The weekly “little of this, little of that” feature here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!
There's nothing like enjoying the fresh fruits of a home garden to boost one's appreciation (already high, trust me!) of summertime! This weekend, we're benefiting from some herbs, tomatoes, and cucumbers that my mom brought over from her garden.
Next year I need to be more on top of getting myself a little garden set up — even if it's only potted plants on my porch. I keep thinking to myself, “why didn't I start up some kind of garden this year? What was I doing this spring?” “Oh yeah. Having a baby.”
You know that we are big on homemade pizza around these LMLD parts. It's such a great Friday staple. Frequently, on Friday evenings, I make one meatless pizza and prepare one meaty one. The meatless one is, of course, for the Friday dinner. The meaty one is for a calm and easy Sabbath meal.
I used to go ahead and make two all the way, but then I was never satisfied with the reheated results on Sunday. So, these (Fri)days, I bake my Sunday pizza halfway and then pull it out of the oven, wrap it in tinfoil, and stick it in the fridge. On Sunday, I take it out to bring to room temperature, leave the tin foil over it, and pop it in the oven while it preheats. Once the oven gets to full heat, I remove the foil, leave it in for another 10 min or so and voila! A crisp, fresh pizza without any work at all — like a freezer pizza, only actually homemade and tasty.
This weekend's are significantly enhanced by aforementioned garden delights, courtesy of my mom:
(excuse the fuzzy pictures; The Artist had our nice camera in the studio today)
Friday's pizza, all prepped:
Sunday's, also prepped!:
Need a refresher on making your own pizza, including dough? It's easy! It's worth it for pizza that's just so much better:
Auntie Leila Makes Pizza: In Photos: Part 1
Auntie Leila Makes Pizza: In Photos: Part 2
This week's links!
Just for fun:
- Fruitcake always gets mocked! 100-year old fruitcake “looks and smells edible”!
- What happens when a group of seminarians go into a bar? Sounds like the beginning of a joke! But it's a cute story for real!
We're always thinking about our dream house:
- When it seems so hard to build a good house these days, maybe training our eye and design sense helps. (No offense to anyone who has one of these builder's delights — all of this is out of our control at some point!)
On education:
- {bits & pieces} seems to be on a bit of a poetry kick recently, so here is another offering on the question of the form of the poem — perhaps of interest if you think about poetry or are teaching a child.
- “The young are always being formed, and thus educated in the Greek sense, one way or the other.” John Cuddeback offers good perspective on the subject as school plans inevitably encroach on summer relaxation.
- And while we're (reluctantly) thinking about formal education and trying to have good goals, let's read Fr. Schall's Guide to Liberal Learning.
In the Liturgical Year:
Today is the memorial of St. Jane Frances de Chantal. Also, as a heads up: the feast of St. Gregory the Great is coming up in a few weeks on September 3! You might consider a celebration with your Pocket, or perhaps that would be an auspicious day to get your St. Gregory's Pocket started!
From the Archives:
- What can children do? A Guide. (As in: chores and helping around the house.)
~We’d like to be clear that, when we direct you to a site via one of our links, we’re not necessarily endorsing the whole site, but rather just referring you to the individual post in question (unless we state otherwise).~
BridgetAnn says
I’ve also half-cooked homemade pizza for later use, i.e. giving to others for those “take them a meal” times.
And I’m glad I’m not the only one who seeks a “calm and easy Sabbath meal.” (well put!) Maybe that will change when the littles are big but for now things like a batch of pre-made soup & loaf of bread from the freezer or a crockpot meal have exponentially increased the “nice” factor, while maintaining some rest on Sunday!
Kate says
We usually have pizza on Saturday, and I make a no-yeast crust with Greek yogurt, flour, baking powder and salt. The first time I made it was out of necessity since I didn’t have any yeast on hand, but everyone prefers it to the yeast version, so it’s my standard now. I couldn’t pull off a pizza-Sunday. My husband expects a festive meal on Sunday as befits a feast day. He gives me plenty of slack with meals during the week, but he asks for a little more culinary effort on Sunday.
The bungalow article was interesting. The only genuine bungalow I’ve been in, was in a small town in California. It was rectangular – a large main room (living room, dining room) with all the bedrooms and bathrooms either to the left or right of the living room, and no hallways. The large, sunny kitchen was at the back. It was painted yellow, and was a very cheery, welcoming house. There was no wasted space, and it seemed like a good setup to promote family togetherness. i could see, too, that the single floor would be a benefit for the elderly or multi-generational living.
Deirdre says
I understand where you’re coming from (/where your husband’s coming from), Kate! My feeling is that I either want to do a very simple meal on Sunday so that it’s more restful and there’s more time for some little family outing or activity, or I want it to be a cut above the weekday meals. Just depends on the week! 🙂
Rebecca Romanchuk says
What bugs me about McMansion Style are all the forced, faux cutesy details that resemble a kind of storybook look. At first glance, their attempted perfection catches my eye, but immediately, and ironically, that same artifice is what turns me away. The one feature consistently absent in those designs is a long front porch – I always envy those in older houses. Apparently you’re supposed to just stay inside your climate-controlled fortress and not socialize with the neighbors or even be seen out there, just passing the time. (But who does that anymore, anyway?)
Homemade pizza is so rewarding, not to mention thrifty. We sometimes do a BBQ’d pizza, with a par-grilled thin crust, then slathered with a (very) light layer of BBQ sauce, a layer of caramelized onions, shredded cooked chicken, and Jack cheese. Grill til done, add some slaw and melon, and call it a meal.
Deirdre says
Mm that grilled pizza concept sounds good!
