Author: NouveauSoileau

Optimistic mother, devoted lover, careful writer

Perfect pizza

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

I’ve become a little obsessed lately with homemade pizza because frankly, if I may modestly say so, it’s delicious and far better than any pizza I’ve ever eaten — either in a restaurant or in anyone’s home.

Yes, yes, I’ve been to Chicago. Yes, I know about New York. I’m sure you have your favorite chain pizza pie that you’d rather eat than anything else. But part of the reason I like my pizza is that I’ve refined it over time, added things that worked and dropped the things that didn’t, won a whole family full of fans, and developed a product that, when consumed as leftovers the next day at work, inspires slitty eyed envy among my coworkers.

Not that this is the main benefit, of course.

I have a bread machine, and in it I make the crust. If you have one, you probably have a crust recipe. Here’s mine.

Pizza Crust

Add ingredients in order listed. Time in bread machine: about 2 hours

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 cups bread flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

2 and one-half teaspoons yeast for bread machines

Set machine to white dough setting. When it beeps after kneading, add one teaspoon dried basil, one tablespoon wheat germ, and one tablespoon Ralston whole-wheat cereal (optional).

When dough finishes, allow to sit in the bread machine at least 15 minutes. Punch down and divide into two discs.

Here’s is where I probably differ from the purists: I roll out my dough with a rolling pin. Yes, all the recipes tell you to push it out into a circle with your fingers. Bah. It never goes into a circle. I love my crust rolled into a perfect circle and if it compresses it, I can’t tell and it still tastes great. So roll away!

Oil two pizza pans with olive oil. Roll out dough into gorgeous perfect circles and lay then in your pans. Drizzle with olive oil and use a pastry brush to coat the surface. Top with your favorite toppings, bake 20 minutes and serve.

And now for my astonishingly good pizza sauce recipe!

Pizza Sauce

1 large can (28 oz.) whole tomatoes, including juice

1 can tomato paste

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon dried basil

1 tablespoon oregano

1 tablespoon dried parsley

Parmesan cheese to taste (about 1/4 cup)

Place all ingredients in a food processor (or blender) and blend until smooth. Add more salt if necessary. Makes enough for about three pizzas, so you’ll have sauce left over if you’re making your own crust.

Here’s an array of toppings. I usually also include some spinach, which I wilt slightly in the microwave first, then drape across the pizza. Sauteed eggplant that’s been cut into tiny pieces is great. Also good is Onion-Cheese topping, which you can use in place of tomato sauce, or in addition to.

Onion-Cheese Topping

2 medium onions, chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

1/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Heat oil in a small pan. Add onion and garlic and cook over medium heat until the onions caramelize. Remove from heat and cool slightly, then add cheeses. Stir well.

Put your pizzas on the lowest racks; what I normally do is give each one half-time on the low rack. One of my pans has lots of holes on the bottom, so it usually spends more time on the top.

What are your favorite toppings? Share your pizza secrets here!

I scream like a girl

Published on by NouveauSoileau4 Comments

Unfortunately the Chez Soileau small-animal problem is continuing and, I am sad to report, has resulted in some uncharacteristic behavior on my part. Specifically, I stood on a tall kitchen chair wearing minuscule, high-heeled ankle-strap pumps (possibly with bows) and screamed for 45 minutes.

OK, it wasn’t a mouse and actually, I was wearing flats — but that’s not the point. One of the adorable rodents living high on the hog in my front garden and beneath the back deck has moved into my garage.

Now chipmunks, exposed and in the daylight, are not scary at all. In fact, they’re laughably benign, except where their garden-gnawing is concerned. But put one of these scampering suckers in a dark garage and you’ve got all the makings of full-on fright.

Take last Sunday. I descended into the garage via the three or four wooden, rail-less stairs. We’ve got a motion-sensor light in there, so usually the first step or two is in the dark. Such was the case on Sunday. Between step two and three, however, roughly at the exact time the light was going on, a scrabbling, scratching scurrying occurred right beneath my feet. That’s when I did it.

I screamed. I did. I screamed like a girl.

Tras, who was right behind me, seized my left arm in a manly grip. On the way to said grip, he managed to scratch a good-sized hole out of my left thumb. (OK, the mere term “scratch” more accurately describes this wound.) All this was in service to his dear wife, whom he thought had lost her footing and was about to plummet head-first two feet down the stairs and into a large bag of hair.

