Let's have a pizza party

I've been on a pizza kick lately. Make that, I've been on a real pizza kick lately. Pizza in Rome has nothing in common with that garbage available for delivery except perhaps the similar-sounding names. Roman pizza hunts me, it does. So I've spent the better part of the last year mastering the manly art of pizza making and I can honestly say that I make a mean pizza. While hardly as good as the stuff in Rome, it's a thousand times better than anything that comes out of a box and best of all, I know what's in it.

The key to successful pizza making is practice of course, but you need cold ingredients when you make the dough and the a really hot oven when you bake your pizzas. It's all but impossible to bake pizzas at home without a pizza stone, so go get one before you try this. No two ovens are the same and so you're going to have to play with the baking time and temperature until you find the right settings. I have a crappy oven so I bake mine in two stages.

Baking bread and bread doughs is fun and there's something about it that appeals to me on a very primal level. I like to make things with my hands and the idea of making food with my hands has an appeal to me I just can't describe. I bake the old-fashioned way, no power tools. If you use a mixer or heaven forbid, a bread maker, I don't want to know about it. Baking bread is actually very easy. There are usually four or five ingredients and the yeast does most of the work. It is not a fast process, but easy access to fast foods is why westerners are so fat.

I got started with my pizza dough recipe on a website called 101 Cookbooks. The ingredients are about the only thing my method has with theirs at this point though. This is a great way to start though. Recipes are just a starting point, true mastery comes when you fly under your own steam.

• 4 1/2 cups bread flour, chilled 
• 1 3/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon instant yeast 
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 3/4 cups water, ice cold
• Additional flour for dusting and additional olive oil for finished dough

1. Stir together the flour, salt, and instant yeast in a 4-quart bowl. With a large metal spoon, stir in the oil and the cold water until the flour is all absorbed. Repeatedly dip one of your hands into cold water and use it, much like a dough hook, to work the dough vigorously into a smooth mass while rotating the bowl in a circular motion with the other hand. Reverse the circular motion a few times to develop the gluten further. Do this for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and the ingredients are evenly distributed. The dough should clear the sides of the bowl but stick to the bottom of the bowl. If the dough is too wet and doesn't come off the sides of the bowl, sprinkle in some more flour just until it clears the sides. If it clears the bottom of the bowl, dribble in a tea- spoon or two of cold water. The finished dough will be springy, elastic, and sticky, not just tacky, and still be cooler than room temperature.
2. Turn the dough onto a floured table top and form into an even ball. Add around a tablespoon of olive oil to the now-empty bowl. Put dough ball back into the bowl and roll it in the oil until it's evenly coated in oil. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let rest in the fridge overnight.
3. The next morning, set the covered bowl on the counter and let the dough warm up and rise. When it nearly doubles in size, it's done rising.
4. Punch the dough down to remove the air and turn it out onto a floured table top. Roll it back into an even ball and then form the ball into a log about a foot long.
5. Take a dough scraper and cut the log into six, even slices. Oil your hands and roll each slice into a ball.
6. Place each ball into a small, zip lock bag and toss in the freezer.

It's pizza time!

1. When you're ready to make a pizza, take a frozen dough ball and put it into a glass bowl then cover it with a damp kitchen towel. Let the dough defrost in the refrigerator. It will take two hours or so to defrost. Once it's defrosted, set the bowl on the counter and bring it to room temperature.
2. While that dough's assuming room temperature, set a pizza stone on the lower rack and pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees and assemble your toppings.
3. When the oven's to temperature, lightly flour the counter and your hands and make a pizza from the dough. Start with a ball and flatten it. Pizza dough is very elastic but you can poke a hole in it if you're not careful. My pizzas are rarely perfect circles but you'll get better at this the more often you do it. By the time you're done forming your pizza, it should be between nine and 12 inches in diameter.
4. Take the hot pizza stone out of the oven and set on a rack. Be really careful with that stone. Place your pizza on the stone directly. Brush with oil or pesto and bake for five minutes.
5. After five minutes, remove the pizza stone and set it back on the rack. Add the rest of your toppings now. Go easy on them. A good pizza has no more than three toppings and they should be added sparingly.
6. Return the pizza and the pizza stone to the oven for an additonal four minutes.
7. Remove from the oven, set the stone on a rack and let sit for two to three minutes.
8. Slice it up and pretend you're in old Napoli.

Not to jump the gun, but the holidays are around the corner

Believe it. Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend. Thanksgiving in the US will be here in seven weeks and Hanukkah starts a week after that. Hanukkah starts in eight. Christmas is in 79 days. Kwanzaa starts the day after Christmas. I'm sure I'm missing more than a few of them. Oh yeah, Saturnalia runs from December 17th through the 23 if anybody out there still celebrates Roman holidays.

