Your Search Is Over

That's it. It's done: your search for the perfect pizza crust. Possibly for the perfect all-around pizza too.

The Muse and I love to cook, and we try each Saturday to make something new. Often, this involves sifting through the wonderful archive of recipes and reviews at Epicurious.com, which culls various cooking magazines.

Not long ago, the Muse discovered this gorgeous pizza.

Pizza Bianca with Goat Cheese and Greens

A simple white pizza. Goat cheese, mozzarella, Swiss chard and a bit of garlic. Some flavored oil for the crust.

We've made it a number of times since discovering this recipe. The dough is particularly good, and very easy to make--though you need to budget time to let it rise. For example, six hours. But that makes for a really nice weekend pizza. You get the dough going in the morning or afternoon and you'll have an outstanding dinner.

The crust is light but not too thin, not too crispy, but certainly not doughy. It's easy peasy to work with. It looks like the sort of easy-to-work-with dough you see on cooking shows, the sort that you see and wonder what you've been doing wrong all these years.

Wonderful stuff.

And we recommend you leave an inch or two around the edge just to brush on the pepper flake and garlic-infused olive oil. The dough is just so good. Like any really good pizza, you don't need to make it edge-to-edge cheese. You want to taste the crust too.

We made this most recently on Christmas Eve while visiting my parents and grandmother in Illinois. Wonderful time, and wonderful food.

RIDICULOUS NOTE

When we grocery shop at the Rainbow in Saint Paul's sometimes dodgy Midway neighborhood, we use the self-checkout line. The chard we buy for this pizza rings up as Swiss Chardonnay.
-cK

Working in Florida This Week

I'm working in Florida this week and do not link up to the Internet in the evenings, so no blog updating til the weekend.

>> insert gigantic world sigh <<

Lol, by the way, is an awesome host. Her dinners are righteously good.
-cK

Please Show Your Education

My sister and her husband photographed the following signs in bathrooms in Mexico back in February. Please Show Your Education is, I think, a sign relevant for most locations!


Lovely.
-cK

Let It Snow!

A few seconds of watching the first flakes of the season,
1 December 2007. Eventually, four or five inches led to our first
city snow emergency (ie, plowing, ticketing and towing).

How very strange to have snow so early! I suppose we usually have some around Thanksgiving, but it seems that snow that sticks before January is a thing of one's childhood, not something one encounters any longer.

It's a trick of memory. Yes, the world is warming. (It is. Knock it off.) But a heavy snow when you're seven is apt to make you remember copious amounts of snow blanketing your neighborhood across many years.

I thought about this recently when seeing photographs of the Muse in Arkansas as a child and teenager. And while all the winter shots next to pines with snow-sagging limbs and houses blanketed like Swiss ski lodges may have been captured in just two of 18 winters, looking at the volume of photos snapped in those years makes it seem unusual when she says, "We almost never had snow."

Would I have recognized winter without it? No. Not a bit.

So it was wonderful to see the snow falling so thickly over the past few days. It piled up December 1 and again yesterday, as evidenced by this photo snapped at 4:30 pm, Tuesday:


But today it is sunny, and that too will be welcomed. The abrupt grey and white matte skies have been difficult to adjust to. You can see how lights in all the apartments are coming on either very early or later than expected now, all of us having trouble sleeping and waking, never truly getting into either.

So thank you for the early snow, dear winter. But now let us have a bit of sun, please. My jade plant is looking awful lean.
-cK