“I’m OK!” I shrieked, beginning the tippy-toe dance absolutely everyone does when confronted with scrabbly, scurrying animals. “It’s one of those damn chipmunks!”

This information sent young Trassie caroming back to my side from the further reaches of the garage on his way to the back seat of the car. “It’s all right, sweetie-pie,” I said. “He’s not going to hurt us. I’m all right. I was just …. surprised.”

This led to some not-so-muffled snickers from the Two Trasimonds.

But it also dislodged a confession from the elder of the two; appropriate since we were on our way to Mass. It seems he spent a semester living with a friend at another university while he took a semester or two off from his.

Like your typical slovenly college males, they lived in squalor in a trailer. One afternoon, what should emerge from a pile of some dank underwear (or maybe it was something else, I forget) but a large rat. The buddy, hilariously, immediately hopped up on a chair and began squealing like the aforementioned little girl.

What makes this story, though, is the conclusion. Upon seeing his friend, Tras started pointing and laughing hysterically at him for his girlie-girl behavior … right up until the time he noticed that he, himself, had leaped off the floor and onto the couch in his own girlie-girl spasm of rat-fright.

So this morning I’m walking down into the garage, wondering again if we still have our onerous little visitor. I pause at the landing. I cup a hand to my ear. And what should I hear but an audible, extremely distinct PLOP from somewhere near the garage door. And then the tell-tale scrabbling.

“THAT THING’S STILL OUT THERE!” I holler toward the other end of the house. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU” comes the reply.

Uggggggh. I punched the button on the garage-door opener, realizing that if the little bastard is indeed in the garage, the noise of the door going up is going to drive him back into the recesses of the garage, where he can hole up in the boat or, more probably, the bag of hair.

What happened next is something that makes me grateful that The Truman Show was a movie and not even remotely likely to occur in real life … that millions of people are daily tuned into The Ellen Show and laughing mercilessly at my ridiculous behavior.

“SHOO,” said I to the vicinity under the boat trailer. “Go away you ratty little chipmunk. Get. G’won, git. Git outta my garage, ya hear?”

In times of pique, I usually revert to talking like Granny Clampett.

I stomped further into the garage, opened the door of the Prius, slid behind the wheel and began backing out. And that’s when I noticed it.

The passenger side window. It was open.

Open. Open all night. In the garage. Where the chipmunk(s) was/were. One could be in this very Prius. Right this very minute.

Little girl? Check.

Scream? You know it.

As it turns out, jumping out of the car and doing the tippy-toe run around the vehicle doesn’t deter rodents any better than it scares away boogiemen who may or may not be creeping around the house when everyone else is in bed.

Further, running in a circle with your hands up in the hair going, “get out of the car you disgusting vermin!” probably wouldn’t flush any disgusting vermin out either. But then opening the trunk and slamming your hand down on the floor certainly doesn’t hurt your chances of dislodging them either.

Not that I would know, of course.

A bumper crop of bunnies

Published on by NouveauSoileau5 Comments

This morning I was up early. I drank my coffee, did my internet duty (did you know mandatory surfing is now the law? It’s not.) and hopped into my Sauconys for a hour-long walk.

An hour later I’m back at the computer, driven indoors by the rain. It’s been a dry couple of weeks, but earlier this spring it rained. And rained. And rained. And the most visible result of all this precipitation, in my yard at least, is a bumper crop of suburban bunnies.

The wet weather, it seems, with the attendant abundance of vegetation, has caused the cottontails to multiply. Multiply like rabbits.

Oh they’re cute. Cuuuuute. We love to watch them out back about an hour before dusk, when we’ve spotted as  many as five to seven of the darling things, bunnin’ around and generally being adorable.

See? Adorable.

But they’re also, you know, pests. They eat the aforementioned vegetation, which would include my sunflowers — if I’d planted them yet. They’re still on my windowsill, paralyzed by the fear of bunnies.

I’ve nurtured these shoots, and I’ll be damned if I let the rabbits chow down on them. Not to mention the chipmunks. If there’s anything more populous in my yard than bunnies, it’s these adorable little bastards, who have taken over not only my front yard, but the dank region below my deck. This steamy place now reeks like the monkey cage at the zoo, the result I am positive of a thriving colony of Tamias striatus that would rival the meerkat lodge.

