No roll pie crust

An hour or so away from making a quiche dinner the other day I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to bring home a frozen pie crust.  With a (thankfully) sleeping toddler upstairs there was no way I could correct that mistake in time for dinner, so I did a quick search for pie crust recipes, dark thoughts of slaving over a stubborn dough flitting through my mind, and I stumbled across this No Roll Pie Crust on Allrecipes.com.  I was a little hesitant but, with very little time and even less experience on hand, I decided to give it a try.

The recipe calls for 1.5 cups flour, .5 cups peanut oil, .25 cups ice water, and .5 tsp salt.   I substituted canola oil and used water from our fridge.  The directions couldn't be easier:  mix all ingredients together, then press out into pie pan, then fill (in our case with quiche) and bake.  Wow.  No way could this be any good, right?  Actually, we were pleasantly surprised.  It seemed light and flakey, although a little bland.  I might still be hesitant to use it with a sweet pie, but it was quite good with the quiche.  So, without really trying, we've scored yet another point on our road to independence from premade and preprocessed foods.

Homemade pizza

Over the past few months we have grown increasingly wary of processed foods.  Not only are many of these products higher in all those things we are trying to avoid, such as calories, fats, and sodium, but many of them also come with extra packaging (hard on the landfills and, until we know more about BPA, possilby harder on your health), relatively high price tags, and a greater exposure to unwanted additives.  One of our personal goals for this winter is to significantly cut down on the amount of processed foods that we consume.  Tonight's foray into homemade food territory found us making pizza...from the crust up. 

Having never made bread of any kind without the help of our handy little machine I wasn't sure how this experiment would go over, but I'd have to say it was an extremely successful outcome!  I did a little recipe research first and, after some mixing and matching, came up with the following:

3 cups whole wheat flour, one .25 ounce package yeast, 1 cup warm water, 2 tbsp shortening, 1 tbsp garlic powder, 1 tbsp basil

Mix ingredients in large bowl until dough forms, cover with towel and let sit for 30 minutes

Knead dough several times (easypizzacrusts.com said 6-8), then roll to the desired shape, size, and thickness

I then spread the dough on our pizza stone, formed the outer crust, and let my miniature helper assist with the toppings.  It baked for 25 minutes, and we should have let it sit for five before we cut it, but we were too eager.  Yum!  This is definitely a keeper, and we'll give it five stars because not only was it easy, it was really goood!

Here's where I have a confession to make, though, because for all our attempts at avoiding processed foods we used a pre-prepared pizza sauce (in our defence, however, it was an organic sauce from Muir Glen, who is known for their BPA free processing and canning), our olives came in a can (if anyone can tell me where to find black olives in any other way please let me know), the mushrooms came in a plastic container (again, I have yet to see mushrooms sold unfettered), and we used pre-shredded cheeses (albeit organic, but of course they'd been processed and packaged).  The more we try, the more we realize how much we have left to do.  At least the pizza was good.

To your health and ours

Since Calvin was born, and perhaps even before, we have been making changes in our daily life to reflect our evolving beliefs about our health, our world, and our well being.  While we feel strongly about some of these changes others are purely experimental, and lately some of our friends and friendly viewers have asked us to share our new experiments with them.  Thus, here we embark on another online journey, one that will revolve around sharing everything from recipes and cleaning tips to general green living ideas.  As with the main portion of our site (better known to some as the Calvin site) we welcome comments and invite anyone and everyone to leave their thoughts and ideas to share.  So welcome!  We dedicate this portion of the site to our health and to yours.