DEEP DISH PIZZA DOUGH

1 C milk
1 tsp yeast
1 tsp honey (sugar)
1 tsp sea salt
¼ C olive oil
2 ½ C soft white flour (all purpose)

Scald the milk; cool to 110*. OK – simply put get your milk to 110* so it will activate yeast.

Dissolve yeast in warm milk, add honey. Beat in 1 C of flour. Cover and let set for 30 min – 2 hours.

Add sea salt, olive oil, and remaining flour (add spices if you want or knead them in later – or leave them out).

Knead – mixer – 4 minutes; or stir about 6 minutes by hand with a wooden spoon. The dough will be soft and sticky….much more so than bread dough.

Form into a ball on a well floured surface. If it is to soft to form a ball, knead in some more flour…this is where I dumped garlic and organic Italian Seasoning from Frontier (rosemary, marjoram, oregano, thyme, basil etc).

Grease bowl, roll the dough in greased bowl to coat. Cover with towel. Let rise in warm spot until doubled in size, about 30 minutes.

Place pizza stone in lowest position in oven. Heat oven to 500* while dough is rising.

Oil a 13 x 9 in pan (we used a 12 inch cast iron skillet). Gently spread dough to evenly cover bottom of pan. Do not beat dough down before spreading in man. Tip: work with wet hands.

Spread sauce on top (approx 1 ½ C)

Add cheese mixture (we used Muenster, Mozzarella and Cheddar – about a lb) and other toppings.

Place your pan of pizza on top of your preheated stone. Yes, you read it right. Turn oven down to 375*. Bake 20 – 25 minutes, until crust is browned through.

Remove from oven and let set up about 5 minutes before cutting.

*THIS is now Jamin and my favorite dough recipe. We are pathetic pan pizza lovers. Others in our home like the recipe we posted last week better. I think that if you like pan pizza you’ll LOVE this one. It was chewy but didn’t rise like bread…..It really didn’t taste like bread – it was much sweeter. The possibilities are endless for this one. LOL Again it may be the technique more than recipe if you have a recipe you like.

This would be delicious as a pizza bread: poke pieces of black olives, garlic, and fresh basil into the dough, rube with olive oil, and sprinkle with coarse salt before baking.

OK - I've been having trouble uploading photos for days...and the ones I want to upload still won't - but it appears that photos of Staica will. Here she hangs from the table...a new trick of hers....sigh.

Friday continued

In our home Friday nights mean PIZZA. I am actually setting aside the money each week that we would have spent on buying pizza. Jamin has taken to this with gusto. He has the dough in the fridge by Wed afternoon each week.

Last night he asked me to handle the “pan pizza”. He had the recipe and technique that I was to follow. I am enjoying something we can do together. I sort of bombed with the weight training – I’m a disappointment. My wrist gives out way to early these days. I also am not a runner these days! BUT I can walk with him in the evenings and I can cook with him. LOL

Equipped with the recipe I began. I try so hard to stay to the recipe. I did fairly well….I only “dumped” some wonderful spices into the dough. He asked me to make my BBQ sauce. I did. He deviated from the tips from the pizza queen by asking me to make the pan pizza in my big cast iron skillet (it called for a 9 x 13 pan). I topped the dough with my sauce, chicken, Muenster (monster) cheese, cheddar cheese & mozzarella I think – whatever Jamin gave me – onions and red peppers. It was GREAT! We were thrilled to find the pan pizza secret…now we are happy with pizza making. WELL o.k. I’m totally satisfied with it. The little ones gave his cheese pizza a “thumbs up”. Jamin will continue to tweak – but that’s o.k.

After dinner we headed out to feed the deer at the end of our street. I think I mentioned all the new babies. They are almost fearless. They come very close to us….mother hanging back…which we thought strange. There are two male deer sporting new antlers who stage a fight for us each night. I had found a cache that was .5 from our home. We thought it may be in the deer field…but it was on the other side of the field….so we walked around to find it. By the time we got to the spot it was dark. We’ll have to walk down and try to find it during the day some time.

We also discovered a human male obviously in a midlife crisis. Mike, they live at the home with the fountain we admire. This man was in his sporty firebird and racing around like a mad man we had to jump out of his way twice…..I nearly knocked on his door to discuss this issue with him - but saner mind prevailed.

We were excited to discover that THREE Netflix movies had arrived. We watched “Miracle” – the story of the 1980 USA hockey team. It was good. It was fun to watch the news clips and commercial blurbs in it. I was hearing comments about the era…..until I said, “yeah – we thought we were cool and looking back we were a bit strange…but stranger still YOUR generation is copying our styles – go retro!” ::::snort::: We also watched a couple of episodes of Hogan’s Heroes. I’m excited because I ordered a disc of “Here’s Lucy”. I plan to begin watching those and going to bed before mid-night…hoping they’ll put me to sleep. LOL

Technically – Friday is now over and Saturday has begun. I’ve got two little ones in the room with me. Stacia woke up in the middle of the night for the first time in a week or so…but she’s down now and I’m heading back for bed.

Choosing Joy is getting much easier the last couple of days. I’ve taken my “self” firmly in hand. I think it will be MUCH easier when the girls ARRIVE in WA and quit the driving part of this. OH for those who know us from AK…..the girls are staying with Tom and Corinna (SP!). They’ve been able to see Frances and her daughters, and Elise and Susan as well. I got to talk to Frances when I was trying to track them down after their first day of driving. She told me she was surprised we were letting them drive out alone….I told her if Mike was stateside it wouldn’t have happened…I would have gone out with them…but they were excited for this step. LOL

PRAYER REQUEST

Our girls are in CO. It has begun to snow. They leave tomorrow to drive across CO, WY and MT. They have no snow tires - they are in WA. They have very little experience driving on snow and none going over big passes in the snow and ice. Please be praying for them on Saturday and Sunday.

