Yo, happy new year!

You need hair and eye protection when baking pizza in a cob oven. It makes me look 10x hipper than usual.

For the first time in over a year (and the second time ever), I fired up our pizza oven on Saturday, inspired by a class I took from Kristin Ferguson Smith when we were in Los Angeles last week. I learned so much crust technique in that class I can’t even begin to cover it here. Plus, to paraphrase Aam Gopnik, there’s no bore like a bread bore. (Read his piece if you haven't already; it's wonderful.)   Here’s what I will say: We drove home from L.A. and I went straight to the refrigerator to revive my languishing sourdough starter. I fed it twice a day for three days until it was active and bubbly and then made pizza dough. Kristin’s recipe is similar to the Mozza recipe, but she calls for sourdough starter and has you knead the dough for roughly 8 times as long. Like, up to 45 minutes in the mixer. Does that shock you? It shocked me. But it works. You knead the hell out of that dough and only when it passes the windowpane test can you quit. I have never made better pizza crust. It’s possible I’ve never eaten better pizza crust.  

As for the oven, it performed beautifully. I plastered it a few months ago but ran out of plaster before it was completely covered, so there’s a little patch at the back to tackle soon. Maybe in 2015. The oven’s dimensions are wrong for optimal burning and there are some funky cosmetic details, but I am proud. I am also proud that I didn’t burn the house down while igniting the fire on Saturday without matches or lighter. How did I manage this? I’ll let you use your imagination. What I did was breathtakingly stupid, but I got away with it and will never, ever do it again. 

It was Mark's birthday, so my sister and her family came over to celebrate. Justine and I stood out there in the dusk and talked and made pizzas while our husbands happily watched football upstairs and foolishly complained that they don’t like clams on their pizzas and our four kids decorated Mark’s birthday cake. It was a perfect evening and I don’t say that very often. 

 While I like to think Justine is gazing up at me with the admiration of a younger sister,  there are other possible interpretations.  I bought the goggles for making soap a few years ago, but am never going to make soap and now use them primarily for chopping onions, a useful tip from Smitten Kitchen. For pizza purposes, sun glasses work just as well, but goggles make you look more impressive (or something.) The oven's doorway is too big. I made a mistake in the planning and when I realized what I'd done, it was too late. This tormented me for a while, but now I'm ok with it. Even if it doesn't retain as much heat as it should, the oven works fine. It was a hard project, but ultimately very satisfying. 

Tonight, I will begin cooking five recipes from Cowgirl Creamery Cooks, which Mark gave me for Christmas. It’s a new book, both to me and to the world. The parmesan broth is already made. 

On fire

We're getting there.

I apologize for my absence. Our household seemed to be falling apart and I decided to devote 2 weeks to getting our lives in order and what that meant was very little cooking or blogging. I started volunteering at the middle school lunch counter, sawed down a small tree, bought earthquake insurance, finished our taxes, acquired a shredder, baked 2 birthday cakes, panned a novel that Janet Maslin loved, spent $40 on drawer organizers at the Container Store, organized drawers, paid delinquent bills, went to Naomi Duguid's talk at Omnivore Books (and bought her new book, Burma, which looks terrific), rewired 3 lamps, and "sold" my mother's car, which has languished in our driveway for the last 30 months. I waited so long to sell that sucker that Isabel grew up and in 65 days will be eligible for a driver's license so I am buying my sister out.

I also worked on our backyard oven. We left this riveting saga at the point where Owen and I had completed construction of a sturdy, well-insulated platform. Then we went to India. Then I went to Utah. Then I came back and, with the help of my neighbor Bill and his rock saw, built an elegant brick arch for the door.

Right about here, Owen lost all interest in the oven.

Once the mortar on the arch had set, I mounded damp sand behind it upon a layer of fire bricks.

harder than it looks

After collapsing repeatedly, the sand eventually held a dome shape. I did not enjoy this step and missed Owen's company.

The next day, I mixed a stiff dough of sand, clay, and, water to cover the sand dome. Mark helped with this part, as did Bill and his wife, Joan, and I am eternally grateful to the three of them because if I'd had to do this by myself, I might be in a wheelchair now. It was hard.

wet clay oven

Two days later, the clay dome felt firm to the touch, so I scooped out all the sand. The hollow dome dried some more. It cracked. I patched it up. It dried some more. This morning I built a fire inside and the dome grew fiercely hot and smoke (or steam?) started seeping out of hairline fissures. I'm not sure what to do about that, as the literature is vague on the topic. Cob oven literature is vague on many topics.