So it's already time to start thinking about exchanging gifts with the people in your life and I just came across a gift idea that never would have occurred to me but makes perfect sense.

In keeping with the practicality that's suddenly all the rage, Top Knobs is selling gift certificates. Theses gift certificates are available in amounts from $50 to $500 and are redeemable at any of the 5000 Top Knobs showrooms found all across North America.

The best way to give a quick makeover to a kitchen, a bathroom, a closet or a piece of furniture is to replace its hardware with something new. Top Knobs has over 3,000 products available in 30 finishes and there's something for everybody in their collections. What an original way to give somebody something most people wouldn't do for themselves. Especially now.

I have to say I thought this was an odd idea at first but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made and the better I liked it. If somebody on your list is putting off a remodel until things start to improve, this is a great way to give them a mini-makeover without breaking the bank. After all, 400 of their offerings sell for $7.99 or less.

You can buy Top Knobs gift certificates on their online store, just follow this link.

And no matter how much I want to ignore it, the holidays really are just around the corner. I think this is going to be a hardware Christmas.

Jeeves and Wooster go under cover as pendant lights

This is a series of pendant lights made by London-based Jake Phipps.

They're made from actual bowler and top hats and they take their name from an early '90s BBC show of the same name. By the way, the show starred now US TV star Hugh Laurie and current Twitter celebrity Stephen Fry.

Anyhow, any time I see a bowler hat I think of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. I like Magritte a lot and I've probably said so before on this blog. Here's why I have bowler hats and René Magritte linked so tightly in my mind.

Golconde, 1953

The Mysteries of the Horizon, 1955

The Son of Man, 1964

As much as I love his art, what I love even more was his perspective on it.

visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Words to live by if you ask me and not just a description of paintings.

So back to Jeeves and Wooster pendants, what do you think? Would you hang something like this in your home?

Are blogs as important as bloggers think they are?

This post is part of of the biweekly Blogoff, a now legendary event where bloggers of all stripes weight in on the same topic. This week's theme is the title of this post: Are bloggers as important as bloggers think they are?

I like to think of myself as an influential blogger and by some measures I am. To remind myself that the qualifier some measures definitely applies to me, I keep this New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory on hand. It helps to keep me from putting too much stock in my own PR.

When Mr. Gregory drew that cartoon and The New Yorker ran it in September 2005, there were 70 million blogs in the world* and I really didn't know what a blog was. The blog indexer Technorati issues an annual report on the state of the Blogosphere and by 2009, the latest figures they have, there were 133,000,000 million blogs indexed**.

All statistics relating to blogs and blogging are hard to pin down because they deal with such an anarchic subject. Blog activity and blog traffic numbers are generally reported by bloggers themselves and even if you take that into account, there are a whole lot of blogs out there. Technorati paints a really interesting profile of what bloggers looked like as of 2009.

• 77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann
• Two-thirds of Bloggers are male  (c’mon ladies, start Blogging!)
• More than half are married and more than half are parents
• 60% are 18-44
• 75% have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees
• One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
• Around half of Bloggers are working on at least their second blog
• 68% have been blogging for two years or more
• 86% have been blogging for at least a year

But of course I find statistics like this interesting, I'm part of the cohort in question. What's interesting too is a glimpse into why people blog.

• 72% of respondents are classified as Hobbyists, meaning that they report no income related to blogging
• Of those who have monetized their blogging to at least some extent:
• 54% are Part-Timers
• 32% are Self-Employed Bloggers
• 14% are Corporate Bloggers (defined as someone who draws a salary as a blogger for a company)

While I don't support myself from this blog's ad revenue, I derive all of my income from it and the projects having a blog leads to. That puts me in the 32% category, self-employed bloggers. There are more of us than I thought and that's a good thing.

Out of all of those statistics though, the most interesting and most important one is the first stat I listed, 77% of Internet users read blogs. When you stop to consider that web sites like The Huffington Post and Apartment Therapy are blogs with monthly traffic numbers in the millions, that 77% figure isn't very surprising.

Blogs, like newspapers, magazines or any other media form come in all shapes sizes and levels of influence. The question "Are blogs important?" gets asked all the time and it's as difficult a question to answer as "Are newspapers important?" The answer depends on which blogs, and which newspapers you're talking about. There's a pretty clear difference between The New York Times and The Dayton Daily News. According to those Technorati statistics, only 15% of Bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging. That means there are a whole lot of hobbyist bloggers out there. Not that there's a thing wrong with being a hobbyist blogger but you can't lump a blog that documents the comings and going of a young family to an audience made up of that young family's grandparents with The Huffington Post.

