Thursday, October 26, 2006

Random Thursday

In stitching news I'm working on HOHRH. Might have an update in the near future.

Our new favorite family meal is homemade pizza. I do not enjoy cooking at all but thanks to the discovery of Publix bakery's pizza dough, making pizza is now a pleasureable experience. I buy two bags of dough, bring them home, roll them out, and man does this dough roll out beautifully, and viola, homemade pizza pie. Below you see a traditional round pizza topped with fresh 'shrooms, pepperoni and Italian sausage:
Piping hot from the oven:
Below you can see a rectanglish pizza, 1/2 pepperoni and 1/2 pepperoni and 'shrooms.
And hot from the oven:
I'm not one of those people that gets some spiritual pleasure from cooking. I wish I did but making homemade pizza has become almost therapeutic for me. I'm working on my own pizza dough recipe but every time I try my own dough, everyone complains. At $1.65 a bag Publix dough is a steal and I still get the pleasure of rolling it out, shaping it the way I want, and the ever fun punching it down. We prefer this pizza to carry out. That's a shocker. Everyone in this family prefers food on the outside but this pizza, it's now our favorite meal.

Earlier this year after a post from Crazy Aunt Purl the spousal unit and I started pondering the possibility of growing square watermelons. Due to drought and not having a clue about what we were doing, we harvested nary a watermelon. The little guy you see pictured below was our last chance at a square watermelon for this year and he cracked. This happened to a lot of our watermelons and we don't know why. I plan to research this and see if I can avoid this problem next summer. Do watermelons often explode like this?
While driving down the highway the other day I saw a sign that said, "Tomatoes". The local miracle farmer is harvesting his second round of tomatoes, mine are still green. I don't see them moving beyond this point as we barely reach 70 degrees during the day and nights are in the 40s. He must have had a bit of a head start on his second tomato crop. I have two tomato plants and four tomatoes between them. I would really love to see one more red tomato before we get our first frost.
This was the sky over my neighbor's house yesterday. It reminded me of waves breaking on the shore.

4 comments:

Anna van Schurman said...

If you bring your tomatoes inside, they'll probably turn red. We did this for our last batch of cherry tomatoes, and they're good eatin'. The dude said his grandfather in the wilds of Northern Scotland used to ripen his tomatoes in a drawer. Go figure.

Myself, I just discovered it was the squirrels, not the rabbits, that kept taking one bite out of our tomatoes. One bite! At least eat the whole tomato! (We grew many large tomatoes and harvested two between the splitting and the squirrels.)

Anonymous said...

That pizza looks soooooo much yummier than the ones we got from Pizza Hut this week!!!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Melissa, pick the tomatoes and let them ripen inside. Thye should and if they don't well you would have lost them to the forst anyway. As for the watermelon, water causes them to burst. You have to pick them as soon as they get good and green. A little water then sun and they're exploding!

Meari said...

The pizza looks yummy. I love cooking, esp trying new recipes. It's been a switch in the last few years -- prior to that I didn't enjoy cooking at all, because I didn't think I was good at it. LOL

Your watermelon looks like it's laughing at you! Only about a dozen of my tomatoes turned red this year. I had a big box of green ones. I ended up making green salsa -- canned it. I figured they'd make good Christmas gifts for the family.