Pizza for dinner

Today I made homemade pizza for dinner, from scratch.  Yeah that's right, yeast, flour, salt, water, knead, bake, etc.  Just cheese pizza, with a little tomato sauce (left over spaghetti sauce, but hey I MADE THE CRUST).

Long time ago, in a different lifetime, when I still had the idea that I would learn how to cook someday, I got myself a pizza stone.  You know the heavy stone thing that sits beside the refrigerator, falls down and has to be retrieved when we move the fridge, that pizza stone.  Well, the recipe I had called for a pizza stone, and an oven set to 500 degrees, yes, 500 degrees.  I though I was going to burn the house down.

But I didn't.  Some of the directions for calzones (which I looked up because I got the pizza all folded, and ended up making essentially a calzone rather than a real pizza, but still....). Anyway, some of the calzone directions called for putting parchment paper under the calzone to facilitate transferring it into the oven, I think.  Should have read that before making the pizza itself,  shouldn't I?  The pizza/calzone got folded in the attempt to transfer it from the cookie sheet to the parchment paper to the oven.

But the next pizza crust, sans topping because there is no way we need to eat three pizzas, which is what the recipe made, got transferred via parchment paper just fine.  I cut away most of the excess paper before baking, and next time I will cut away all of the excess, because the parchment paper is only good to 420 degrees and the oven was 500 degrees.  I didn't know it would go that high.  Part of the parchment paper which extended over the edge of the pizza stone got singed somewhat, but it didn't affect the pizza crust at all.

Tomorrow, more pizza with the second crust.  Oh, and I used the third half (why yes I was a mathematician in real life, why do you ask?) to make pan bread?  If that is what I mean.  I just cut it in small pieces and cooked it on a skillet on the top of the stove, and the part I inadvertently kept at about 4 on the dial came our real nice, but the part the got heated up to the 7 or 8 on the dial was a bit, shall we say, toasty.

I have more yeast, and more flour, and more salt, and more muscle (for kneading).  I want to make more bread.

BTW, I also made a bowl of knitted fruit (the bowl is knitted too) and here it is.  Remind me to tell you about it someday.

Hope your life is a bowl of cherries.

Results of Crafting while Traveling

 Don't try it.  Doesn't work so well.

I am speaking mainly of traveling from motel to motel, now, not the "take your own stuff with  you" motorhome style of travel.  That is a different story.  This is car to motel to car to sightseeing type travel. 

I took lots of projects with me.  I worked on them all, well almost all.  I took some beads, but never opened up that box.  Too much work to schlep the stuff into the motel, open it, spread it all out, decide which bead, etc, etc, etc.  I did work on all my knitting projects.  This is what happened.  I started several projects.  I finished one project, the green spring teeshirt.  The rest are in various stages of waiting to be finished.

Okay, I forgot,  I did finish two of the Cats in Balls project.  But then I started another one.   And the head was too small, so I ended up with one (incomplete) cat and one head without a cat.  To be finished later.  I did not get the cat complete, as by that time I had stored my tapestry needle somewhere and couldn't find it.  It was difficult sewing stuff together in the car.  So this meant schlepping all the stuff into the motel room to work on, then schlepping it back out to the car the next morning.  UGH.

Next time I travel this way (which will be never, if I have my way) I will take one large project, and just work on that.  Perhaps a hooded lace cardigan on size two or three needles.  That way, I won't have so much stuff to schlep around. 

I started five or six projects, or continued working on them, but got stuck on every one, mainly because of the issue of it all being shoved in the back seat of our car.  I did accomplish things, but it is not the best way to go.

Hope you find the right way to go for your projects.