Myriad Musings

Summer is HERE with its hellish heat, kids off school lazing around all day, envious me off to the lab where the ancient window Air Conditioners takes off every third day.  The kids would love interesting meals and I am loath to spend more than an hour in the kitchen.  Hubby has wisely chosen to eat at work this month. Meanwhile, I scrounge around for interesting recipes requiring minimal effort - the Perpetual Motion Machine of the cooking world.   This is my weekly schedule this summer - Cereal and Muffins/Quick breads or Cereal and Idlis for breakfast, rice + variety of lentils/beans/chickpeas+ vegetables+curds for lunch, One of my staples is the Olive Oil dough from Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day.  Nilgiris has stopped carrying Fresh Yeast in reasonable sized packages a.k.a. 100g.  I found Active Dry Yeast worked just as well!  Not just that, my Organic Atta produced no discernible change in flavour or texture, No More Maida in pizza! Yay! I did ...

My Son won the third price in one of his sporting events, I told him just the joy of winning should suffice but offered to pack lunch of his choice for a whole week.  Predictably, first choice was pizza. I ditched my Peter Reinhardt recipe via 101cookbooks for a 5 minute Artisan bread recipe.   I just made it a tad healthier with 40% whole wheat flour and used fresh yeast. I put out the dough as soon as I woke up today and got started on the quickest sauce possible, again from Heidi's 101 cook books. I unfortunately had to leave out the lemon zest, no lemon, no lime and no sweet lime :( The dough was a tad too tacky and I had to dust with quite a bit of APF to get it to a point where I could roll it.  I started rolling the dough, it was resisting, so I left it alone  I went ahead and chopped onions, tomatoes, capsicums and olives for the pizza.   I fried the vegetables (except tomato, olives) in a tsp of oil until softened.  By now the doug...