Pizza number 7 of Pizza Summer! To recap for new people, I'm spending the summer making a "healthy" pizza recipe over and over, so that I can get good at making it for lunches in the future whenever I want. By "healthy," I mean the pizza has no cheese, no butter, no added salt or sugar, is made from 100% whole-wheat flour, and is covered in an extra-healthy pesto made of spinach instead of basil, avocado instead of cheese, and roasted chickpeas instead of pine nuts. To make the special whole-wheat dough, I consolidated and averaged out the top four or five recipes when Googling the subject; as you can see in this close-up photo, I'm getting really great gluten bubbles all the way through the length of my pizza dough, even in the paper-thin center, so don't be afraid to bake with much healthier whole-wheat flour! (I use just the generic Whole Foods brand.) This week topped with olives, cherry tomatoes, and prosciutto (i.e. "fancy ham"), and with truffle oil brushed on the crusts immediately after it comes out of the oven. Perfecto, as the Italianos say-o.

Greetings from Pizza Summer! The whole reason I'm doing Pizza Summer is to teach myself how to make "healthy" pizzas for lunch, by which I mean made with 100% "artisan" whole wheat dough, no cheese, no butter, no added salt, and an extra-healthy version of pesto for its base (featuring spinach instead of basil, avocado instead of cheese, and roasted chickpeas instead of nuts). This is pizza #5 of the summer, which this week will all feature olives, tomatoes, prosciutto (aka "fancy ham"), and truffle oil brushed on the crusts, which profoundly improves both their flavor and texture. (Turns out you mostly love pizza crust because it's slathered in butter and salt.) I make four pizza doughs at once on Sundays, along with four servings of pesto, so each lunch itself typically only takes ten minutes to prepare and bake (once you let the dough rise to room temperature, that is, which takes all morning). Very happy with how this routine is going so far, so we'll see how Pizza Summer continues as the months pass.

Now that I've gotten good at basic artisan bread, I've decided this summer to teach myself and then get good at making healthy pizza. By "healthy," I mean that the crust is made of 100% whole wheat flour; I put no cheese on it; and the pesto I use for the sauce is made of spinach instead of basil, avocado instead of cheese, and roasted chickpeas instead of nuts (which I can no longer eat because of having diverticulosis). My housemate and I each made one here at the co-op on this Saturday night, and I'm relieved and delighted to report that the results are freaking AMAZING, all the best parts of a pizza-eating experience but without the greasiness, bloating, need to take a nap a half-hour later, etc. I can make four pies of dough at once and then keep the rest in the fridge, then each pie itself cooks on a pizza steel at 500 degrees for only six minutes, so this SHOULD be easy to prep on a Sunday to then be able to quickly cook each day at lunch (which was the point of learning this in the first place). The healthiness of the ingredients makes me feel not even the slightest bit guilty about that at all. Very excited that this didn't come out mediocre in taste!

I recently read this brand-new book called "3 Doughs 60 Recipes," which does as the title promises, teaches you three basic types of dough and then shows you all kinds of different things you can make with them. I've been testing it out the last couple of weeks, and so far it's turning out to be true! Here's my first attempt at sliceable sandwich bread baked in a traditional loaf pan, which came out great. The main difference between this and the "focaccia/artisan boule" dough style is that this has milk and butter to make it a bit softer, and honey to make it a bit sweeter (or plant milk, margarine, and agave syrup here in our vegan-friendly co-op). Came out great; we all love it! According to the book, you can also make perfect English muffins with this dough type, fluffy dinner rolls, and diner-quality hamburger and hot dog buns, so I'll be trying all of these soon too. (For what it's worth, dough type #3 of the book is pizza dough, which you can also use to make flatbread and bread sticks.)

The most visually impressive project I've ever worked on as a book editor has just arrived! This is from a guy in his seventies who's spent the last 50 years working in the field of home audio, a groundbreaking pioneer who helped invent some of the technical innovations now found in almost all home stereos, and he decided here at the end of this career to put together an exhaustive guide to everything he's learned over the last half-century. He really wanted to do it right, as hardback books with a slipcase to hold them all; so when he discovered that Amazon doesn't offer these options, he went out and contracted with a traditional printing press to make them, even knowing beforehand that few people will buy this $400 "prestige edition." I think they look gorgeous, and I'm super proud to have my name associated with them. A really nice highlight of being a freelance book editor, to have a chance to work on something so substantial like this.

