Final Post for 2013: Christmas Concoction & Contest

 

Well, here we go folks. Many of the wintertime holidays have gone and past, and in many parts of the world, 2014 has already made its mark. Before New Year's eve comes to an end in Michigan, I wanted to share with you for this final post of 2013 an experimental recipe gone right. Coupled with this is another reminder of the Christmas Menu recipe challenge I'll be helping to judge in the coming weeks, the deadline of which is January 5th (more info at the end of the post). And since I can't win as a judge, the timing works out to share the following concoction I made to pair with brie en croûte, which is perhaps the recipe I have replicated most frequently since beginning this blog nearly three years ago.

Living a Foodie Kind of Life: Boston, Friday (3/22)

Following a very full day on Thursday, I woke up Friday with a rush of enthusiasm for the even fuller day ahead. The Eastern Sociological Society's first ever Mini Conference on Food Studies--a testament, in my opinion, to the growing recognition and acceptance of food studies as a viable and relevant field in academia--had finally arrived. Without going into too much detail here, this mini conference (organised by Barbara Katz Rothman and Alexandrea Ravenelle from City University of New York) was divided into four back-to-back sessions, each focusing on a different intersection with food. I was part of the first panel which addressed food as a tool for learning and teaching, specifically from the angles of ethnography (Richard Ocejo and Connor Fitzmaurice) and pedagogy (me and Helaine Harris). My paper focused on the food and culture programs and research I have led over the last year and a half or so at Denison, leading up to our Food and Culture Colloquium. Subsequent sessions focused on food as a tool for social control, as a tool for constructing ethnic identity, and as a tool for media representations. To have been fortunate to dream up and construct my own understanding of food identity, and to create a tangible mechanism for seeking to understand the connection between food and culture, continues to be an important highlight of my professional journey to date. To have been fortunate to engage with others who are going through similar processes has helped me in this orientation, to further recognise that we're all still learning through and with food. Now, after a full day of this (14 presentations within a span of 7 hours), and with a quick snack run to Au Bon Pain, I was ready to take it easy for the evening. For me, of course that more often than not involves cooking and the consumption of food.

Personal Pan-Size Four-cheese Italian-style Thin-crust Pizza... with Fresh Basil

When it comes to making pizza dough from scratch, there are two pretty big hurdles to pass in particular, so as not to end up with a very doughy, and a not-so-very-good crust. The first major hurdle is working with the yeast itself: too cold and the yeast won't activate, whereas too hot actually "kills" it. As could be gleaned from my yeast packet, if the water itself is far too hot but not hot enough to kill the yeast, it's best to mix the yeast into the flour; otherwise, it could be dissolved straight into the liquid. (By the way, for more fun reading on this particular fungi, click here.) The second hurdle is overworking the dough to the point where it will never rise; just think "elastic" and "springy" as adjectives you want your dough to be described as.

I acknowledge I've never actually made pizza dough before and have once again (this time, with much inspiration from this site) come up with a few techniques that yielded a result far better than my own expectations, especially as I don't have a cooking thermometer nor have had much luck with doughs in the past (though I am getting better).