I’m not sure how the week got away from me but I didn’t do a lot of cooking. On Sunday I repeated the chicken and soba combo from Everyday Food (the recipe for which is now available on the magazine’s Web site), and on Monday I made pizza; the other nights we went out or had leftovers, and tonight I made pizza again. Monday was a holiday and I took time during the day to make pizza dough for the freezer; I tried to make it a little softer than usual to see if that made the texture better, but it made it harder to separate the frozen layers when it was time to thaw them. So I’ll experiment with that again when I don’t plan to freeze any dough, but I’ll stick with my usual texture for freezing. I learned something, and it still tasted good, and the texture wasn’t terrible, just not ideal, so I still count it as a success.
The coming week will probably be fairly busy as well. I will be browsing through some recipes tonight to see if there’s something fast I can try out, or I may repeat the beef and lettuce wraps–that was easy and fast. But next week I’m on vacation, so I hope to spend some time playing with longer-form recipes.
My subway reading this week has been Betty Fussell’s Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef. I’m learning a lot about the history of cattle ranching and the politics of meat, agriculture, and much more. I’ll offer a full review when I’m done, but I’m really enjoying it so far and recommend it.