Once upon a time, I made pizza every Saturday night. Pizza was such a Saturday night tradition that on our two trips to Europe with our children, we had to find pizza on Saturday night – in England, Germany, France, and finally, two Saturdays in Norway. Fortunately, pizza is an international food. Later, life became too much, and we started getting take-out – never delivered – Robert went and got it. This, however, caused Andy-our-neighbor-across-the-street (and indispensable friend) to kid us unmercifully about the delivery guy sneaking over the back fence to bring a “home-made” pizza.
Now that we are in West Virginia, an essential ingredient for traditional West Virginia pizza is easily available – Oliverio’s sweet peppers in tomato sauce. (We used to carry jars back to wherever we were and hoard them.) These are canned here in Clarksburg, the southern edge of the large northern West Virginia Italian community. There are other brands of peppers, but these are closest to the ones Bobby Belcastro’s mother made. I learned to make pizza from Bobby when we were college students. He was from Fairmont, and on Sundays he would go home from WVU, come back with his mother’s canned peppers, and make pizza.
Homemade pizza is so simple, it hardly needs a recipe, but here is how I do it.
Pizza
1 cup of whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry yeast
Mix the salt and flour in a medium-size bowl. Make a well in the flour and put in the yeast and water. Mix with a wooden spoon until the dough gathers up in a ball. Cover with a dish towel and let rise for 30 minutes or more. Knead briefly. Put a little olive oil on a 9-inch pizza pan, turn the dough in it to coat, and leave it to relax a few minutes. Stretch out to fill the pan.
Top with two cups of Oliverio’s sweet peppers in tomato sauce, Italian seasonings to your taste (I use basil, oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme, heavy on the oregano, which I think many commercial pizzas are short on), and 2 cups of shredded cheese – Mozzarella, Provolone, Parmesan, Romano, whatever.
Bake at 425° for 20 minutes. This feeds the two of us with leftovers for lunch the next day, but your mileage may differ.
I picked a mess of dandelion greens one weekend in March, when they were new and tender, and used a hot olive oil, garlic, and raisin dressing (fancy recipe from Epicurious).
Filed under: Food | 1 Comment
Letter to the President
Mr. President:
I am sure you are aware of this editorial by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203022.html
It outlines what you can do immediately to enforce existing law and regulation and end the travesty of mountaintop removal coal mining, and touches on the consequences it has had for the people of the southern coal fields.
I am a West Virginia native who left in 1978 to attend the University of Chicago and have only this year returned. West Virginia, the only state completely within Appalachia, has suffered the fate of a third-world country for a century. Even though coal mining is now a much smaller part of our economy, the coal companies do not have to pay the full cost of extracting the coal, and can spend a great deal on politicians and judges to keep it that way.
I was shocked by the conditions in the South Side of Chicago when I moved there; the southern coal fields of West Virginia are more shocking, because the people can be helped only if the land is not irretrievably destroyed. Please go and visit southern West Virginia. Visit the grade school threatened by sludge. Fly over the devastated mountains. Visit a “restored” mountaintop mine and listen to the silence of a destroyed ecosystem. Walk the streets of the communities. Then go visit the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, in the heart of the untouched mountains, and see what was and could be.
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You can write President Obama at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
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Turtles All the Way Down
Robert was outside moving the old bricks that were dumped next to the side of the house, so that he could get the ladder in there, so that he could work on the library window – the windows were not only painted shut, the bottoms had been caulked on the outside – so that we could go ahead and paint the woodwork in the library – but only after we have put on the second color coat and put down the shoe molding. It’s turtles all the way down.
This phrase in its present form is from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, with variations back through Bertrand Russell, William James, and Thoreau, who cites a Hindu myth that the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a turtle. The question is, of course, “What supports the turtle?” I often quoted the phrase in my career as a programmer and systems analyst, where there often seemed to be an infinite regression of prerequisites or errors to be fixed, and progress was measured by new error messages which indicated that one problem had been fixed and giving a clue to the next one.
As long as he had moved the bricks, I decided to try cleaning up the rest of that area. There was what appeared to be the edge of a concrete slab beside the house. So I got the hoe and started uncovering it (after removing another ton of English ivy) and it was clearly where the garbage cans used to be kept. Which was a much better place than they are now. And there was a huge pile of rocks under the ivy at the corner of the house, where they were directing water into the foundation. So we ended up re-sloping the dirt away from the house and building a set of shallow stone steps up to the the garbage can area.
During this Robert did get the second window in the library loose, so it opens more or less. Now we have to get the top sashes, which have dropped, unstuck, so we can raise the top sashes, stop the air leaks, and be able to lock the windows.
Someday we will be able to paint the woodwork.
Filed under: New Old House, News and Musings | 2 Comments
Now the Tale Can Be Told
2/19
We had an offer on our Texas house. Not a wonderful offer, but a starting point for negotiations. We immediately countered and held our breaths.
2/24
Breath-holding had become difficult. The buyers’ agent intimated they really couldn’t come up much. We said we would consider a counter-offer.
3/3
Having given up on a counter offer and continuing to strip wallpaper and other tasks, a counter arrived, closer to our asking price. After lots of discussion, we accepted. The title company asked for all our information.
3/11
The buyers hadn’t gotten an inspection yet and asked for an extension of their 7-day, “need no reason to cancel option” (for which they had paid a small amount, deductible from the price if the deal went through). We granted it. What followed was several roof inspections by the inspector, our roofer, the insurance adjuster, their roofer, a hailstorm, another option postponement, several amendments, and 119 e-mails (I didn’t keep track of the phone calls). I won’t even mention the hot-tub repair, which was not aided by the total lack of information on what the inspector thought was wrong with it.
