A friend of mine went whole-hog with the pizza post the other day, and sent me his variation on the theme. It’s long, so I’m going to put it after the jump.

Dough

I used the dough recipe from this site: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pizza

Follow the instructions exactly. The hardest part is actually rolling out the dough to get it ‘pizza’ shaped. Mine ended up all rectangulovoid.

Also, pay attention to where she says to use baking paper. That stuff is a lifesaver.

Sauce

This was mostly improvised. This was also the longest bit.

• 2 cans diced tomatoes (14oz) – Spiced garlic flavoring (no idea what this was.. just get any flavor that looks good)
• 1 can diced tomato – Regular/no flavor (this was to kill the over-zealous use of vinegar so you may not need it)
• A BIT of red wine vinegar (or just red wine)
• a teaspoon of dried basil
• a teaspoon of dried oregano
• salt
• a bit of butter
• 4 cloves (you will want more probably) garlic, crushed and chopped)
• half a big white onion, diced

Fry up the onions and garlic with the butter on medium-hot. When browned, add the flavored tomato cans. After it simmers for a bit add a bit of vinegar (or red wine) and let that evaporate. Throw in the basil and oregano and stir it up. Keep it on medium heat for a while (10-15m) and keep stirring every once in a while.

At this point, start tasting it. Ideally, it should have a bit of sour-sharpness, while being tasty. You may need to add salt or more vinegar/wine. If it’s too vinegary/winey, add another can of tomatoes. It doesn’t hurt, you just end up with more sauce (makes great pasta sauce too).

When it tastes ‘done’, take it off the heat and, when it’s cool enough, puree the whole thing into a proper sauce.

When you add it to the dough, a couple of tablespoons is all you need (might even be too much). You just need a thin covering on the dough, as this dough is designed to be super thin, and too much sauce will just make it gooey.

Toppings

This part is of course up to you, but these are the toppings I made for the two pizzas. Both were great.

1) Margherita

• 1 medium sized tomato
• 1 buffalo mozzarella ball.

This one was super standard. Cut the tomato and the cheese into rings. Layer on the dough, sauce, then tomatoes and mozzarella on top. Get as much coverage as you can with the cheese, as it will melt, but not as much as you’d like.

2) Vegetarian

I had fun with this one.

• 2 medium sized sweet peppers (capsicum)
• a bunch of fresh mushrooms
• 3 (you will want more) cloves of garlic
• some salt and basil (dry) to taste
• some olive oil
• some butter
• grated mozzarella cheese (not buffalo)

First, the peppers. Chop them up into pizza-sized chunks and put them on a big piece of tin foil. Drizzle with some olive oil and stick them in the oven (I had it at 200C) for about 10-15 minutes (until they start blackening). In a frying pan, get the butter hot and fry up the garlic (smashed then chopped). When browned, throw in the mushrooms and swish them around so they get buttery and garlicky. After a while, toss in some salt and the dried basil. Cook them up until they taste done.

Put some sauce on the dough and then toss on the mushrooms and peppers (if you made too much, awesome.. they make great sandwiches or pasta topping later) and then cover generously with the grated cheese.

Baking

Simply put, bake at silly temperature (I had it at the highest my oven would go : 530 F) for a few minutes.. Neither pizza took longer than 8 minutes. Just keep an eye on the crust of the dough; it should start browning. The cheese will also get melty (buffalo) or browny (normal).

I’m getting really sick of the New American Conservative. The ones who rails on the Democrats and the Obama Administration about the need to stop wasteful spending, but scream bloody-fucking-murder if the Democrats don’t extend a massive tax cut. The ones who tell us they want a smaller, more efficient government that doesn’t tell it’s constituents what kind of health care they need to have or what food is safe to eat, but still want to tell you who you can marry and who you can take into your bedroom. Either stick to your principals or get some new ones – using the old ones in name when you don’t really follow them doesn’t work.

All that said, I don’t think the Democrats are angels with the wisdom and vision of the Philosopher Kings either. Their inability to make a decision – even when they have an unassailable super-majority – is criminal. They almost never think about the repercussions of their actions.

(Spitzer, Emanuel, Blagojevich, Edwards). To make matters worse, their conflicting goals of strong labor unions and a strong middle class don’t work when the reality is that BMW can build cars in South Carolina for half the hourly wage than it takes GM to build a car in Detroit.

In the process of setting up OpenID on this blog, I broke the authentication used by the iPhone WordPress app. I already reset the password on the account and verified that I can log in with a regular web browser (bypassing the OpenID process), but the iPhone app still balks. When I get some more time, I’ll figure out what I broke and write it up here.

When you have a bunch of pictures and posts lined up – and you throw your back out and forget all about posting them? [sigh] Still catching up from the weekend, now that I’m up and about again.

I’ve finally gotten my photoblog listed on coolphotoblogs.com, and I’ve updated my listing on photoblogs.com. This should help somewhat in getting the word out about my site. Are there other places that are useful for posting your blog to, short of spamming your facebook/twitter/whatever feeds with every post you make?

I love watching the cost of storage drop. The last time I was buying a lot of disk for my home file server, in the spring of 2008, 750 GB drives were $110.00 on deep discount. The drives I purchased, along with a moderate white-box fileserver, cost me around $900 USD – or around $0.29/GB all told.

Now 2TB drives are under $100 USD each. I suspect prices will fall again soon, as Seagate has enough of their 3TB drives to cram them into all kinds of SOHO NAS devices. The most recent of these is a $1875.00 USD, 12TB, 4 bay array that serves as a drop in system for most moderate users. Configured as a RAID5 array (so there is protection from a drive failure), the price is about $0.20/GB.

Now, $1875 would go a long way towards building a home file server, running OpenSolaris or OpenFiler, or whatever you like. Some quick checking on NewEgg will build you a file server with an 80 GB boot drive, a main array with the same 9 useable terabytes of space (7 x 1.5 TB drives, one for parity), 16 GB of RAM, two gigabit NICs, the case to put everything in and a power supply able to run it. While it will take a much longer time to bring up a home-brew file server, you get a lot more bang for your buck. Want to run iSCSI? NFS? A LAMP stack? Firefly (MT-DAAPd)? It’s all there, ready for you to go to town on. Do you want to setup an archive system? Or perhaps a squid proxy? If you use ZFS, on top of all of this, you get a data integrity promise from the ability to scrub every block of data and verify that it is what you wrote months or years ago.

(To be fair, I would probably spring to spend slightly more to get redundant boot drives, and I would probably configure the array with two parity drives. This way, any two drives could fail before I had to worry about data loss, and would give me time to rebuild the failed array member. This still gives me 7.5 TB of useable space for around $0.24/GB.)

There’s something about pizza that really warms my heart. A few years ago, I read an amazing article that Jeff Verasano wrote about how to really make pizza from scratch, and it made me want to go out in my backyard and build a wood-fired bread oven and start making really good pizza. You know, the kind that makes New York the pizza capitol of the country. Sorry, Chicago… deep dish doesn’t hold a candle to good New York pizza.

The trouble is I already have a couple of hobbies, and a toddler. I don’t have the time to get truly obsessive about pizza, which seems to be required to follow Jeff’s instructions. Then, today, I see a post on food loves writing, which seems a lot less crazy, and a lot easier to do in my free time. We’ll see what happens.