Foodie Mondays – Crispy Bread and Pizza Crusts

Well, morning sickness has reduced my personal diet to crackers and grapes, but I did hear something magical sounding from a little birdie this week…

I know not everybody loves a really greasy pizza but if you happen to be one of those people who do like them then you probably like Little Caesar’s deep dish pizzas. And if you like Little Caesar’s deep dish pizzas then you probably love their crispy, greasy, almost carmelized looking crusts.

(And if you don’t like greasy pizzas but would like a nice crispy fried crust on, say, a loaf of bread, then keep reading.)

Upon inspecting the unusually crispy pizza crust on one of the aforementioned pizzas recently I questioned aloud to my husband and brother-in-law how they made them like that. Off the cuff, they both said, “This is just like our mom’s bread crusts. You just throw a bunch of oil in the bottom of the pan and it fries as it cooks.”

What? Fried bread crust? We use my mother-in-law’s bread recipe for things like navajo tacos all the time, so I already know her bread is good fried. It had never occurred to me to try frying an entire loaf before, though.

Here’s the recipe for one of her famously delicious (and easy!) loaves of homemade bread. To make it extra crispy, add a tablespoon or so of oil to the bottom of the pan and let it run around to evenly coat the sides and bottom. If you’re using the recipe for a pizza crust (or if you’re using your own pizza dough recipe and want it extra crispy on the bottom), use a pizza pan with sides that doesn’t have holes in it (or a flat sheet or cookie sheet with sides) and use just enough oil to evenly coat the bottom and sides.

Mama Costello’s Bread:

Dissolve 1 tsp. yeast in 1 c. warm water.
Combine yeast mix, 2 Tbsp. sugar, 2 Tbsp. oil, 1 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. lemon juice. 
Add flour until the dough sticks together and cleans the bowl. This may be more flour than you’re expecting! Make sure the dough has enough flour that you can knead it without it sticking to your hands too much.)
Knead for 10 minutes or until “like gum.”
Let rise double, punch down, put in pan and let rise again. Bake at 350F for 30 minutes.

Thanks for reading!

Foodie Monday – How to Make Your Own Coconut Milk!

The aftermath and about a third of the total coconut milk we got out of our one small coconut.

This week my husband and I decided to have another go at a promising mango curry recipe that we’d tried before but which hadn’t panned out correctly yet. The directions are a little vague if you don’t have a lot of experience with the ingredients, so most of our previous attempts had ended up really watery. The recipe calls for “1 cup canned coconut milk (the thick part)”. The first time I remember thinking, “Uh… The thick part?” I had vaguely remembered opening cans of coconut milk that had separated into a thick, creamy white part and a translucent part. However, when we opened our Asian Market can (the regular grocery had been out), there was maybe a half of a cup of white stuff in the bottom, and the rest was the clear stuff. Also, when trying to pour the clear stuff off the top… the white stuff immediately homogenized into it and everything became a white slurry. After adding the full cup of water to dilute the already watery coconut milk… we ended up with a super watery curry. Go figure!

The recipe does have an optional substitute for the canned coconut milk and water combo though: “If you’re using fresh coconut milk, use two cups of the first extraction and skip adding any water.” So, for our most recent go-around, we decided to try buying a coconut and extracting the milk ourselves!

Hello world! – It’s Info Dump Wednesday!

Welcome to Basically Everything!

I’ve wanted to start a blog for a while now–or maybe a few blogs. One about my life as a furniture designer and woodworking extraordinaire, one about all the foodie adventures that my husband and I get into, one about the mind-blowing revelations I’m always stumbling on (and have to share!) about how people work and what makes them tick, and at least a half dozen more pursuing my infamous Projects (with a capital “P”!). Because we all know there just really isn’t enough space in a Facebook caption to do justice to the 10 hours you just spent on your recent love affair with *fill in the blank making-technique*. On top of all that, my husband and I just found out that we are pregnant with our first baby! That’s a whole new world of learning and growth, and I can’t even begin to imagine what knowledge and insights that path will bring me. I intend to make that journey part of this blog, too.

In order to keep all these topics and directions afloat and at least a little structured, I’ve decided to post on one topic per day, 6 days a week. Here’s the schedule:

Foodie Mondays –