Well, I slept some.

As it turned out, nobody got a visit from the cookie fairy last night. Look for a visit this afternoon once I'm off work.

Working for Prof Thom can be ridiculously frustrating. A lot of the time she'll give you something to look into, then immediately say that it might as well be impossible for these reasons, but you should do it anyway, and by the way you ought to look into these other three things, but this one's also impossible, that one's worse than NP-complete, and the last one is showing that there's a correlation between x and f(x). At the same time, you should read these chapters from this graduate-level textbook, and do the problems, and we'll talk about it at the end of the week. Want some tea? It doesn't help that I'm not in the reseach mindset; I don't feel like anything I've accomplished has actually been useful, and all of the things that might be useful are the same ones that seem asbolutely impossible.

Man, I want to get back to the applications of this. But I know I should understand what I'm doing now - preferably to the point of explaining it - - which is exactly what I suck at.

On the upside, I'm learning LaTeX.

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And the sweet, sweet smell of burnt^H^H^H^H^cooked onion fills the air.

My first thought was: This will be pizza the way it ought to be made.

My second thought was: Holy crap, I'm going to have a lot of pizza.

"The way it ought to be made" is from scratch, beginning by dissolving yeast into water on the way to making dough. This is, naturally, the first place that things could go wrong. After all, I have no way of measuring 110-degree water, and if it's off by ten degrees either way PEOPLE DIE! So I guessed, and let the faucet get as hot as it could, and used that water, which naturally cooled off instantly. Unfazed, I started mixing up the dough, and let myself be fascinated as the flour did its magic. Eventually I had a blob of stuff that felt about right. Hey, I'm supposed to knead this stuff?

I push it around in the bowl, vaguely remembering and mimicing the fold-push-repeat motion that I saw somewhere. It was either a cookbook or a porn, and I'm definitely hoping the first. Eventually the stuff got awfully stiff and thick, so I cover it up and put it in the oven to rise. (The oven's been off since last night. I'm not entirely clueless.)

Next step, although rising is two hours of waiting, is to assemble the ingredients. Now, my pizzas are not to be trifled with. I once went to the Muddhole and asked them to make me a pizza with everything on it. (They refused.) But I went to the store last night with the direct purpose of finding anything I could reasonably put on a pizza, and getting some. As such, I came home with olives, mushrooms, and pineapple to supplement what I already have. Added to these are the ham, chicken, and onions I already had here - the latter two sauteed (frozen water into hot oil! fuck, my forearms, the splattering!) to kill stuff and dull the taste, respectively. Now the whole mess sits in a bucket in my fridge, waiting for the dough to rise.

I hope I have enough sauce. Correction - I hope I have enough sauce in the jar that I already have opened. If I open the second one, I'll feel compelled to use up the rest of it in the next week or two. Of course, I probably don't, with my luck.

Um, I'm making a giant pizza. I'm the only one here who'd eat it. Anyone interested in an impromptu cooking group, by which I mean you come over here and eat* pizza that may or may not actually turn out? It should be done sometime around 9:00. There's also the usual assortment of things to do that have already been here, which I've listed enough times before.

But OMG is there going to be a lot of pizza.

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*Offer void where prohibited, outside the Claremont area, to vegetarians, kosher Jews, or those squeamish to fungus

Quoth the little red hen, "I'll eat it myself."

And I will eat it all myself. At this rate it will be gone sometime around next Saturday.

The one major failing turned out to be the sauce. I entirely failed to take into account the difference in consistency between pasta-sauce-from-a-jar and something a sane person would put on a pizza, such as tomato paste. As I was shopping yesterday, I decided that my jar of Safeway Verde pasta sauce would cut it. What a fool was I! As tasty as the tomato chunks in the sauce were, the rest was so thin that everything slides off when you pick up a slice.

Once it started looking like a pizza, I took pictures so that you can all see just what you're missing. Warning: I took high-resolution pictures.

( Commence mouthwatering )

The existence of this entry means I clearly have too much time on my hands.

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Hm.

A while back, I created a few opt-in filters. I'm going to try to get back to using those filters, for the very same reason outlined in that post. For the few that have added me since then, comment here or there, for whichever ones you're interested in. I may even add more as time goes on, because right now there are only three, but you will be notified of those as they appear.

Entries to one or more may appear later, or may not, if I don't get them formulated well.

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