Healthy, Low Budget Homemade Pizza

I'm always in search of cheaper ways to get the foods that I like. Pizza is my absolute favorite, but easily becomes one of my most expensive (after sushi!). After seeing a recipe for homemade pizza dough and sauce, I decided I could give it a try. The most appealing part to me was that both recipes were simple, had generally inexpensive ingredients, and contained nothing in my list of foods and additives that I avoid.

I made the sauce and dough on a Sunday afternoon and refrigerated both until Pizza Night two days later. While both were quick to make, I'll definitely keep preparing them ahead of time. It just cuts that much more time off of the week-night preparation.

The pizza dough costs almost nothing, and the sauce makes enough for 4 recipes of the pizza dough. So freeze it!

I modified the sauce recipe a bit, to avoid buying expensive or unknown ingredients (a whole bottle of red wine, marjoram), and reduced the garlic by a couple of cloves. 10 cloves seemed like a lot, but I didn't want to give it a wimpy taste if it needed a lot of garlic. The finished sauce definitely tasted like garlic in the pan, but once cooked the garlic taste faded. All in all, I think it's an excellent sauce, even without two major ingredients! The fresh herbs were clipped straight from my indoor Aerogarden for a more down-home feel. Here's my modified recipe:

Homemade Pizza Sauce
6 cloves garlic, minced (organic)
2 oz tomato paste (organic)
1 28oz can diced tomatoes (organic)
1 cup water
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced
3 tablespoons fresh basil, minced
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt

Lightly sauté garlic in olive oil over medium heat. Add the rest of the ingredients, stir to combine, and heat for 1 minute. If refrigerating or freezing, allow sauce to cool before transferring to a airtight container (such as a ziploc bag). Keeps up to a week in the fridge. I suggest dividing it into 4 equal containers, freezing three of the containers, and keeping one for the first batch of pizza dough.

I followed the dough and cooking directions on the link. The outer crust cooked perfectly and was delicious. The dough under the sauce & toppings was a bit undercooked. I'm not sure if this was because I used a cookie sheet instead of a baking stone, or if I used too much sauce/cheese/toppings. I would definitely recommend using the cheese and toppings sparingly. It's easy to pile too much onto this pizza when it only needs a little bit.

All in all, both recipes are excellent. At $0.50 - $1 per pizza, I'm going to definitely make this again.

Cooking by craving, curiosity, or leftovers

I've just been introduced to what may very well be my new favorite food-site: CookThink.com. I'm geeky excited about browsing through this site to plan next week's meals.

Craving some good southern comfort food? A rhubarb infused desert? Gluten-free Italian dinner? How about a light summery dish of grilled chicken? You can search for them all, and discover just the recipe you need, complete with tantalizing pictures and short description.

To steal a line from their FAQ:

Cookthink is a personalized cooking and recipe website that helps you find recipes to suit your cravings - hence our tag line, "what are you craving?" Most of our recipes are for everyday meals that are easy to prepare and cook during a busy work week."

Each recipe offers suggestions for other recipes that match well, so that you can easily create a full-course meal from a single ingredient. It's also a great way to explore your own flavor tastes to discover foods you might not have known about.

The recipes are composed by a large group of chefs, food bloggers, cookbooks, etc. Plenty of recipe websites out there allow submissions by any visitor, which can lead to some very creative recipes, but can also lead to a cluttered list of terrible options. By only allowing a select group of authors, they can keep the recipes full of fresh, natural, and simple ingredients. This also means that I can easily stick to the fresh and natural (possibly organic) foods that I love!

Best of all, the entire service is free.

Taking apart the Sony Vaio VGN-FZ290 for cleaning

A few weeks ago my laptop began to overheat to the point that I couldn't even rest it on my legs. I could still hear the fan working, but the air coming out of the side vent was pitiful. My laptop is in decent condition, so the logical assumption is that the vent and/or fan is clogged with dust and just needs a quick cleaning. I'm always a bit nervous about taking apart laptops, so I evaluated my options:

1. Use an air-can on the vent and hope the dust scattering further into the computer doesn't wreck anything.
2. Invoke my warranty and have someone come over to "repair" it. The upside here is that if it's not just dust, they can fix it.
3. (Probably) void my warranty by opening it up myself and cleaning it out. This is much more interesting, and doesn't require me to coordinate with a repair person or ship it somewhere for a week.
   

Naturally, I chose option #3. I figured that if I messed something up, I could always drop it in the pool and invoke my "Accidental Warranty."

Getting down to the fan requires disassembling most of the laptop. Taking off the back cover and components was easy. It just consisted of removing a couple dozen screws.

When it came time to unclip the keyboard, I opted to search for useful directions. Breaking a plastic clip is a high possibility for someone as clumsy as me. Luckily, these directions (with pictures!) were easy to find:

Take apart a VGN-FZ220

Armed with the confidence of someone else's experience, I continued on. After thirty-five screws, tweezers, and a can of air, my laptop laid in pieces and I had a brand new pile of dust.




Problem fixed!