We're throwing a big dinner party here at the co-op on Friday, in gratitude to a sister co-op here in Chicago's Hyde Park that went above and beyond with help while our entire kitchen had to be gutted and rebuilt from scratch last fall, a process that lasted four months. My contribution to the 35-person dinner is going to be four loaves of the boule-style "house bread" I make for my housemates on a regular basis, and today I finished up the two that will be made out of 100% artisan whole wheat four. (Chilling tonight in the fridge is the dough for the two Rustic French [aka "white"] loaves I'm baking tomorrow morning; I've cut the process into two days, so that I can always be done by lunchtime and be out of the way of the person cooking dinner around here that night.) I've been getting really amazing stencil results lately with the cocoa powder, so I used that for both loaves this time, instead of doing one in white with rice flour; I'll stencil both white loaves with cocoa powder too, tomorrow's with the two-tree co-op logo stencil I made myself last month out of mylar book-jacket plastic. It's been a trying time in my personal life recently, and one sacrifice has been bread making, so it's nice this week to have an excuse to put aside the extra time to get a bunch of loaves kicked out. I find it a contemplative and rewarding process, especially when having something so delightful to share afterwards.

Today's bread was just one loaf of whole wheat, just for me (I'll make two loaves of white for my housemates tomorrow), so I thought I'd try something experimental and sprinkle cocoa powder over an entire half of this loaf before baking, hoping for (and succeeding at) a look like half the loaf is stained dark brown and then gently pixelates into normal bread color by the middle, in the style of one of those hipsters who has a giant tattoo that consists of nothing but solid black. It looked great in real life, but unfortunately you're not seeing it that clearly in this photo, mostly because I also wanted to show off the impressive lip I got by scoring it with my curved lame (lah-MAY). To remind you, this is made with "artisan" white-berry wheat, which is lighter and more delicate, which is how you can get whole-wheat loaves with the fluffiness and gluten strands of processed white. I'm still cranking out three to six loaves every single week this winter, and am still really enjoying it!

One of my New Year's resolutions is to start cooking all my lunches at home, and try to break my habit of going out to a coffeehouse for lunch every day, which nicely aligns with my doctor's orders to get a lot more spinach in my diet (for antioxidant reasons) and protein (because I'm a male over 50). So far this winter, I've been trying to make that easier by making a big batch of soup once a week, which I can then have over the next four or five lunches. This week it's a Thai asparagus soup, also featuring lemongrass, ginger, onion, coconut milk, and lemon juice. (Not listed but added anyway, four cups of spinach and a package of tofu, for the reasons cited above.) This will eventually get pureed and look like a hot green smoothie, so I thought I'd take a picture of it now while it's still in its attractive raw-ingredient stage.

Here is the one and only "serious" #AI #image I've ever generated, or I guess I should say the one and only AI image I've generated for a serious purpose, in this case to use as the header image at my freelancing website (because I'm hanging my FREE LANCE, see, since I'm a FREELANCER, see, GET IT?!). Everything else I've done with AI has just been fucking around for my own amusement, which is why I don't feel very guilty about playing with it, even though I'm somewhat hypocritically against anyone using writing-style AI bots. But this year I'm thinking of finally getting a paid subscription to the 800-pound-gorilla AI image generator, Midjourney; and if I'm going to pay money to use an AI bot, I won't be shy about using it for commercial purposes if that ends up ever being something of use to me, for example this new banner for my freelancing website, which I consider not a terribly outrageous use of AI. (My goal, as always, was to make something very photorealistic and subdued in its outrageousness.) I'm making up my ethics about AI imaging as we speak, based on these kinds of experiments, so we'll see how things progress this winter and spring.

M. (right) ran into me at in the kitchen at 8:30 this morning; I had just started today's artisan bread, while she was off to her retail wage-slave job at one of the many bookstores here in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago where we live. She sighed. "I hate days like today when I'm working eight hours, because you're always done with the bread in the early afternoon, and it's all eaten up by the time I get home."

So I hid it in my room until 6 pm, and we were able to cut into it right when M. got home. She in turn had a bag full of sandwiches that were going to expire tomorrow, bowls of soba noodles, and plastic cups full of melon pieces. Meanwhile, our other housemate L. got home from culinary school, where it's bread week and she hates it, because she's being forced to learn a bunch of fussy stuff like baguettes and croissants. So she joined us too, and we have a lovely little impromptu dinner, one of the really nice things about living in a co-op, these opportunities to stumble into these small social moments where you simply have fun while spending time with people. A nice Wednesday evening around here.

My latest batch of artisan whole-wheat bread features my first homemade stencil! This is a common logo used by co-ops like the one I live in here in Chicago, originally created in 1922 by the National Cooperative Business Association. As always, I used rice flour for one stencil and cocoa powder for the other. As you can see, what I've been learning this month is that cocoa powder tends to work much better, because it dissolves in the water I spritz on top of the dough right before baking, becoming almost like ink, while the rice flour sits on top of the water without dissolving, which means it gets all smeared from the slightest touch. I might just try regular wheat flour next time to see if it does better. These loaves were made with 100% "artisan" whole wheat flour, created out of white-berry wheat which is more delicate than the red-berry wheat found in most grocery stores, which is how I can still get lots of oven spring and gluten bubbles out of what's traditionally been known as a really dense and chewy type of bread.