Tomorrow, I'm going to insulate the oven with a thick paste of clay and straw. After that: plaster. If all goes well,  I'll try to make pizza on Sunday. I sure hope it's delicious! Then I can cross this epic project off my to-do list and will really be caught up.

Just a couple of dishes

The crust on the blueberry almond tart from Chocolate and Zucchini is like a shortbread cookie. The filling has intense blueberry flavor without being at all gloppy, which is sometimes the case with pie. It is tidy to eat; you can pick up a slice with your fingers. The recipe is here and you should make it before the end of blueberry season because it is very delicious.

My meatball gold standard is still the meatball from Nancy Silverton's Mozza, but the Chocolate and Zucchini lamb-and-prune meatballs are also lovely -- sweet, delicate, and Middle Eastern, as opposed to brawny, zesty, and Italian. They're also easy. (Silverton's meatballs are a production.) Recipe is here.

zucchini with olives at left

Interesting that while I'm indifferent to both chocolate and zucchini, I like Chocolate and Zucchini so much. I look at almost every recipe and think, I could make that tonight. And I might not even have to to go to the supermarket! And I can start 30 minutes before we want to eat! The recipes are simple and reasonable and they all work, perfect for this weird phase in my cooking life when I'm more interested in masonry than pastry.

The state of the oven:

People keep thinking the brick base is the oven itself, but it's not. It's just the platform that will hold the oven. The opening in the brick is for wood storage and later we'll bolt molding on so it doesn't look so raggedy. I was hoping to be further along with this by now, but I don't think we'll be baking pizza until September.

I have real kitchen swagger!

pan bagnat

I've now made all the sandwiches from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook, and it gets an A+ for sandwiches. In my view, any book that reminds me how good homemade sandwiches are, how you can get protein, starch, vegetable, and salad in a single easy, cheap package and call it dinner deserves a gold star.

pan bagnat. Classic Provencal sandwich featuring tuna, tomato, olives, olive oil, and greens on baguette. (Or focaccia.) Wet, zesty, refreshing. Much loved by all. I'll make this again for sure.

curried turkey sandwich. Turkey chopped and mixed with curry powder, goat cheese, and raisins. Yellow and softly spicy. Much loved by my husband and me, but not Owen, who objected to the raisins. He is silly. I'll make this again after Thanksgiving.

cantal cheese sandwich with mushrooms. My personal favorite. You cook cremini mushrooms until soft and broil them on bread with cheese. (She calls for cantal, which I've never encountered, so I used tomme.) Much loved by all. Owen apparently didn't notice he was eating mushrooms. I'll make this again.

And last night I served her sardine club sandwich. You spread toast with tomato jam (she offers a recipe, but I used the leftover jam from last month's Mourad dinner), goat cheese, and mashed sardines. Add some greenery. She calls for an extra slice of bread in the middle of all this, but I skipped that. Very tasty, though I probably won't make it again as Isabel wanted to eat neither sardines nor tomato jam. 

I also baked an excellent ricotta poundcake from Dolce Italiano last week. Ricotta is strange. It's so bland on its own, and yet baked in this cake you could taste it clearly through the sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs. This is a wonderful cake. You should make it. The recipe is here.

It looked like this on the first day:

And like this on the second:

And I hardly ate any! As you can see, I baked it in a bundt pan rather than a loaf pan. I also omitted the vanilla bean and used 1 tablespoon of vanilla, and as I didn't have cake flour,  I used all-purpose.

I also reviewed a book for the first time in ages.

On another subject -- perhaps more exciting than sandwiches and poundcake? you think? --  I cooked in front of TV cameras all day Thursday and Friday. The Food Network was making a so-called "sizzle tape" to see if my eccentric cooking life and mild personality have any TV potential.

Whatever! It was fun. I made Nancy Silverton's pizza dough (the best), pizza, marinara sauce, goat's milk mozzarella (not my best; Natalie's milk was off), chevre, pesto, graham crackers, frozen yogurt, flour tortillas, pork-apple sausage patties, croutons, salad. I also milked the goat, talked incessantly, pretended to collect eggs, applied and reapplied lipstick, ate, opined, served a big dinner to my extended family, wished I weighed 12 pounds less.

 One of the cameramen said I had "real kitchen swagger." That made my week.

Then everyone left. Yesterday morning, Owen and I returned to work on the oven. Props to friends Melanie, Tom, and Isaiah for helping mix disgusting, squelching cob with their feet. Twas no walk in the park.

