Beast of the Yeast

I don't feature enough pizza on this blog.  Don't you think?  As far as I'm concerned, pizza is the Perfect Food.  I mean, it's bread, with anything you want on it.  How could that not be perfect?  Okay, so sandwiches are bread with anything you want on it, but I guess the sandwich is a good representation of the phrase 'familiarity breeds contempt'. 


Anyway, last weekend I made a pizza.  And when I say 'made', I mean made from scratch.  Not such a big deal on a Sunday, when you don't have to worry about much and you can hang out with your dough as it rises, listening to cool tunes while the Lad blats away at zombies from his horse (obviously, that's an Xbox thing - I got him Red Undead Redemption for Christmas, and he's having a ball with it - but imagine if it was real!  Zombie Apocalypse comes to New Zealand!)  I have to say, getting back on topic, that bread making is an awesome fun thing to do.  I know a lot of people think that it's a big onerous effort, but it's really not.  Actually, the worst thing for me is finding a warm enough place for the yeast to work its magic, as our house is pretty terminally cold.  In the winter I put it on one of our oil fin heaters (with the heater on low, and not in a plastic container - I did pay attention sometimes when my Dad was telling me about conductivity.  Plus, even a dummy like me knows that plastic is so not a good flavour).  My new trick is to put the dough in a metal bowl in a sink full of not-quite-burny hot water. 

But that was the weekend, and this is now.  Well, yesterday.

Instant yeast = instant good

These little puppies are from a recipe entitled 'Moroccan Fried Flatbread', which my Gran sent to me ages ago - so I can't even tell you about the provenance of the original recipe.  Maybe Cuisine magazine?  Anyway,  I'm not sure how Moroccan they are exactly, but if they are, I want to go to there (in the words of Liz Lemon), because any nation that has a type of fried bread named after them deserves a visit.  Oh yeah, and this is what they look like cooked up and ready to eat -

Crunchy and delicious

If you can get the instant sachet yeast it makes these things even simpler to do - it's the only kind of yeast I buy now (even though I do have some active yeast that I bought during an abortive attempt at making home made ginger beer... one word can describe that... FAIL!)  And these flatbreads have the added bonus of being fried, not baked, so they soak up all the delicious oil (I use peanut oil to fry these, but you could really use anything.  Maybe I'll try butter next time).  So not good for you, though I'm sure all that oily white bread action is good for the soul.  Somehow.

In other news, my little sister is coming to town in a few weeks, so that is exciting.  She's coming to town for a few days just on her own, so I've got time off work to sloth around with her and eat cake and drink wine and all that good shit.  Library school starts up at the end of the month, and I did what I'd been dreading - went and got all the textbooks out of the library (the library that I work at, not the library of where I'll be studying) so that I could have a flick through, just to mentally gird my loins, you know?  And you know what?  It wasn't that bad.  I was worried that I'd only understand one word in five, but as I'm flicking through them at random, I'm sort of getting into it.  Which has to be a good sign. 

And speaking of Little Sister, if we were (ha!  the segue!) - today it's only twenty days until Queens of the Stone Age's Wellington gig.  Not that I'm, you know, hopelessly excited about it or anything.  Though I did find out that High on Fire are going to be in town the same day, which is a bit of a pain, but.... but... this is QotSA.  I'm hoping against hope they'll play lots of stuff from their self-titled album, but really those guys always seem to do a good show, and I'm totally happy that they've even made it all the way out to lil' ol' NZ.  February sure is shaping up to be a good 'un.