Everybody who writes a blog thinks his or her blog is important and influential. Including me. But numbers don't lie and they don't grow in relation to wishes and dreams. So are blogs important? Yes some are.

If the question is turned to "Is blogging important?" the answer's a resounding yes and that importance only grows every day. As a social phenomenon its importance can't be overstated. With that said, there's a world of difference between blogging as a whole and an individual blog.

Old media isn't going anywhere and it's only a matter of time until "new" media gets absorbed by it. But blogging itself is changing the landscape. It's a lot of fun to be something of a pioneer (at least within my niche) and to have found myself a player in my industry (even if it's a bit part). But what's most amazing to me is that I can derive an income from it.

If you ask me how influential Kitchen and Residential Design is I wouldn't know how to answer that question. If you ask me how influential blogging is in the kitchen and bath industry, I'd say that it's a growing influence. But that's my niche and my industry. All niches and all industries will answer that question differently.

So if the question is Are blogs as important as bloggers think they are? My answer would be Ask a better question.

All of the participating bloggers in today's Blog Off will be listed here and updated as the day goes on. Give 'em all a look-see.

Edit

Blogger	Twitter	Blog Post Link
Veronika Miller	@modenus	Modenus Community
Paul Anater	@paul_anater	Kitchen and Residential Design
Rufus Dogg	@dogwalkblog	DogWalkBlog
Becky Shankle	@ecomod	Eco-Modernism
Bob Borson	@bobborson	Life of an Architect
Nick Lovelady	@cupboards	Cupboards Kitchen and Bath
Sean Lintow, Sr.	@SLSconstruction	SLS-Construction.com
Hollie Holcombe	@GreenRascal	Green Rascal Design
Saxon Henry	@saxonhenry	Roaming by Design
Betsy De Maio	@egrgirl	Egrgirl's Blog
Ami	@beackami	Multifarious Miscellany

The United States in color from 1939-1943

For most people I'd say, the image that sums up the Great Depression in the US is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. As iconic as the image of 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson is, that it's a black and white photograph takes it out of my ability to relate to her as a real human being. She's an archetype, she is The Depression and the struggle of a migrant worker's life is etched deeply into her careworn face. Even so, I have a hard time relating to her as a human being. I suppose I am a product of my generation, but black and white photography, despite its artistic appeal, makes its subjects seem unreal.

I'm admitting this as an ardent student of history. Studying the past is the best way to understand where you are now so far as I'm concerned and it's incredibly important to remember that history doesn't march in a straight line. It's a tapestry of interconnected threads and each thread depends on every other thread to make up the whole. It's too easy to cast the subjects of portraits and black and white photos in either/ or terms. Historical figures, like all human beings, were complicated and conflicted and they got through their lives the best way they could. The same as anybody. Life was not simpler, less violent, more directed, safer, cleaner or more wise in the past. The people who lived before us decried the state of things, clung to what ever they could, they loved, felt loss, smiled and laughed. They were us and I force myself to remember that any time I read something historical.

I've been obsessing for the last couple of years about US history in the years that lead up to World War II. Then, as now, the economy was spinning out of control and nobody seemed to know what was going on. I grew up listening to my parents' and grandmothers' stories about life during the Great Depression and it always thrilled me to hear about a time when butter was an expensive treat and everybody had a single pair of shoes. But parents and grandparents tend to tell the kids int heir lives the myths of their lives. It's a parental thing to do, to use one's life experiences for instructing a younger generation. It's been a real boon to flesh out those stories of expensive butter.

The world we live in today was built by the folks who survived the Depression and World War II, for better and for worse. Through a combination of hard work, self-reliance and a whole lot of government help, they left us a world where things like kitchen design matter.

Yesterday a great friend of this blog, Madame Sunday, popped a link from the Denver Post up onto Twitter. And the link contained 75 color photographs of life around the US between the years of  1939-43. I hate to admit it, but the subjects are easier to see as human beings because they're photographed in color. I spent hours yesterday pouring over these images and here are ten that really stood out to me.

Barker at the grounds at the state fair. Rutland, Vermont, September 1941. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Distributing surplus commodities. St. Johns, Arizona, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Young African American boy. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1942 or 1943. Photo by John Vachon. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Bayou Bourbeau plantation, a Farm Security Administration cooperative. Vicinity of Natchitoches, Louisiana, August 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

African American migratory workers by a "juke joint." Belle Glade, Florida, February 1941. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Rural school children. San Augustine County, Texas, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by John Vachon. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Mike Evans, a welder, at the rip tracks at Proviso yard of the Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Chicago, Illinois, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

School children singing. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

The rest of these photos are on the Denver Post's website. Spend some time with them. As the economy flounders and as the US heads into another election season, it's important to remember what we have in common instead of concentrating so stridently on the things that set us apart.