crispier crust. Unfortunaltey, I was not happy. There ended up being a really doughy layer between the crispy crust on the bottom and the toppings. So the recipe that follows is not for the pizza crust in the picture but for the original one I made that I liked much better.

Home Style Pizza (taken from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake book)

2 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 cup tap water (this is a little variation from the book, based on Beth's recommendation at A Year in Bread to use cold water, it worked really well for me)
2 1/2 tsps. active dry yeast
3 tbsp. olive oil

At this point I didn't follow the cookbook directions. I mixed the water, yeast, and oil in a measuring cup, then mixed the flour and salt together. Then I poured them altogether and I kneaded this by hand. The dough should feel pretty wet but not too sticky when you are done kneading. I really enjoy the kneading process so I just knead for a long time. Its very relaxing, but I don't time it. Then I put the dough ball in my fridge and left it there. The cool thing about this is that I had the dough ready in the morning and I could've used it at any time in the day. In fact, for the pizza in the picture that's what I did. I mixed the dough together before I left for school (about 6:30 am) then when I was ready in the evening about 10 hours later I went ahead and spun it out. The other great tip I learned from A Year in Bread was to preheat the stone (in my case a cast iron pizza pan) in a 500 degree oven. This was absolutely an essential step in my mind. My crust had never quite worked right before this tip. I spun out my dough and placed it on parchment paper. Then when my pan was ready in the oven I took it out and put the dough on and then topped it. You can actually top it on the parchment and then just slide it over onto the pan but I'm not that graceful at this point. Between the cinnamon roll success and the pizza I'm feeling pretty confident at this point. If I feel up to it tomorrow I will make some lemon bars for the freezer and I might try my hand at biscuits.

The cool thing about this is that I can teach my kids important cooking things and also save a lot of money. Dave and I are trying to live on a budget, something we have never done our whole marriage. This has really put things into perspective for us and where our money goes. We have wasted a lot because we have not paid attention. I think to some extent this is the major downfall of having credit. Often we have not had the money for things but we use the credit card which makes us think we have more than we do. As we have put things on paper and been better at following the plan, we have made our money behave itself (and ourselves too). I'm fast becoming a huge Dave Ramsey fan. His advice is timeless and priceless. Plus when you listen to his show you really are empowered to act in your own life. I think alot of the reason many people are successful in the self help area is because when you surround yourself with people who are already successful you become so yourself. Not everyone has the initiative to maintain a level of energy without some cheering on. Today a man called in and said he and his wife had paid off over $600,000 in three years. This was incredible. They had sold a vacation home, cashed out of their dead end insurance policy. The cool thing to me was that they made between them, somewhere in the vicinity of half a million dollars but they realized that the fancy cars, the extra homes and their lifestyle period had not brought them peace or happiness. These people could afford the debt they were carrying but they knew that it was a burden and that it was bondage. I'm so convinced that debt is a tool to cause dependance. Whether its a car payment or a tv doesn't matter. It creates a cycle of dependance that only helps the people who are collecting the interest. This cycle of debt has many people unable to save for college, or retirement or even meet their basic needs. It is a crushing and despairing condition that makes you a slave to its hungry appetite. I am so ready to be free of this condition and I feel like the plan that Dave Ramsey offers is a solution. Once you feel energized and like you can make a difference in your condition you are spurred on and much more successful than a hampster in a wheel.