Five Week Hiatus

Well it's been five weeks since my last post, but I've now lost twenty-one pounds! Everything is right on track, but I know I can do more. I've learned more about what works and what doesn't, and I feel a lot better and more mobile than ever before. If this is what 300 pounds feels like, I can't wait until I hit the magic 200!

My concentration is now on eliminating all manner of night eating and getting to bed by midnight each night. The days of working until 3 or 6 AM are over. The consistent schedule will help a lot.

Thanksgiving was great. We had both sets of in-laws plus the Four Musketeers (David, Matt, Jimmy, and Mekail) and Sandy and her husband Michael for a cozy fourteen at Ted's Montana Grill. For $530 (which included a $106 tip for excellent service) I got to let someone else do the cooking, plus I didn't have a mountain of leftovers to burrough through afterward. No, just a nicely balanced meal expertly prepared. Ted's was great, but next year we might try the Colonnade. I never thought I'd have so much fun *not* cooking!

Learned how to make outstanding pizza dough, and how to make pizza an actual diet food, believe it or not. Everything from scratch -- I'm even milling my own whole wheat flour now! The flour and dough is from scratch, the pizza sauce is from scratch, the sausage is from scratch (so I can control the fat content), fresh veggies, fresh mozzarella balls sliced into medallions by hand. Hand-tossed, docked to prevent puffing, baked on a 500F stone for 8 minutes. Incredible.

The half-inch-thick wooden peels you get in consumer-oriented stores suck because you can't flick a fully-laden pizza from peel to stone without the toppings sliding all over the place, so I have a super-thin aluminum sheet peel with a long wooden handle coming from Fantes.com.

I'm also going to experiment with starting the docked dough undressed on a baking screen placed on the baking stone for four minutes to set the exterior surfaces, then dressing the pie and taking it off the baking screen and placing it directly on the baking stone to finish. Hopefully that will eliminate the unbaked dough the sauce sits on and make a finished pie that is both chewy and fully baked through and through. The reason why pizzerias don't do this is obviously because of the expense of time needed to fatz with everything, but this is home cooking for loved ones, so extra care is warranted, eh?

Now if only I can build a real brick pizza oven in the back yard...

KBO!