On My Way Home...

I had a lovely trip back to my Alma Mater. I am so incredibly proud of the friends of mine who finished their theses this semester. It was a lovely and wonderful weekend.

I am resuming my teaching tomorrow. It's a new class so there will be new fabulous moments and challenges. I am excited to continue working on my teaching skills because those communication skills are vastly important for every part of my life, and the ability to impart knowledge will come in handy in graduate school and in my life as a professor.

A Bacchic Celebration

Today, I am going to see a couple of professors, and then there is the gigantic bonfire celebration of the culmination of theses. It should be fabulous!

Off to the Old Stomping Grounds...

I'm going to be at my Alma Mater for the next few days. Cynthia and Ovid II are turning in their theses and I am joining them to celebrate. I may or may not have the time and/or internet access necessary to post over the next few days.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

Raw Foodism and Evolution

I stumbled upon this NPR piece a little while ago and, being both a cooking and evolutionary biology enthusiast, found it fascinating. Apparently cooking helped make humans smarter (by allowing for larger, more complex brains) because cooked food can be digested more easily and allows a faster extraction of nutrients from the food source.


The piece, which is very well done except for some annoying chewing noises at the beginning, starts at about 5:45 after a short note on companies hiring marine scientists to keep their mouths shut about the oil spill.

When I stumbled across the piece, I immediately sent it to Cynthia, who had tried raw-foodism for a while. She noted that, like the piece described, she felt clean and healthy at first, but began to notice decreasing energy. This is apparently because the human body likes the roughage from a raw food diet, but it requires so much energy to process the calories that ultimately one stops getting enough nutrients and vitamins.

The Starter Lives! and Adventures in Pizza

Tonight I decided to make pizza. Amusingly, pizza is Cerinthus' food. His mother makes it a lot, but he has never been satisfied by the crust. Tonight he says "this is what pizza should taste like." WIN!

The pizza was not perfect, to be sure, but it was much closer than any homemade pizza he's ever tasted. Here is what I did. I took this recipe (which is technically a deep-dish recipe):

Pizza Dough (1):
1 1/2 cups warm water (about 110 degrees F)
1 (1/4-ounce) packages active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup semolina flour
1/2 cup olive oil, plus 2 teaspoons to grease bowl
1 teaspoon salt

In a large bowl, combine the water, yeast, and sugar and stir to combine. Let sit until the mixture is foamy, about 5 minutes.

Add 1 1/2 cups of the flour, the semolina, 1/2 cup of the oil, and the salt, mixing by hand until it is all incorporated and the mixture is smooth. Continue adding the flour, 1/4 cup at a time, working the dough after each addition, until all the flour is incorporated but the dough is still slightly sticky.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth but still slightly tacky, 3 to 5 minutes. I used the method of mixing recommended by Steve from Breadcetera (2).

Oil a large mixing bowl with the remaining 2 teaspoons oil. Place the dough in the bowl and turn to oil all sides. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set in a warm, draft-free place until nearly doubled in size, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. (I wish I had a picture. For me I kept the dough in a very warm area. It practically TRIPLED in size.)

Divide into 3 equal portions (I needed to make pizzas on a 12x12 pizza stone). From here, the original recipe requires deep dish pizza pans. I didn't have them, and I had just bought a pizza stone.

Note: this pizza stone is actually the unpolished part of a piece of granite that Cerinthus got for $4 at a tile store since I am a college student on a budget. I rubbed olive oil into it and the dusted it with semolina flour.

From there, I rolled out the dough, plumped up an inch or so for the crust, and then added tomato sauce (from Trader Joe's) and mozzarella. The dough was way too sticky (and the pizza peel I ordered has not arrived yet) so I used a flour-caked cookie sheet. It worked ok. When it was time to take the pizza out, it had solidified enough that I could move it freely, which was nice. I cranked the oven up to 500 degrees F and cooked the pizza until the cheese bubbled and there were patches of brown.

As is obvious, the first pizza got totally mangled as I put it into the oven. However, the crust rose admirably. The problem was that it didn't cook all the way through. I definitely need a solution to this. Ponticus, who came over to have some pizza, said perhaps heating the oven stone up to 500 degrees F and then bringing the oven temp down to around 400 to cook the pizza. I might try that next time.

While the pizza was rising, I decided to check on my yeast starter which, after 12 hours didn't seem to have much going on. But much to my surprise, as the pizza dough rose, so did the yeast in the starter. My starter still looks terrible on the top:

but looks great from the side:
If you can't tell from the picture, it's all bubbly, which means it's alive! I'm SO HAPPY. Sadly, tonight when I feed it I'm going to have to throw half of it out, per Breadcetera's instructions (3). I thought I had killed it because on of the tablespoons of flour I put in to start it was bleached flour (by accident). However, I found out that it grows anyway, although at a slower pace. I'm not sure if this is because of my apartment's heating, or because of the flour, but either way I'm totally happy it lived.

Endnotes:

1. From Joelean's Culinary Adventure: http://joelens.blogspot.com/2008/12/chicago-style-deep-dish-pizza.html
   
2. Mixing tips and video: http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=9
3. Breadcetera instructions: Starting a Starter
   

Sulpicia vs. Conference vs. Sourdough Starter

So, I got rejected from the UBC conference (not a surprise since it is for grad students) and wait-listed at Cornell (which is probably good because I can no longer get financial aid to go there since I got so much for the St. Thomas conference. However, I was accepted to the Willamette conference, and I will be presenting my final chapter of my thesis! This chapter is the one where I unveil my crazy theories about Platonic dialectic, so it should be interesting to see what the classics community thinks of it. On the other hand, I need to finish my third chapter first. Wish me luck.

The second major project I'm endeavoring right now is making my own sourdough starter. Cerinthus loves sourdough, and I also would like to be able to not have to buy commercial yeast all the time (it's expensive!). So, I'm making some. My roommate, Cynthia (1), does not look pleased, but she was excited by the prospect of sourdough bread.

I now have a use for my old pasta sauce jar! According to Cerinthus, in the US reusing is more efficient and better for the environment than recycling so I'm trying to reuse as much as possible. I'm going to reuse my yogurt containers to grow fresh basil. Yum.

Here is the inside after eight hours:

It still looks like lumpy oatmeal (2). What did I do wrong? Maybe it's just not warm enough in my apartment. I'm going to give it a 48 hour testing period to see what I can do with it.

Endnotes:

1. Cynthia is Propertius' lover from the Monobiblos and the two successive poetic cycles (although I believe not in Book IV). She is characterized by a philandering heart, a wild temper, beauty, flightiness, spontaneity, some minor intellectual prowess, and controlling strength. My roommate, whom I love dearly nonetheless, fits this description very well.
2. According to Steve from Breadcetera, at the beginning it should look like lumpy oatmeal: http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=58