Pizza Pileup

They say you learn more from failure than success. I'm not so sure about that. What I am sure of is that failure is often more interesting than success. And it is in that spirit that I will recount my massive pizza pileup last Sunday.

I've made pizza before and successfully. It's the only pizza my daughter will eat (she generally disdains anything bready), and she specifically asked that I whip up a few pies.

All went well at first. I made my dough that afternoon, six rounds that I put in the fridge until about an hour before baking time. With dinner time approaching (I was trying to time it to a Man vs. Food episode), I fired up the oven to 500 degrees, laying the pizza stone on the bottom rack which I set to the lowest rung just above the coil.

I shredded the mozzarella, grated the peccorino romano, sliced mushrooms and pepperoni and put freshly made marinara at hand. My daughter, meanwhile, cut olives and minced anchovies. Her idea was to use the sauce, olives, anchovies and capers to make a putanesca pizza. A great idea, I thought, and was curious to see how it turned out.

Everything was organized, laid out in bowls ready to go on pizzas with the efficiency of an assembly line. The oven was hot. The pizza peels were standing by.

I was kind of proud of myself as I started to roll out pizza dough. Silly me.

All went well with the first pizza, mushrooms, olives and cheese, which would be mine. It came out perfectly.

My daughter then carefully built her putanesca pizza (see the picture above just about to go into the oven). Little did I know, but I'd made a fatal mistake: I failed to put enough cornmeal on the peel. When I tried to slip it onto the stone, it stuck. I ended up with blob that looked like the bizarre formations inside the wrecked Chernobyl reactor. My daughter was devastated. She made a second pizza, and, yes, you guessed it, I did it again.

We were able to salvage some the putanesca pizza, enough to fill her up, but it was a real cluster you-know-what. By the fourth pizza, I'd learned my lesson, dumping corn meal on the peel like a sand truck spewing ice melt on a slippery road. It made a mess, but it worked. The pizza slid like a man on a banana peel.

So the lesson is, puts LOTS of corn meal on the your pizza peel. Overdoing it may make a mess, but it's better than pizzas that look like bad modern art.

Oatmeal Crispies

My mother is a talented if unenthusiastic baker. Her pies are far and away the best I've ever tasted, so good that I never order pie at a restaurant because I'm always bitterly disappointed. She also bakes outstanding cookies and desserts like date nut squares. Not that she makes a big deal about it. Far from it. Mom has always been much more interested in art and art history (she is a retired art history professor) than the domestic arts.

The other day, mom gave us a new recipe, oatmeal crispies. They were outstanding. She emailed me the recipe and I tried them this weekend.

The recipe, which follows, was straightforward: cream shortening (gets a bad rap. Actually much less saturated fat than butter), sugars, eggs, etc. add flour, oatmeal and crushed walnuts, cool dough in fridge and bake.

A few tips. I made my dough log too thick, so the cookies, while tasty, came out the size of hockey pucks (see above). Too big. I should have cut the dough into two or three pieces and shaped each into a log. I also didn't keep the dough in the fridge long enough. As a result, it was too soft, making it hard to slice into rounds for baking.

Lastly, I had to crush the walnuts because my wife doesn't like certain kinds of nuts (only certain kinds, mind you, not all) unless they are in microscopic pieces. I achieved this by putting the nuts in a plastic bag and pulverizing them with a meat mallet.

A great recipe. Here it is:

1 cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar tightly packed
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tsp cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3 cups oatmeal
1/2 cup chopped (in my case, crushed) walnuts

Cream the shortening, sugars and eggs. Add vanilla and mix well. Add flour, salt, baking soda, oats and nuts and mix well. Divide dough into two or three pieces, depending on preferred size of cookies, and shape into logs. Wrap in wax paper and refrigerate at least two to three hours.

When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove dough, slice into quarter inch rounds and place on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake about 10 minutes and cool on wire racks.

Scenes from the Supermarket

What I saw at the supermarket yesterday: A morbidly obese woman in a motorized cart shopping with her equally overweight, but still mobile sister/friend/lover (unclear). They were in the dairy section near the bank of fridges holding the milk.

"You better get the bigger cream," the fat woman in the cart told her companion. "The smaller one won't be enough."

Not much more to say.

Don't Eat the Pink Milk

Don't eat anything that turns your milk pink. That's the basic advice food writer Michael Pollan gave this week on Jon Stewart. Kind of like, don't eat the yellow snow.

Let's be honest, whatever colors those hearts, moons, clovers, stars can't be good for you. And let's not even talk about Frankenberry or Count Chocula.

Check out the video of Pollan's interview with Stewart. Hilarious and informative at the same time.

Pollan was pushing his new book, "Food Rules." His number one rule: eat food, not food-like substances. It sounds so obvious. I haven't yet read Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilema," but it's on my list.

Simple Syrup Lemonade

After making raspberry sorbet last week, I still had about a cup and half of homemade syrup (two cups sugar, two cups water, bring to a boil and stir about 30 seconds to a minute). I figured I'd try to make some homemade lemonade.

We've all seen those lemonade stands at the fair, the ones with lemon-shaped stands where they put water and sugar in a plastic cup the height of the Empire State Building and shake it in front of you. Overpriced, but usually not bad, although the sugar tends to settle at the bottom. Indeed, I tried to make lemonade using sugar once a long time ago and had the same problem. The result was inconsistent, going from overly tart to cloyingly sweet as you drank. The syrup seemed the perfect solution, evenly distributing and infusing the sweetness throughout the beverage.

Guess what. It works. I squeezed five lemons to produce about a cup of lemon juice and mixed it with three cups of water and about half a cup simple syrup. For my taste, it was perfect, pleasingly tart with just enough sweetness to take the edge off (although my daughter thought it should be sweeter). The taste was consistent throughout and there was none of that annoying gritty sweetness at the end.

I was surprised at the relative expense. You don't think twice about buying a lemon or two at 50 cents a pop. But five or six, well that's not cheap, especially when it only produces about four cups of beverage. Unfortunately, the processed stuff is much cheaper.

Next I want to try adding pureed raspberries. I suspect that will make a killer drink.

Pink Slime

That's what a former U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist called "ground beef" produced by a company called Beef Products. This vile alleged food product is used in about half of all fast food burgers in the U.S. and in the nation's school lunch program.

The "ground beef" in question is in fact fatty trimmings that until about 2000 were considered unfit for human consumption and used for cat food. One of the reasons: the substance is far more prone to e coli and salmonella contamination.

Enter one Eldon N. Roth, an enterprising, self-taught chemist, who proposed dousing these inedible beef byproducts with ammonia to kill bacteria. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Argriculture (let's see, who was president in 2001? Let me think, let me think) gave him the green light. The government even decided the company didn't have to list ammonia as an ingredient, so not many people knew that fast food restaurants and schools were feeding people a powerful cleaning agent.

The advantage? It's cheaper, about 3 cents less a pound.

Oh, and by the way, it appears that the process doesn't work that well. The beef still gets contaminated with e coli and salmonella. To really work, the ammonia level apparently has to be so high that the "hamburger," which comes in frozen blocks, smells like a pool.

All this from a truly appalling New York Times story published several days ago. I dare you to read it and go to McDonald's or give your kid money for a school lunch.

My favorite is the quote from Mr. Roth: “Like any responsible member of the meat industry, we are not perfect.”

Responsible member of the meat industry? Not perfect? Dude, you're feeding potentially contaminated cat food to kids and adults after slathering it with a powerful chemical normally used to clean floors -- really dirty floors. And you've gotten rich off it.

Words fail.

Happy New Year