3/27
We were in constant communication with Robin, our agent. Closing was supposed to be March 31 (postponed from March 17), but the buyers, having signed the “as-is” contract, were still trying to negotiate. We were all planning to check ourselves in to the nearest mental health facility if it ever closed. I alternated between “Que sera, sera”, pacing, anger, and despair.
4/3
Finally, the closing. We had had a lovely time the day before. The title company didn’t email us our documents to print, sign, and overnight back until 4:38 – and didn’t think to say beforehand they needed to be notarized. The UPS office closes at 6:30. We had already driven over there to make sure of the hours, location, and quickest route. Fortunately, Robert Googled and found that the public library had a notary, called to verify she was there, we printed, drove to the library, signed, copied, drove over to UPS, and were done by 6. The library notary and the UPS clerk were both wonderful; made up for the title company – who had had all our information for a week, and didn’t put it in the paperwork – we had to fill it in.
I wasn’t about to assume the deal was going to close until it did, but I did spend the waiting time on-line cancelling all the utilities, so I must have had faith. Finally, the title company notified us that the deal had “funded” , but the money didn’t show up in our account.
4/6
I was convinced that something would go wrong with the wire and would take additional days to straighten out – and that paying off our mortgage here was going to be a hassle. But the proceeds hit our bank account on Monday morning; the 1 p.m. closing hadn’t funded until after the wire transfer deadlline of 5 p.m. on Friday.
I spent 10 minutes on hold but got the payoff amount for our mortgage here and was told we could just walk into our nearest branch and pay it off – so we did and it was that easy. We went down to the bank and wrote a check and it’s done…
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Almost Heaven (8)
Morgantown is number 9 in the Small Cities Rankings – 2009 New Geography Best Cities for Job Growth, of 173 small cities in the country, and 13th among all cities. Charleston has moved from the small to medium cities category, and is 37 of 103 medium-sized metro areas, and 114 overall. Smaller job markets like Clarksburg and Parkersburg aren’t included.
Toledo, Hickory, NC, Sarasota, and Dayton, all places West Virginians long went in droves, are the bottom four medium-sized cities, and near the bottom overall.
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Small Things
This morning’s air was full of the barely visible. Clouds of infinitesimal gnats hovered above the lawn. Puzzling threads of rainbow drifted past, shimmering in the early sun. At last I saw the tiny spiders hanging at the end of each one.
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The Vision Thing
This is my response to a post on New Geography to “Take the funding decisions out of the hands of elected officials and policy makers, and place it unfettered in the hands of a blue-ribbon panel of experts from a broad range of disciplines.”
The transcontinental railroad did not come from a presidential vision or from a contest for the best idea to unite the nation. Neither did public high schools, which developed over generations. No-one said “If we send returning veterans to college, it will create the largest middle-class in history.” The interstate highways came from Eisenhower’s vision, true, but it was a vision for better military supply lines, not a vision of California lettuce in New York. Who knows what Kennedy’s vision really was for the moon program? It was a response to the imminent Soviet domination of space. It gave us Tang, but the computer revolution was well under way, fueled by business as well as military needs, long before the space program.
Kennedy is not remembered for envisioning specific innovations – he is remembered for saying “Ask not…” Even FDR’s New Deal was not a specific vision for the future; the various programs built or repaired infrastructure, physical, regulatory, and social, that eventually enabled individuals and businesses to build and innovate.
The end of the sentence “Take the funding decisions out of the hands of elected officials and policy makers, and place it unfettered in the hands of a blue-ribbon panel of experts from a broad range of disciplines” should instead be “in the hands of the people.” The current stimulus efforts put funding, for the most part, in the hands of state and local governments, who are responsive to local needs, to a wide variety of “bureaucrats,” many of whom are experts, and individuals. Little by little, and sometimes with blinding speed, individuals will build the future, meeting the needs that they see with innovations. The Internet was built on an infrastructure funded by the Federal government, for military purposes. Individuals all over the world took the initiative in a thousand different ways to use the new facility and add value to it, to meet the needs they saw. No blue-ribbon panel nor president laid out a detailed vision of on-line discussions, electronic commerce and banking, e-books, e-music, e-video. And no blue-ribbon panel of experts said “If we put cell-phones in the hands of African farmers, they will be able to find out prices in the market.”
Obama’s role, every president’s role, is to remind us of this, encourage us, remove barriers and provide infrastructure. It is to give us the materials, not the blueprint.
Filed under: News and Musings | 2 Comments
The Environmental Protection Agency has issued letters to the Army Corps of Engineers recommending denial of permits for two mountaintop removal mines in Pike County, Kentucky and Logan County, West Virginia and calling for further mitigation plans and environmental review. The letter for the West Virginia application emphasizes that the EPA has “the authority to prohibit the issuance of a permit to fill waters of the United States if it is determined that such a discharge will have an unacceptable adverse effect on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas (including spawning and breeding areas), wildlife, or recreational areas.” The Kentucky letter calls for permanent conservation easements or deed restrictions “to cover all waterways in avoided valleys within the permit boundaries as well as all restoration stream reaches to prevent future impacts from coal mining.”
The EPA will be reviewing more mining permit requests.
See the press release and the letters for more information:
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Juncos
Today was cool, but bright and sunny. The yard was full of juncos, the first we’ve seen. In my childhood they were winter birds at the feeder with the titmice and chickadees. The first daffodils are blooming, down over the hill in the far corner of the yard. I think I spotted the groundhog, and a doe was grazing. All were a nice break from patching the plaster (finally – I had been procrastinating) in the soon-to-be library.
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Almost Heaven (7)
Pleasants County, West Virginia, was recently ranked as the 6th best county to raise a family in the Southeast by the Progressive Farmer.
Filed under: Almost Heaven, News and Musings | Leave a Comment
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