[Mike Nolan]

I've never had the nerve (or motor skills) to try tossing pizza dough, but hand stretching doesn't compress the dough as much as rolling it does.

[Mike Nolan]

I need to try the baked salmon and couscous recipe, but I'll have to scale it down for one, because my wife doesn't like salmon. (When we have fish, I have salmon and she has orange roughy.)

[Mike Nolan]

Lincoln has had a flurry of pizza places open in the past few years, and another one is opening this Friday in downtown, but most of them use too much garlic in their sauce, some also use it in their crust. And since I'm now limited to one slice of a 12" pizza at a time, due to the sodium content, going to a sit-down pizza place doesn't make much sense any more. (We haven't been big restaurant patrons in quite a while due to garlic issues--it's in EVERYTHING!)

When we lived in Rogers Park and then Evanston, our favorite pizza was a hole-in-the-wall place on Main street, but Gulliver's on Howard was a close second and My Pie (down by the Loyola campus) was another we liked. A lot has happened since we moved to Nebraska in 1977. The hole-in-the-wall place closed (it's a Giordano's take-out place the last time I drove past), Gulliver's changed owners and he change the recipe to use cheaper ingredients, and My Pie moved, though I don't know if that was under the same ownership. A lot of the places on Howard depended on the fact that Evanston was dry, so the college crowd would head there to drink. But Evanston went wet and business at the Howard places suffered. (You can order beer at the student union now!)

The owner of Nancy's sold to a franchise group in 1990 and people tell me it isn't quite as good. I understand there are two Nancy's locations that aren't part of the franchise, they may be better. The last time I was in Chicago, I went to Lou Malnati's River North location, takeout was a 90 minute wait, but it was pretty good.

[Mike Nolan]

I made banana nut mini-muffins last night.

[Mike Nolan]

Back in its heyday, Godfather's Pizza used to advertise that their large pizza had 3 POUNDS of cheese on it.

Nancy's (originally in the western suburbs of Chicago) does a stuffed pizza that looks like a layer cake. One slice is a meal--and then some. It's still arguably the best of the Chicago-style stuffed pizza that Nancy's claims to have invented. (Giordano's also claims that honor, and possibly Lou Malnati's.)

When I was in college, there was a pizza place in Evanston called The Inferno, their specialty was what they called a dubl-dough pizza, the thing had to be at least 4 inches high, not counting the toppings. Somehow, they managed to get all the dough cooked so it wasn't just a raw mass of pizza dough in the middle, and they were very popular among Northwestern students on Sundays, when the dining halls didn't operate.

[Mike Nolan]

The last several times I've made pizza I used the rectangular pizza pan that I got from King Arthur (though I don't see it on their site today) and I stretched the dough out mostly by hand. (I did use a small pastry roller to help get it all the way to the corners.)

But I think the next time I'm going to use the Roman crust recipe from Peter Reinhart's book, "American Pie". It can be stretched so thin it is translucent.

[Mike Nolan]

It depends on what ingredients you use, a pepperoni pizza might cost $5 or so in ingredients.

The big chains use cheaper ingredients bought in bulk, I use whole milk mozzarella--they generally don't. That's how they can afford to sell a pizza for under $10. But as I recall, pizzerias have a higher food cost than most of the restaurant industry; the cost of the ingredients is usually about 40% of the price, but for most sit-down restaurants it's more like 25%.

The local pizzeria we order from most frequently charges about $20 for a 12 inch pizza with several added toppings. Pizza Hut it isn't!

Buying in bulk is the real key, a 15 ounce can of tomato sauce costs about a dollar, a #10 can (about 110 ounces) costs about $2.50. 50 pounds of pizza flour is running about $14 a bag right now. Sams sells 5 pound bags of mozzarella for about $15, but Pizza Hut probably pays about half that.

[Mike Nolan]

I like parm, but not as the only cheese on a pizza, it needs the mootz. Romano cheese is good on pizza, too, as it browns well and adds some pungency. One of the local pizzerias does a really good pizza with mootz and cream cheese, we usually have them add tomatoes and artichoke hearts.

BTW, did you know that Pizza Hut, Domino's, Little Caesars and Papa John's all get cheese from the same supplier? Leprino Foods in Denver, home of possibly the world's most secretive billionaire, James Leprino. Forbes ran an article on him recently: Forbes Article, but even Forbes couldn't get a recent picture of him.

[Mike Nolan]

We've probably drowned more rosemary than we've dried out. We used to try putting them in the kitchen window, but it is north-facing and definitely doesn't get enough light for rosemary, though it seems to be working for orchids.

[Mike Nolan]

Our dining room might work, though my wife would have to give up some of the space for her Christmas cactus plants.

[Mike Nolan]

She's concerned that her garlic allergy could spread to other alliums, but at this point she can still handle onions and leeks. She's not fond of chives, though we have them in the garden, mainly for color.

As for spices and herbs, I tend to use basil, parsley, oregano, thyme and marjoram a lot, and I've been experimenting with winter savory. You have to know when to add them, basil gets really bitter if cooked a long time, so it goes in towards the end.

I've started using rosemary more frequently too--now if I could just get a rosemary plant to survive over a winter. My wife's sister has a huge rosemary plant in her living room, she's had it for decades. But that room has good sunlight, I need to find a better place to put a rosemary plant, if we put it in the guest bedroom (southern exposure) it gets forgotten about.

A beef stew just isn't complete without some bay leaf in the pot. I've been using dill weed more frequently lately with fish. (The other day I made salmon poached in butter with dill weed and powdered mustard.)

I tend to stick to ripe (not green) bell peppers and I don't use the hot ones much, as we're not really into spicy hot foods.

[Mike Nolan]

We're having tacos.

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks for being sensitive to copyright issues. Lists of ingredients are often considered 'facts' and are not copyrightable, though the instructions on how to assemble the dish are clearly copyrightable. I generally stay away from even posting lists of ingredients from another source, though the usual rule of thumb is that if you change two or more ingredients, it's considered a different recipe.

I'm curious about the Romagnoli book, how many of the recipes use garlic? (As I understand it, northern Italian cooking doesn't use much garlic, though southern Italian recipes do.)

[Mike Nolan]

Rye chops are similar to cracked wheat, they're not fine enough to be a meal. I've looked at a lot of rye recipes, I don't recall any that called for rye chops.

Back when I was testing rye recipes, I bought 5 pounds of rye berries and use my impact mill on its coarsest setting. That was pretty similar to the pumpernickel flour I was getting at the Mennonite store in TN. I'd look for pumpernickel flour, it's usually pretty coarse.

[Mike Nolan]

I tend to keep all the ingredients on hand, but we're doing carry-out pizza tonight.

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