Leftovers tonight
I haven't seen anything official on it, but I suspect free range chickens (meaning they have access to the outside) are more likely to get bird flu than those who never leave the henhouse, because they pick up the virus from the droppings of geese and ducks flying overhead.
We had Chinese takeout from the same place we got it from last Friday.
It's in the 40's here, with heavy winds and not-quite snow.
So we had something warm, chili and cinnamon rolls.
We had beef stroganoff on toast.
I'm making another batch of semolina bread today.
Pineapple juice as a dough relaxer was a new idea I got from that thread, that came from the Modernist Pizza folks. I'm trying to convince myself whether I need any of the Modernist series, unless I win the lottery, probably not. But I would like to know more about the Brazilian thin crust that is one of the various styles of pizza they describe. When you search online for 'Brazilian pizza', all you find is about various toppings.
There's an interesting thread in the BBGA forum about using L-cysteine as a dough relaxer. The poster uses it for croissants, but it'd work for pizzas as well. He mixes some of the L-cysteine powder in with flour then uses a small amount of that flour to get the recommended amount of L-cysteine. (20 ppm, or thereabouts.)
My son gave me a very nice bread knife for Christmas, but it is so sharp and moves through bread so easily that it is very easy to cut myself on it, so I tend to use the older bread knife most of the time.
Boboli and other pre-baked crusts are still on the market, but the only time I've ever used a pre-baked crust was when I bought a gluten-free crust. Wasn't impressed by it, but it was better than nothing, I guess.
I do make lavash pizzas, though, but they aren't in the oven all that long, nor is it set as high as I would set it for pizza.
Tonight we had sirloin steak with sauteed mushrooms and a baked potato.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to that site, and have never bought from them, as it always seems like most of what they have I either buy in larger quantities or can find cheaper, if not both.
I tend to buy mostly from Webstaurant and Bakers Authority these days.
When I was living in Chicago, a lot of the pizzerias would do pizzas on a perforated pan. Do you have one you could try?
We haven't done pizzas at home for a while, but at some point I want to resume my explorations of thin-crust pizza dough recipes. I also want to get a pizza steel, but they're not cheap or light.
It was 'fend for yourself' night here, so I had some salad from the slim pickings in the Aerogarden and a sandwich.
This page says male and female pepper fruits don't exist, though male and female parts of flowers do exist.
I have a book on knife skills (Knife Skills Illustrated by Peter Hertzm), it recommends cutting the top and bottom off bell peppers, then slitting it so you can open it into a somewhat rectangular form. Cut off the innards and the pith that connects the innards to the shell (I have a looped Exacto blade that I use for this, although sometimes I use a bird's beak knife), and then you can cut it into even strips or dice it. You can dice the bottom and cut off the useable parts of the top and dice them as well, just make sure you get the pith out of the top, it is bitter.
I've been told that one of the differences between home cooks and professional kitchens is that in a professional kitchen a bell pepper is almost always roasted over an open flame briefly to char the outside before it is cut up, that allows the somewhat chewy transparent outermost layer to be peeled off.