Cate Nunan says
Thank you so much for the link to the information on St Jane Frances de Chantal. What a wise and loving woman and her example to all of us, but especially mothers to be forgiving, neighbourly and to love more, was nectar to my ears. It’s a brisk Sunday morning in Australia, and I agree with the need for rest on this special day.
Stephanie says
My goodness, those are appetizing pizzas! And a great meal-planning idea to bake one halfway to complete a day or two hence!
On a related note, ladies of LMLD (writers and/or readers), may I turn to you with a baking question? I recently received a recipe from a relative who is a great baker, but the recipe calls for boxed “yellow cake mix,” and I prefer to bake using only whole (and non-artificial) ingredients, so to speak. I looked at the ingredients on the “yellow cake mix” box at the store so I could get an idea of how to substitute the mix in this recipe, and I see some basic ingredients that make sense (flour, sugar, some type of leavening agent), and a whole bunch of others that do not. I will search the Internet for ideas, suggestions, and recommendations for devising the best substitute for this type of mix in a recipe, but thought I would turn first to this wonderful resource for your own ideas, suggestions, and recommendations! All are welcome, with many thanks!
Leila says
Stephanie, without knowing what the broader recipe requires, I do recommend the “lightening cake”, I think it’s called, in the Joy of Cooking. Here is a version of the recipe online that I found in a quick search, if you don’t have that cookbook: https://bumblingchef.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/cold-butter-makes-for-a-short-lightning-cake/
You can leave out the lemon if you don’t want it.
The closest cake to what “yellow box cake” SHOULD be is the Joy of Cooking “four-egg cake”, which I love. I have adapted it here: http://likemotherlikedaughter.org/2010/01/im-not-letting-go-yet/
It has a very moist and buttery taste, like a light pound cake.
Hope this helps!
Stephanie says
Thank you very much, Auntie Leila!
The broader recipe is for a crumb cake… at a quick glance, it seems like either one of these cake recipes would be good for the “base” … maybe the lightning cake would lend itself a little better to it, or perhaps the “four-egg cake” without the extract? I’ve never baked a crumb or coffee cake before – cookies are more my baking domain! – so I feel a little at sea here, but at any rate, with these possibilities in hand, it should be tasty and fun to experiment and find the best substitute! 🙂
Thanks again!
Stephanie says
(It occurs to me that I should clarify… I realize that I probably could find an entire/intact recipe for crumb cake that doesn’t involve boxed cake mix and just follow that, and save everyone the trouble of these substitutions, but since this recipe is from a dear relative, who is a great baker to boot, I am inclined to preserve at least some of that recipe and just adapt the boxed cake portion of it, both for emotional and baking reasons! Thank you for helping in that quest!) 🙂
Jody says
Thank you for bringing attention to the pizza recipe. Can extra dough be frozen?
Leila says
Jody, in the comments of those posts people do discuss freezing the dough. I’ve never done it, but apparently it can be done!
I have kept it in the fridge for a day or two, and it’s fine. And I have frozen a whole partially baked pizza, which is easier to do if you bake it in a rectangular sheet pan rather than a round pizza pan, just because the round is a difficult shape to wrap.
Suzette says
I have had lots of great success freezing balls of yeast pizza dough. I have not tried that with sourdough. These yeast dough expands as it defrosts, so keep that in mind!
Elizabeth says
The McMansion article is very helpful! They have often annoyed me, but I never exactly knew why it was that they bothered my brain. Now I know why, because it’s so confusing to look at the random assymetric chaos in front of you. They just give you a headache by looking at them, while the classic mansions calm the eye. Interestingly, their symmetry makes them appear less pompous.
Kari Brane says
Lol. I live in a house that is not symmetrical, has a metal roof, 2 kinds of exterior “siding” -stucco and stone, and whose garage juts out from the rest of the mass, but is most definitely Not a McMansion! It is just a little single story mountain cabin that grew in 4 or 5 different places at different times as the owners/ builders had need and money (with the materials on hand). Metal roofs aren’t ghetto here either, they’re a great thing and very common in the mountain West. But I do agree with the article and know some homes around that would qualify, and now I have a quantifiable reason!
Leila says
Kari — I love metal roofs! They are common in Vermont here — I think they probably do well in the mountains. And of course, with our actual colonial architecture here in New England (as in, from the colonial era), additions abound. It’s so normal to see a house that has multiple add-ons in what have come to be called “connected farms” — in fact, there is a little ditty about it: Big house, little house, back house, barn.
While it’s true that symmetry adds elegance to some houses, especially those seeking grandeur, which presumably McMansions do, there’s another principle that could just as easily be invoked, which is *balance*. Yet at some point within the balanced structures, there does need to be symmetry, or you have a lack of center. The virtue of the McMansionhell blog is the photos, so that you have a visual of how the elements that *could* be attractive if done well end up as an incoherent jumble because they do not relate to each other — although there are serious problems with the actual building materials themselves and with the execution.
One of my favorite books, A Pattern Language (http://amzn.to/2fP9UWN) attempts to explain how it is that a house like yours, built over the years by people who knew what they wanted even if they weren’t “experts” can be so much better than any house thrown up by a vast industry chock full of professionals. It’s an interesting question. Sadly, unlike a dumb dress, a dumb house — a huge development of dumb houses — is there for a long time and forms the people who live there.
Suzette says
I love this bits and pieces!
Deirdre – brilliant to save the pizza for Sunday, and half baked, brilliant. I often serve it with salad on Saturday at lunch. Then Saturday evening I generally make a boat load of something (chicken, rice and gravy; gumbo; spaghetti; two dishes of lasagna; two shepherds pies) and have my Sunday meal already to warm up while we are in mass on Sunday, or when we get home.
I love talking groceries and meals!!!