Wednesday, June 10, 2020

coming soon

Later this month, I'll be making spaghetti and meatballs for our small R&D crew.  I'm also curious about making a "pizza pie," by which I don't mean another name for a pizza (like in the song), but a pie—with an honest-to-God pie crust—containing the ingredients you'd find on a regular pizza:  sauce, cheese, meat, etc.  "So, a Chicago pizza, then," rumbled my boss when I told him my intention.  No, no:  a literal pie, whose crust would not merely be pizza dough.  This isn't an original idea, to be sure.  Chef John did a pizza rustica here:

 


Chef John's crust uses a good bit of olive oil (and egg!*), but it's basically a pie crust—not pizza dough, and not a pasta-like shell in the spirit of a timpanoPie, dammit, pie!  This shouldn't be hard to grasp.  Anyway, because I'm doing this pizza-pie project and also prepping spaghetti and meatballs, I decided to order two things:  (1) a kilo of pepperoni (which you can't find in the Muslim-owned foreign-food stores in Itaewon), and (2) an item I already own, but which is currently in public storage in Virginia:  a crank-turning pasta roller.  I went for an el-cheapo one; the other pasta rollers ranged from $70-some to almost $200 on GMarket, which seemed preposterous.  I don't recall spending all that much for the roller I'd used in Virginia, so I kept my shopping cheap and downscale.

I got word from GMarket that both of my ordered items have shipped.  I wonder how the kilogram of pepperoni is going to arrive.  Will it be packed in dry ice, or will this be one of those no-refrigeration-needed packages?  I've seen pepperoni sold both ways:  unrefrigerated and refrigerated.  The pasta roller, for its part, supposedly weighs 5 kg.

My fear is that GMarket will somehow fail me.  I'd say it has about a 90% success rate, as far as I'm concerned, but I've been bitten a few times:  shipments have been suddenly canceled, refunds have been hard to obtain, and orders have been screwed up.  The service is wobbly at best.  I believe the Brits say dodgy.

I've got a spare lump of pie dough in my fridge right now, but I don't think my items will arrive quite yet:  I suspect it'll be at least a week before I see anything.  I may have to use that dough up on something else, then make another batch in anticipation of the arrival of the pepperoni, which I plan to pair up with some aggressively fenneled homemade Italian sausage.

More news as it happens.

NB:  this is my first-ever blog post published using the new Blogger post-editing format, which Blogger is forcing us to convert to whether we like it or not.  For nearly a year, Blogger allowed us the option of using the "legacy" (i.e., current) Blogger format, but no longer:  as of the end of June, we'll have no choice but to switch over to this new way of doing things.  The new format isn't that hard to adapt to, but it's a pain in the ass having to learn how to navigate buttons and other functions that seem to have been rearranged for no purpose other than to rearrange them.  I might get used to the new WYSIWYG format for entering text and images/video; the text editor no longer ignores your spacing when you put two spaces after a period or a colon, so I can go back to typing the old-school way and will, I hope, see the results on my published blog post.  I'm now also able to use regular controls like CTRL-I for italics, CRTL-B for boldface, and CTRL-U for underlining, which is nice.  Not sure I like how the new editor creates thumbnails for embedded videos, but as long as the videos play normally, that shouldn't be a problem. Hitting "preview post" no longer generates a new tab, which is both good and bad:  with the old way of doing things, you could root around your blog post while also looking at a preview image in a second tab.  I liked being able to click back and forth between the text editor and the preview image; I can't do that anymore.  All in all, the new Blogger format is still a pain, but I'll get used to it soon enough.



*You might argue that the addition of olive oil and egg makes this more of a pasta dough than a pie-crust dough. To that, I would counter that you need to explain the presence of two ingredients found in pie-crust dough: ice-cold water and butter.




No comments:

Post a Comment

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.