We have a one-year-old in the co-op these days, and they're fascinated by pretty much everything within viewing distance...or to be more specific, they're obsessively fascinated with every thing around them for exactly two minutes apiece. Here, the two minutes they were obsessed with the on/off cord of our kitchen's ceiling fan, being supported and encouraged by their dad.

About ten loaves in now since the first time I tried it, my bread stenciling game is getting quite good! The process itself isn't difficult -- simply wet the top of your dough with a spritzer, lay on the stencil, then sprinkle either rice flour (white) or cocoa powder (brown) over it -- it's getting the sprinkling exactly right that's the challenge. (A bit too little and the powder disappears because of the water; a bit too much and it becomes a blurry mess.) I have four stencils and am already getting bored with them, so I think another purchase is in the cards soon, plus this week I'm going to try making my own stencil (featuring the "two trees" logo commonly used by co-ops) out of the mylar I usually use to wrap rare books.

#bread #breadmaking #boule #french #white #rustic #artisan #stencil #riceFlour #cocoaPowder

Here's the latest loaf of homemade bread this winter, smaller and denser than normal for two reasons -- first, because it's cold as hell here in Chicago right now, including in the kitchen of our co-op's ancient 125-year-old building; and second, because it's 50% whole wheat flour, another 25% rye (and 25% white to round it out). That said, the tighter and dryer dough responded well to my curved lame (lah-MAY), and here I got that fabled lip crust you're always looking for in your $7 artisanal loaves at the farmer's market and on Instagram. Another semi-blurry stenciling using rice flour, but it's at least enough that you can see the pattern!

#bread #breadmaking #wholeWheat #rye #white #rustic #artisanal #home #baking #stencil #riceFlour #lip #lame

Here at the Chicago co-op where I live, we do not actually do a group dinner on Wednesday nights, but rather all three co-ops in our umbrella here in the Hyde Park neighborhood get together for a GIGANTIC group dinner, hosted at a different house each week. But many people don't go to these mega-group dinners (they're pretty crowded and chaotic), so Wednesday evenings are known around here for everyone cooking their main project of the week, whether that's a special dessert, prepping for next week's lunches, etc. Here, our resident one-year-old helping their mom make chocolate chip cookies; or perhaps more precisely, destroying their mom's efforts to make chocolate chip cookies.

I took this for the purposes of documenting our co-op's dining room space for a specialist in sound-dampening foam who's going to offer us some advice; but then I realized it's a pretty good casual image of what it's like to be in this main hangout space of our five-story, 20-bedroom building, a cluttered and funky space but no more so than any kitchen here in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago where I live. Late mornings and early afternoons are often like what you're seeing here, a tiny crowd of just one, two or three, work-from-homers or people cooking/baking that day; the people swell enough to fill one of those tables during breakfasts and lunches (especially now with a one-year-old in the house); all three tables are filled for dinner; then it dips slightly to one to two tables during the evening, for things like gaming, drinking, or conversing. It's pretty well set up to be our main social hangout space of the 32-room house (once you count the six bathrooms and all the common rooms), a very illuminating snapshot I think of what the day-to-day small pleasures of co-op life is all about.

Got unexpectedly called back to St. Louis today to deal with another eldercare crisis, which unfortunately has become a regular part of my life. The bleak winter view from the Amtrak mirrors my emotions today.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to take a lot more black-and-white character portraits (which I adjust in the "Dramatic Black & White" phone app), then post them here at Pixelfed (and repost to mastodon.social/@jasonpettus). We have a one-year-old these days in the 20-person co-op where I live, and people here react to the baby in different ways. One housemate, for example, has developed a rather special attachment already, not a father himself but with his parenting skills clearly on display whenever around the baby. It's a real treat around here in a co-op like this, having a baby around every day and getting to watch their rapid development.

My second time now, using my new bread stencils, and I'm rapidly getting much better at them! For those who want to try this, start by spritzing the entire top of your uncooked loaf with water -- not enough to drip, but just enough to make it wet. Lay down your stencil and hold it tight against the dough with one hand; then in the other hand, lightly sprinkle either rice flour (white) or cocoa powder (brown) over the stencil's holes, then VERY carefully lift off the stencil once finished. The steps themselves are easy; it's the subtle implementation of them that's hard.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to take a lot more black-and-white character portraits (which I adjust in the "Dramatic Black & White" phone app), then post them here at Pixelfed (and repost to mastodon.social/@jasonpettus). We have a one-year-old these days in the 20-person co-op where I live. They have learned exactly two ways to communicate at this point: they clap when they want something, and they wave their hands in the air when they're happy or excited. Needless to say, the 19 adults here are endlessly delighted by it all.