PLAY STATION – WooHOO!

Zander has earned 30 – 60 minutes of Play Station time. I really thought and prayed about how to handle this after posting about last Saturday’s obsession.

I think it is fine for him to play for a reasonable amount of time 2 times a week. On the trip, when we were giving him tickets to teach him instant obedience, he earned 20 tickets a day. I set his goal at 60 tickets for 30 – 60 minutes of play time (others play with him). He has been GOOD and done what I asked, but it took him all week to earn the 60. We may lower it so that he earns it in 3 days.

In praying about this I wanted to be sure the tickets were not punitive. I was aiming for reality discipline/training. The things that earn him tickets are the things that he “slides” from when he’s “off program”. In this way, when he’s having a good day and can HANDLE the PS he has earned it…and if he’s having a bad time, he won’t be able to handle the screen time and he doesn’t earn it.

I don’t give him many tickets any longer for instant obedience. He really has that down. I do give him tickets for making his bed, getting dressed and KEEPING his clothes on all day, brushing his teeth, cleaning his room….etc. You know – those “social things”. An unexpected benefit of this is that he has kept his clothes ON every day ALL week. He has a sensory thing and really has trouble with clothes.

Here Zander shows off his tickets!

I thought it was cool that Josiah came up with the idea of copying the tickets on to sheets of paper. Then we only have to glue a ticket on, he doesn’t loose them, and we can all watch his progression.


Arielle and Nolan are currently earning tickets towards a BIG prize. When they earn 500 tickets Arielle will get a Kit Doll and Nolan will get a robotic dinosaur. They get tickets for eating fruits and vegetables and for trying a new dish. {G} At this rate it looks like it will take them far over a year to earn their goals…an apple a day. :::snort::: I really thought they could do it in 3 months.

Now for those of you who think we are bribing the kids….I disagree. We are training them. I LOVE this. Within one week Zander was obeying instantly and didn’t need tickets any longer for that. Yes, he still has “days” but we deal with it. We also noticed that he DID obey a lot during the day….giving him a ticket for good behavior instead of watching for bad behavior changed the atmosphere of our home for the better. LOL I don’t know, the food one is more like bribing…..but it was a price we are willing to pay…and their choices will determine how long it takes them to reach their dream…so it is still reality discipline/training….

I’VE BEEN SNAKE BIT!!!!

Or at least I thought I was. It turns out I was only cacti bit on the last cache of our day. It hurt…and I couldn’t see a thing…but when we got my shoe off….we found it. We really were doing “urban caches” today…..but this last one was up on a bluff overlooking the Concho river. It was an old home site and the cactus had taken over. All but Josiah gave up – he found it! At one point he slipped and fell – I had visions of having to go to the ER. “Josiah’s accident was private….very private” as the local bill board says. :::snort:::

To back up – this was a productive day for us. Josiah showed me the trick to finding caches for us that were in the SAME area. No more driving to hills behind the lake and then to Wall in the same day! :::snort::: While Josiah and Jamin worked: I watched the little ones, gave them a pep talk, found books for the first two weeks of school that the library had, ordered a couple of books from Amazon and found caches that centered in three areas of town. The areas are around our home, in a North park that we have never been to, and down by the river, where Kid’s Kingdom is. Adrienne called and wondered if we could meet at Kids Kingdom today. I told her we were going to cache but we’d drop by for an “hour or so”. We began. We found 3 cache’s….then got a call that Adrienne was going to be later than expected. Found another cache and went to the park. Kelly and children were at the park. The younger ones and I stayed.

Josiah and Jamin took the library list and went to pick up books. Josiah loves to do this chore for me – I love to have a driver in town…I miss leisurely browsing a library. I may have to take a few hours once a month and get out by myself to do this sort of thing. One book I was glad the library had was “The Great Feast of Redwall”. This is a picture book by the author of the Redwall series. My older boys have read this. My younger ones have not. We have been invited to a Redwall feast so I wanted to get the younger ones a bit more familiar with the happening of Redwall.

Adrienne and children arrived at the park and we visited while they played. The older boys came back and went to find a cache that was right down by where we were.

It was fun that Mandy and Martin showed up. She told me I had the “most distinctive…” I expected to hear vehicle as folks always know where I’ve been because they note the van. She said “family”. It seems she was driving over the bridge, looked down and saw the boys. LOL It was fun to visit with her for a few minutes. Remember, that her family just moved here earlier this month. Her dh is our newest chaplain. We talked about getting together for breakfast. The TLF (Temporary Lodging Facilities) are finally starting to close in on her. She’s a trooper – they close in on me much quicker.


After the park, we went to find one more cache that we had looked for earlier in the day. We were within 500 feet – but it was across a river. We found it – it was the one above.
Mike reminded me this a.m. that our goal was 120 caches by Jan 1st. Hmmm…..he is sure we can’t make it. We are accepting the challenge. We found six more today. I am in communication with a man who makes geonickels. I want him to put our AK logo on a wooden coin for us to leave spots. OH – Arielle got a beautiful bracelet today. I’m thinking we need to get supplies and make a bunch to leave in caches. She was thrilled to see something besides plastic spiders, frogs and super balls. We had left a couple in our first caches and they went FAST.

As I looked for the way home I said, “Does anyone know which direction to go?” and Zander yelled, “FOR – WARD, MOM!” Jamin commented that that is the only direction Zander knows…..and I must add it is always full speed ahead….but this day we wore him out!

On to the evening.

Arielle & Nolan on the last cache of the day

Cy finds it & brings it up to us!

Ah bummer - 3rd photo won't upload. I'm about to try another blog hosting company.