Put an egg on it

Okay, here is the finished pizza!  I actually ended up baking these at 6:10 am before heading off to work at 6:30 am, grabbing a hot slice for my breakfast on the go. So, there is a testament to how easy they are to whip up.  One batch of the whole wheat crust made two medium-ish pizzas.

Toppings (from bottom to top):

Mozzarella

Fresh tomatoes

Crushed garlic

Ricotta

There was another pie with caramelized onions and basil from my garden as well, but it got eaten too quickly to take photos of.

I ate my slice of pizza topped with a mixed green salad and a fried egg = best dinner ever.

For the wee ones…

Even better than the people you love finding love, is when the people you love start having children, lovely children you can spoil and snuggle and then send home.  I have two lovely sets of friends that I owe baby gifts.  Carman and Emmy just had their wee one last week, while Val and Jimmy had their baby, er, a year ago? (In my defense, their gift took a year to make and I am in nursing school).  Okay, so timely gifts are not my strong suit.  Clearly.

For Carman and Emmy, I whipped up a trio of onesies perfect for their little man.

For Jimmy and Val’s sweet little girl, I made a quilt that follows no pattern, but I love it.  Maybe enough to keep it.   

My favorite square is this little orange one, that has little white elephants playing croquet.

It’s in the mix

Okay, so I have always liked to bake, come from a long, long line of bakers, was born with mixer in hand.  I did my first science project (you know the ones, the tri-fold boards in the school gymnasium and the homemade robots) on the properties of yeast in bread.  My childhood was a timeline of excellent baked goods.  My mother would greet us with homemade cinnamon swirl bread when we got home from school and would always having a batch of her famous cookies in the oven.  I associate Sunday mornings with my mom baking biscuits in her sunshiny kitchen.  My mom has a special new cookie that she makes for each of her grandchildren (Amelia = Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk, Liam =  Pumpkin Snickerdoodle, Emmaline = Emma Bean Sugar Cookies).  In the Oakes family, we feed the people we love.  There are some secret family recipes, such as Grandma’s banana bread (don’t worry, I am going to track it down), Mom’s oatmeal chocolate-chip butterscotch cookie, my brother’s focaccia.  All that to say, the men and women of my family are Jedi masters of baking.  I hope to keep up the tradition.

My grandma’s a dish.

Inevitably in a family of bakers there is a constant search for the BEST recipe (or really the best of anything: we have done trials from soft-serve to jelly beans to hamburgers, in the quest for the best). On our hunt for the best pizza crust, we inevitably settled on King Arthurs recipe as the top-notch-perfect-to-bake-or-freeze-for-later pizza crust.  Today, however, I am trying out their whole wheat version.  I like the “toss it all in the bowl” mentality of this recipe, which is perfect for a busy Sunday morning.  I, as a rule, always like to activate my yeast in a separate bowl, as I am a little paranoid I may not get it right and ending up with a flat brick of bread.  But today, calming breath, I am going to have a little faith that the bread will rise, even without this extra step.  This dough has a long rising time of 18 hours, which is probably the key to what makes it delicious, as whole wheat tends to be a bit heavier.  I will keep you posted on the results.

Other Sunday morning things I love: a fried egg.  This morning its a’top a bowl of kale, made while the dough was resting. Tomorrow, maybe a fried egg a’top a pizza?