Crazy Pizza People (Chow)

Experimenting with some pizza of our own today, NDM ran across a pizza website whose owner's dedication to his food not only magnificently exceeds my own but perhaps crosses over into the realm of mania. This is Jeff Varasano's take on pizza. Jeff has defeated his oven's safety features so he can use the cleaning cycle to bake his pizza at well over 500 degrees.

He's making the most spare type of Neapolitan pizza margherita, so his focus is quite different from my own. He doesn't even make a sauce, while for me, while I like a good crust, it is all about the sauce. I'm cooking one now:

1. I browned 6 roughly chopped cloves of garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil on high heat.
2. I threw in about two tablespoons of spicy Italian peppers and crushed dried bird peppers.
3. Then, I splashed in maybe a cup and a half of a Shiraz I had open and reduced it with 3 large bay leaves.
4. We picked a tray full of fresh tomatoes (These are an unknown small red hybrid which EJB gave us the seeds for several years ago -- NDM grew them this year for the first time as a lark. They are excellent.) that I diced and threw in. They're still simmering, mostly filling a dutch oven.
5. I also threw in a fair does of basil, oregano, and freshly ground black pepper along with a dash of chili powder to stew with the tomatoes.

By the time we're ready to sauce the pizza, this will have cooked down to an incredibly rich and potent red sauce.

Of course for the wife it is all about the genuine buffalo mozzarella. Luckily I can live with her mozzarella fixation if she can live with my spicy sauce fixation.

Updated...
So here are the results!

EggMcNDM Breakfast (Chow)

This is one of my favorite uses of the orange heirloom tomatoes EJB seeded with us. Sure, it looks a bit like McDonald's fast food. But it is sooo yummy. The thick orange wedge under the egg is the sweet, mild, succulent tomato. Because of EJB's little European escapade this past year, I'm not going to be having many breakfasts like this.

Melting over open-face sandwiches is one of only two uses American cheese is put to in our household, the other being scrambled eggs (since it completely incorporates without separation).

Missouri Botanical Garden (Recommendation)

We visited the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis this weekend with EJB, his mother, and his daughter. It was a nice change of pace from the excellent Chicago Botanic Garden, and even held up acceptably to EJB's mother's marvelous private garden that I just posted about.
A non-vegetal highlight was a beautiful hanging Chihuly in the visitor's center at the garden's entrance.
In the line of plants, I really liked the asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus 'Myersii')...
The Peruvian golden shrimp plant (Pachystachys lutea), which I'd never seen before...
The king's spear asphodel (Asphodeline lutea), which had neat little fruits that yield a yellow dye...
This dramatic Amazonian elephant's ear (Alocasia x amazonica)...
A wonderful dense stand of bamboo... I really need to get some bamboo for our yard, but it is so expensive!
There were also many wonderful stones in the Chinese garden. The most dramatic were the Taihu stones. I'm not sure if these limestones always come from Lake Taihu, or just get that name because of their prevalence in that area. Maybe one day we'll get one of our own -- after we've got a nice thicket of bamboo going, of course...
I'm not sure what kind of stone this aggregate is. Maybe CRB will chime in with an answer? It is natural, but does share a lot of characteristics with concrete.
There was a really nice bridge in the Chinese garden...
The bridge to an island in the Japanese garden was also very picturesque, but closed to the public.
The waters around these gardens were full of koi and other carp. These were some of the largest such fish I have seen anywhere, and must be very old.

One Garden To Rule Them All

On the way back from our weekend trip, we stopped at EJB's mother's house. His mom has the most extraordinary private garden I have ever seen; these few pictures totally fail to do it justice.
There are lots of smaller plantings from the street front up to her house. Then her huge back yard is so riotous with interesting colors, textures, elevations, and smells that you just don't know which way to go to further appreciate its beauty.
One of the plants I enjoyed the most in her yard was this excellent ornamental asparagus, leaning a little more than usual due to our recent high winds.
She even has a few smaller accent gardens with various succulents. Many of those pictured here are in home-cast cement troughs.
There is even an old mulberry tree. Here we witness EJB's inevitable tree climbing ritual (although I shrunk the picture down so much that he just looks like some particularly strange branches). Unwilling to play the chump and pick fruit by hand, he's placed a tarp from his trunk under the tree and is jumping up and down to dislodge the mulberries. A quick spritz and it is time to eat!

Gojira-no-BIIRU

Damn, I wish I knew where to get these, both JTC & EJB need one.

Chew On Gumboy (Reblog)

I am sometimes nostalgic for old-timey arcade games, and MAME doesn't really satisfy me -- even EJB's cool MAME cabinet, were I to have convenient access to it. Which I weren't. I'd like some modern gloss on top of solid game play (as opposed to modern gloss on top of modern gloss).

A while ago I stumbled upon Gish, a physics-based PC game where you control a ball of tar by adjusting your stickiness and viscosity. To me, this is the new-tech version of the old-tech arcade joy. Which, however, is not why I'm writing this reblog...

I've just run into a clear descendant of Gish, Gumboy Crazy Adventures. To me, this promises sentimental arcade pleasures in a hip, fancy package. At least EJB may like it.

Fish Cam (Reblog)

Perhaps this fish-cam is a potential pre-Quetico gift for EJB's fisherman-brother? It looks pretty cool, but not clear on U.S. availability. Something similar is available in the U.K. I can imagine his cries of outrage already...

The How Many Legislators Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb Act (Reblog)

EJB brought this to my attention. California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-LA) is planning on introducing a bill to ban incandescent lights in favor of compact fluorescents as an energy-saving measure. The number being thrown around is a 75% reduction in energy usage, which maps to the industry-standard tables of incandescent wattage (i.e. 60W) to compact fluorescent wattage (i.e. 15W).

While EJB might be sickened by fluorescent light, I don't have as much of a problem with the light from the compacts, which tends not to have human-noticeable cycling to make you nauseous. However, the printed equivalencies certainly don't make sense to me; a "150W equivalent" compact fluorescent is just beginning to get into the ballpark of my perceived brightness for a standard 100W incandescent bulb. Even so, there is still clearly a savings there, and in fact I'm using compact fluorescents for about a quarter of my household's bulbs right now.

Many people have complained about fluorescent light. Headache, eyestrain, fatigue, inability to concentrate, irritability (or as we know it, EJB syndrome), cutaneous light sensitivity... There is a discussion on fluorescent light at the James Randi Educational Foundation. In general, I think it all boils down to incomplete spectrum and flickering -- neither of which are significant issues with modern compact fluorescents.

EJB -- are your problems worse in Germany than with the CFLs we get in the States? You've never complained about my kitchen lighting, but your exposure could be too limited or you may just be too polite :-) Perhaps there is a different standard manufacturing process for CFL in Europe with more efficient but less stable ballasts.

Über Alles

A reader in Germany writes:

---

I hate you [sic] blog software. It auto-detects the IP I am coming from and then auto-translates everything to German. It gives me no options to change this. Here is an example:

KRM

• Standort: Chicagoland : IL : Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika

Über mich

Another Luddite who has spent the best years of his life tilling the ol' computer fields. In his 'crepitude, his solace is the ancient art of the blog.

Blogs

	Blog-Name	Teammitglieder
	Itty Bitty Kitty Committee

---

I don't know about you, but I find this to be totally awesome. (Sorry EJB!)