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unfailed pizza
Wednesday, August 9 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I took the dogs with me when I drove out to the Lowes on 9W. I needed a bigger circuit breaker for the new induction stove top and a proper junction box to make a connection in the island (which, surprisingly, there were none of in my copious stores of eletrical supplies). While I was at Lowes, I also bought more spray foam and foam-compatible adhesive, as I'm running through that stuff quickly in my cabin foundation insulation project. I hadn't cooked a meal in awhile, and was also doing a little mental menu planning, and this had me going by myself to Adams Fairacre Farms by myself (something I almost never do) to get things like crimini mushrooms in a bag (to avoid all the packaging of Hannaford mushrooms) as well as things I thought I might need to make a pizza.
Back home in Hurley, I quickly got the big 50 amp circuit breaker installed for the cooktop and then redid the improvised wiring in the island, also sealing up all the holes into the subfloor while I was at it (to keep mice from coming up into the island). Mice are crafty little fuckers and will do things like climb up an electrical cable and chew away at its insulation until there is enough space to crawl through a hole made for that cable to get through. So I used Gorilla Glue mixed with cayenne pepper to secure a piece of wood I was using to plug that five-inch circular hole I'd cut into the subfloor.
I found a recipe online for pizza dough, but it must've been for a different kind of flour than the unbleached white flour I was using, because the dough ended up being a mess of stickiness. When Gretchen came home, I said the dough was making me feel like a failure. Not only was it super-sticky, but now it was also lumpy because I'd used the new induction stove to heat it at a low setting to activate the yeast, and this had instead dried out the dough excessively and irregularly along the bottom of the dish it was in. Gretchen said that this wasn't a problem; it just needed more flour. And the she spent some time kneading that flour in. Later it turned out we had no good pizza cheese, so we ended up using little blobs of a Miyoko's nut cheese and some little pieces of Violife slices as well as dollops of pesto. This was in addition to mushrooms and onions. It looked great when we were done, but my hopes weren't high. Fortunately, it ended up being delicious, even the crust. We ate it while watching an Australian comedy show about a socially-inept lawyer called Fisk., which was pretty good. Then Gretchen went off to see Carlos Santana, Don Byron (who we actually know), and other musicians pay tribute to Miles Davis at the Bardavon. Meanwhile I stayed home and, after taking another gratuitous bath, watched an old episode of PBS's Frontline from the early 90s entitled Prisoners of Silence on the subject of Facilitated Communication, having had my interest in that subject renewed by my sister in-law's practice of a new form of it. I must've watched this same episode many years ago back when it first came out (that's probably how I knew to look for it), because I remember a lot of the details, including the increasingly-feeble defences of Facilitated Communication by Douglas Biklen, the guy who was its original champion in the United States. It was obviously hard to argue with the results of the double-blind studies of Facilitated Communication demonstrated in this episode (where Facilitated Communication was shown to never produce information known only to the facilitated), but Biklen tried. Another amusing thing about this documentary from from 30 years ago was its casual use of terms like "retarded" and "mentally retarded," which at the time were considered technical terms that carried no particular baggage in polite company. (Those terms were already being used a playground taunts, though, so it was only a matter of time before they came to be viewed as offensive.)
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