Life Skills

Baking Steel and Pizza Stone Side by Side

Baking is so much fun. There’s always something new to try, plus you get to eat the results (well, unless they’re too burnt–we’ve all been there). On top of that, there are lots of different cool tools. I’ve talked about some of these before, but there are two additional ones that happily are in our kitchen: a pizza stone and a baking steel.

A Lifetime of Pizza

Why are those two tools in our kitchen? It’s all in a name: Pizza.

Like most other kids, I loved pizza growing up. Back then, it was simple: Your Mom buys the Chef Boyardee pizza box from the store and you follow the instructions. The big tools you need are really just a bowl to mix up the ingredients, some oil, and a round baking pan to put the pizza on. Some minutes later, the pizza comes out.

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Basket with food for husband. Popcorn, chips, yogurt, granola bars, root beer, Izze, and cashews.

There comes a time every so often when a woman just needs to get away. Sometimes it is business, but other times it can be for fun.  Taking some time for yourself to be whole, reflect, and just relax are important. They are what help to make you a better mom. I had the opportunity to do this for a weekend. It was amazing!

Now onto the scary part, or for me it is scary: Leaving your family and just going.  Here’s the thing. I have an amazing husband, who could keep things running well without me, but I still sometimes feel guilty about leaving.  I have all these worries. I decided though before I left this time, I would step into teacher mode for a moment. I never left my students without a lesson plan or list of things they could do while I was gone.  So why would I leave the little people and the wonderful husband with nothing and say, “Wing it, good luck and I will be back Sunday.” I could, and they would be just fine, but I would worry.

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A slice of Boston Cream Pie

About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Boston Cream Pie, is from the The Cook’s Illustrated baking book.

Boston cream pie is, when done well, truly incredible. The interesting thing is that, at least in the restaurants we go to, it’s not served much anymore. Similar to the previous project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, I last had one while traveling; in this case, on the east coast. Go figure–Boston cream pie is more common around Boston.

If you’ve never had a Boston cream pie, you can see the pictures in this post, but the general idea is this: Cake layer on the bottom. A cream layer in the middle. Another cake layer on top of that. All of this is capped off with a chocolate layer that surrounds the top cake layer and drips down the sides. So, yes, with all those layers you don’t need a large piece to get a lot of dessert.

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Austerity Month A locked up bag with a sign saying "Your Money. Do not open til next month!"

Money can be a great thing to have, and a terrible thing to be without. I’ve known people who are great at managing it even when barely making ends meet, and people who struggle financially even though they’re making six figures. Today’s post about having an austerity month is definitely more for the latter group–so if you’re struggling just to pay the bills, take a breath, and just take whatever you can out of this.

There have been multiple articles on how money doesn’t really buy happiness, at least once you get past a certain point. A 2010 article from Time indicated that your day-to-day happiness doesn’t increase once you make more than $75,000. A more recent article from Money magazine (which references the previous one) looked internationally, and found that it took up to $95,000 for those of us in North America to be happy, or $105,000 if you include long-term goals and other metrics.

Getting Personal

For us, the idea that we’re able to go out and buy a superyacht or a mansion to live in is ridiculous. Our bank accounts are far below that threshold. We are at a place, however, where we can fulfill our needs and quite a few of our wants. The trick is in those “wants”, though–it’s very easy to spend a lot of money on new toys (my weak spot), caffeine-based drinks (the wife’s), or myriad other things that you believe will bring more happiness into your life but really don’t.

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Baltimore Berger Cookies Closeup

About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, is from King Arthur Flour. You can find the recipe here.

I’ve had to travel sometimes as part of my job. When I was a contractor for a systems integrator, this meant traveling to different places in the U.S. Moving into the non-contractor world, the rare travel situations have been to other countries.

No matter how good or bad a trip to another country is, the food experiences are always interesting. Lots of people rave about incredible dinners, but on a trip to Finland a couple of years ago I enjoyed breakfast far more. The overall amount, variety, and quality of food was excellent, but one little item became a favorite morning treat. It was a crisp cookie which had a fairly basic dough flavor, but was half dipped in chocolate. The crunch of it, the smooth chocolate taste, were a nice little sugar rush to wake my jetlagged behind up.

I felt weird doing it, but I took a picture of one of those cookies. I was unable to find anything about it online once I got back, and I couldn’t find any recipe that really looked like it. That is, until King Arthur Flour published in their magazine Sift about favorite foods in different states. And lo and behold–Baltimore had something called a Berger cookie that looked darned close to what I ate in Finland. Of course, that meant I had to make it to see if it actually was similar.

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Three styles of New York Cheese Pizza

I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.

Preparation

We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).

Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:

New York Cheese Pizza Doughballs
Doughballs, Fresh from the Fridge!

The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender:

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Children's Books for bedtime routine: Bedtime routine items include pjs, books, toothbrush, and stuffed animal

When we first brought our oldest son home, we did not have any routines established. It took us a while to come out of the fog of newborn life. As we wanted to establish routines for our family, especially at bedtime, we asked ourselves what we wanted that to look like. Then we looked to children books, to help set up these simple but powerful routines for our family.

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The ball has dropped and people are excited about the new year. Social media is inundated with posts for a healthier and better you, and one of the big topics for January is organization. I wish the word “organization” conjured up positive mental images in my head, of a perfectly organized home or the newest organization item I was adding to our home. However, organization for me is a word of anger, resentment, frustration — a trigger word if you will. While for anyone else it is simply a word, for me it is a strong word, and it has been wrecking my life.

BACKGROUND

How did I get here? Why is this such a strong negative word for me? Here’s the root of my problem: I am a creative person who wants to be organized, who at times keeps up the appearance of being organized (especially as a teacher and now as a mom), who wants organized structures in place, but is terrible at follow-through. For example, when I was little my mom would ask me to clean my room.  I couldn’t just do a clean sweep of the room though; I had to go through and turn out drawers and “organize” everything into groups or parts. It would take forever. But the problem was that two days later, after I had “organized” everything, I would have turned it into a total disaster.

As a student, I wasn’t really organized at school either. I would find myself many times taking a binder and reorganizing it, because I had papers stuffed everywhere.

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Molten Cake OK

RECENT PROJECT

This week’s project was again from the Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book (p. 334, to be exact).  Amongst the many baking projects that I haven’t yet honed my skills on, molten chocolate cakes (or Fallen Chocolate Cakes, as the book calls them) are at the top of my list.  Last time I made them they were basically a cake texture, with a little dollop of something that was still kind of a cake texture in the middle.  Not exactly appetizing.  So this was a redemption bake for me.

The first part of the process went well, meaning I didn’t break the glass bowl that I stacked on top of a pot of water to rig up a double boiler.  I’ve never tried that approach before, and

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