For the Love of Pizza

I am not from an Italian family. My father's side is German and my mother's Scotch-Irish. But for as long as I can remember, we have all had a love affair with pizza. Now, I'm not talking about delivery (or Digorno), but made from scratch dough, add your garden veggies pizza. My mom was never much into baking or crafts, but from a young age my grandmother took it upon herself to instill in my sisters and I (and my cousins) all things homey. This included making pizza dough from scratch. It was one of the very first things I learned to make. I can remember standing on a chair pulled up to her counter, wearing a homemade apron and as much flour as the counter, helping her add ingredients and knead the dough. Since then I've grown up and gotten married and had a kid of my own, but I still love making pizza. This is a dinner, though, that has to be planned. No thirty minutes or less here. You have to allow time for the dough to rise. It's worth it in the end though. This weekend we had some friends and their kids over, and since I don't know any kids who don't like pizza, I thought this would be a nice treat

Ingredients: (this makes enough dough for two 12inch pizzas)

2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast

1/2 teaspoon brown sugar

1 1/2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/ 45 degrees C)

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 1/3 cups all purpose flour

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast and the brown sugar in the warm water and let sit for ten minutes. In should smell a bit like beer

stir the salt and oil into the yeast solution and mix in 2 1/2 cups of the flour. Turn the dough out into a clean and well floured surface, and knead in more flour until the dough is no longer sticky.

place the dough into a clean and well oiled bowl, and cover with a cloth.

Let the dough rise until double; this should take about an hour. Punch down the dough and form into a tight ball. Allow the dough to relax for a minute before rolling out

Use a rolling pin to roll out your dough, and arrange on pizza pan. Make your crust as thick as you like it!

Now top with all your favorite goodies! Sauce! Cheese! Veggies! Meat! Have fun! (I normally like lots of different stuff, but had some particular eaters that night, so our pizza has tomatoes and green peppers with extra sauce and cheese)

Repotting the Aloe Vera





original aloe



old aloe in new pot



new aloe



new aloe in old pot

Aloe Vera is something I think everyone should have. It's super easy to take care of, and nothing better works for soothing and healing minor cuts and burns. Just put it in a sunny windowsill and water when the soil starts looking dry. We had ours in our kitchen window, but it was just getting too big for the pot it was in. Then, on Freecycle (Freecycle is a website where members can post things they would like to give away, or request items they need. It's a way too keep usable things from ending up in the landfill.) someone posted they had aloe plants to give away, so I asked for one. Yesterday, I moved our existing plant into a bigger pot and relocated it to the bakers rack by the sliding glass door, and put the new baby plant in the windowsill using the pot the other aloe plant was in.



Early Potatoes

Since the pest damaged to our potatoes was so bad they couldn't be saved, we decided to harvest what we could as early potatoes. This means we won't have them for storage over the winter, but we will get a few meals at least. We dumped one of the containers and had about fifteen potatoes for four plants. It was a little bit depressing because there were at least forty to fifty more little mini potatoes that had just started to form before the plant died. We could have had a massive crop. Well, at lest now we know growing them in containers is very productive. These I sliced up and made homemade chips out of to go with some baked zucchini for dinner. Dipped in olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary and garlic salt and broiled on high for about thirty minutes. Yummy!

Zucchini Bread

When our cow was delivered this past weekend, the farmer also brought us some fresh picked zucchini. When I say fresh I mean it had been picked that morning. The very best thing I can think of to do with Zucchini is Zucchini Bread. Andrew loves it and so do I. I made two loaves, because it freezes well. We've been munching on one all week, and the other I put up in the freezer for another week.

3 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
3 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup water
2 cups grated zucchini (this is about one whole zucchini)

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 cup chopped walnut or pecans

Preheat over to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar. In a separate bowl, combine oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in. Bake in 2 standard loaf pans (greased if not non-stick), for one hour or until tester comes out clean.

Buying in Bulk



The meat took up the entire freezer



I often buy my grains in bulk, and my honey too (honey has no expiration date as long as it is kept in airtight containers, otherwise it will ferment), but since getting the freezer from my parents, Andrew and I decided to buy some meat in bulk. A person can be put in a really difficult situation when they feel it is very important to eat hormone free beef, but the cost of it is so high compared to regular beef. Especially since Isabelle eats what we do now. At the grocery store I can buy standard ground beef on sale for as low as 1.99 per pound. Hormone free, depending on where I buy it from (this involves another choice because it's cheaper at Earth Fare, but much further to drive) anywhere from 3.85 per pound up to 7.99 per pound. Since we made the switch to hormone free beef, we don't even eat steaks or stew meat anymore because it's always at least 6 dollars per pound. One of the solutions we've come up with is to just eat less meat entirely, cutting back our beef consumption to just once or twice a week. While this had been really good for our health, we still look for every opportunity to save money when we can, and the opportunity presented itself in the form of a cow. A local farmer whose meat is hormone free, and whose cattle is allowed to graze, was selling them by the half or by the whole for 2.75 per pound. That is for all cuts, steaks, stew, ground, all of it. We agreed on half, which ended up being about 250 pounds of meat. This is more than enough to get us through the whole year. All of the meat was packaged for us and even delivered to us. Now I will learn how to cook parts of the cow I never used before, like the liver. Anyone have a good recipe for liver?

Ladybugs to the Rescue!



Aphid damage to Butterfly Bush

Our ladybugs arrived over the weekend alive and well (despite being put in the mailbox by the postman even though in big bold letters on the front of the box read DO NOT PUT IN ENCLOSED MAILBOX). They came in two packs if 1500, the first of which we released Saturday evening. We will wait about a week I think before releasing the second group. We spread them around the yard, heavily concentrating on areas already infected with the aphids. Hopefully they will help. It was a lot of fun setting them free. They were crawling all over Andrew. After we got them all out of the mesh bag they came in, I had to start picking them off of him, and placing them on leaves or in the grass. I took a picture, but Andrew made me swear not to post one of him.  When I told my mom about ordering them, she was surprised that I actually had to buy ladybugs. "Do you know how prevalent ladybugs are in this area!", but then my dad commented that he hadn't really seen any, and it got me thinking. Usually they are everywhere. They are usually crawling up and down the screen porch at my parents house, and we almost always find them on the windowsills at our. They are very common in this area. Maybe they lack of ladybugs helped fuel our aphid problem. With less predators, their population exploded.I wonder what happened to our ladybugs?

Friends in the Garden



Jack



Our fat cat Lola watching Jack

Other than those pesky aphids, who will soon meet their doom as soon as our ladybugs arrive, we have a few other visitors to our garden every year. One is a little chipmunk, that I named Jack, who lives under our porch. He actually lived in our crawl space when we first bought our house, but my husband sealed up his little tunnel and relocated him outside. Now he lives under the porch. I know they are supposed to be garden pests, but he doesn't bother the beds, that I've noticed, and he's just so darn cute. I see him almost every evening. Our cat knows he's out there because she always plants herself in front of the sliding glass door and her tail flips furiously as he scurries back and forth. The other day, the cat the dog and the kid were all line up with faces planted to the glass, and Jack on the other side just staring back. Andrew said when he was watering he saw two, so maybe Jack has a friend (or maybe he is a she and has a baby). I don't know if chipmunks hibernate, but I only ever remember seeing him in the spring, and it's something I look forward to every year.

Next to our back porch we have a monstrous butterfly bush which has just bloomed. It SO pretty and sometimes it just gets covered with butterflies. I should get a book or something so I can start identifying the different species. I can see it from the window above our sink, which is really nice when I'm doing the dishes.