All this might be about to change, however. Upon discovering the below-decks reek, I’ve about decided that it’s time to become a mass murderer and thin the population around chez Soileau.

Image via WikipediaI know. Look that that darling little face. From someone who was hell-bent on becoming a veterinarian (ages 9-18) it’s startling news that I would go from self-appointed guardian of the animal universe to slayer of rodents.

But there is one last-ditch effort that I’m willing to make, which may save the bun and munk populations from certain death.

I’m going to fight hares with hair.

In my garage right now I have stored away, next to the warfarin-laced rat poison, a bag of hair. It’s handy, you know, whenever someone announces that their coworkers are dumber’n a bag of hair, I can just trot out there and check.

No, really. It’s reputed to be a rabbit and rodent repellent, and my hairdresser, April, kindly provided me with a whole bag of mine, plus that of her previous four customers.

So, for the time being, at least, I’m not going to have any blood on my hands — figuratively speaking. When the rain lets up, I plan on getting those sunflower shoots in the ground before it’s August and I’ve got a forest of sunflower seedlings obscuring the view in the breakfast nook.

But if the hair doesn’t prove hair-raising enough, mass murder it is. Just don’t tell April. She’ll cut me off, for sure.

An utter twit

Published on by NouveauSoileau4 Comments

I’ve had a Twitter account for a year or so, and I can unequivocally say it’s never once crossed my mind to use it for anything but writing headline-length bites of marginally interesting information about my life.

Sadly this appears to the apex of Tweeting.

For today, thanks to the disgraceful tweeting habits of former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner — the worst of them, apparently were photographic rather than verbal in nature — we now can say that completely useless information is spectacularly transmitted in this way. And it has set me to ruminating on the appropriateness of the name itself: Twitter. I therefore propose that those who habitually misuse Twitter be universally referred to as Twits.

I'm a bird. I tweet.

Now, I’m a  blogger. I use some of the latest technology to communicate. Hey, I’m doing it right now, and it’s no great revelation.

But the Twitter love, I admit, does escape me — even though I was initially happy it had a bird theme. Usually if something has a bird theme, I’m  all over it. Sports teams like the Cardinals? I’m a fan.

The actual mechanics of tweeting remind me of writing headlines. When I was a newspaper reporter I had an irrational love of headline-writing. Most reporters hated it. Me, I liked the economy of words it forced upon a writer. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being a poet, though believe me, very few of the headlines I ever wrote were particularly poetic.

All right, none of them were.

I also enjoy writing titles for the blog posts I write; unlike headlines, which are written after an article’s done, I write my blog titles first, in hopes that it’ll give the post a tone. Generally I’m going for a low tone — possibly a B-flat. (Insert rimshot.) Not much of an aspiration I’ll admit. But juvenile humor has got to be someone’s specialty, right?

Today I discovered, via Wikipedia, that San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 and separated them into six categories. What was the top tweet category?

Pointless babble. A full 40 percent. Pointless.

New York Times photo

Yes, Twitter today seems the proper medium for millennial communicators, who want instant delivery of pointless information. Damn the reflection, full speed ahead.

It’s undoubtedly the medium of choice for celebrities, who can instantly communicate their inanities to their followers. It’s also useful for bloggers, she said, calling up the Twitter website, who wish to alert their readers to new posts. (Like how I can so effortlessly lump myself into celebrity category?)

I do have  testify to its effectiveness in promotion and marketing work. If you want to get the word out about something your followers are presumably interested in, it’s a quick to say, “hey, look at this.” The information can be seen, digested and squirreled away for later use. Or ignored.

As a writer, I’m dismayed by the prevalence of tweeting; as a reader, I’m grateful that my array of reading choices are longer than twit-length. Out there in the blogosphere, there are insightful, thoughtful posts on a stunning array of absorbing topics. Like shoes. Or punctuation. (Someone needs to tackle these important topics, you know.)

But if current events are any indication, twit-length is the dominant force out here in Internetland.

Sigh. I think I’ll go outside and do some bird-watching until the whole phenomenon passes by.

Be sure and watch for my tweets about it.