75% of my crew

I'm thinking everyone is bored hearing about my oven. Well, it will stop soon. We've put down the clay sub-floor, built a cob wall around it for insulation, and today we'll put down the actual oven floor, construct a brick arch for the door, and, if we're energetic, build the sand dome and cover it with cob. Then it's a sprint to the finish line.

I mean, really, what does Nigella have that I don't?

 Oh, be quiet.

And I did not lose a single pound

You'll want to keep your distance when you see this.

I was meaning to post a lot sooner, but became busy with work and then got sick. I still don't feel like talking about food, so I'm going to save recent cooking experiences for a subsequent post when I can do them justice.

However, I will happily talk about ovens.

Last weekend, Owen and I chose our oven site. It is the correct distance from the fence as dictated by the county. We put down cement pavers to create a level surface.

You have no idea how hard this was.

It looks like it would be about as complex as setting the table, but took us almost an entire day. Getting cement pavers to sit level on a sloping piece of rocky ground when you have no upper body strength or geometry skillz? Humbling. We ended up using a carpenter's level, which I'd never done before. I assure you, those mothers are now level.

After we were through for the day, Owen and I ended up watching Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. No comment. I bring it up only because I was preoccupied throughout by all the perfectly flat stone surfaces in the ancient world. Humans are so smart.

2. The next day, we mixed mortar, inhaled mortar powder, and started laying the brick platform for the oven.

That is not the vessel in which you want to mix mortar.

What a mess. What a learning curve

A few times I got my hands coated in mortar. If I rub them together five days later it still feels like they underwent some expensive and brutal dermabrasion. We worked hard for a few hours and I ruined my favorite pair of jeans and then it was time to drive Owen to sleep-away camp.

where we left it

Not exactly tearing through this project, are we? It looks good from a distance, very bad close up. But I have kicked it as hard as I could and the structure is solid, so that's what really matters.

We will resume on Saturday, after Owen returns. Isabel comes home on Monday. We have missed her. I'm ready for us all to be under one roof again.

Look what the chickens have done to our rhubarb.

Supposedly poisonous, but I see no signs of illness among the hens.

 I am trying to decide whether to construct more barriers, or clip wings.

In case you missed it, I wrote a review of ice cream books for Slate that you can read here.

It's GOING to take a village

The wrong day to wear the Anthropologie tank top.

On Saturday as Owen and I were leaving for the cob oven-building workshop, my husband said, "I hope it isn't too much fun. I really don't want you to build an oven in our yard." 

He said it kindly. I think he knows he's playing a thankless but necessary role in the sitcom of our marriage. I think he deserves an Emmy. 

The workshop was held in a mysterious new art/garden/sustainable living center a mile from our house. I don't understand the business plan at all, but they now have a fabulous new oven courtesy of our workshop. Is that the business plan? People pay for workshops in which they build the center's infrastructure? Shrewd! In a few days the clay will be dry, they'll scoop out the sand, coat it with plaster, fire up the oven to 800 degrees F, and start baking phenomenal pizzas.

The plank-topped platform in back is what we started with.

The workshop was fascinating on many levels, starting with the people who teach and take cob oven building works. Let me assure you, the dream of the '60s is alive in cob oven-building workshops. Two beverage stories to illustrate my point. 1. A gentle young man was drinking a "smoothie"(his word) that consisted of crushed blackberries and plums he'd foraged from around town. That was it: mashed up fruit he'd picked on the side of the road. In a Mason jar. 2. Midafternoon when an older man in the class asked whether there was anywhere around he might buy a cappuccino, there fell an awkward silence. It dawned on me that the coordinator didn't want to mention that there's a Starbucks right across the street. Finally, after saying there wasn't really any place around to get coffee, he almost apologetically mentioned the Starbucks. The older man -- maybe the only participant there who was older than I -- happily went off to to procure his cappuccino.

As to the oven, "cob" is the old English word for durable, sustainable earthen material that was once widely used in construction. I dislike the word "cob." I don't know why. What to call a cob oven if you dislike the word "cob?" "Earth" sounds sanctimonious. "Mud" sounds dumpy. Clay?

In any case, we mixed a lot of cob, stomping to a Pandora station that played folksy songs in Spanish.

Owen and some other cats mixing cob.

The teacher sort of danced on his tiptoes in the cob, but everyone else just shuffled.

We made a round, hollow base for the oven that we filled with empty Jim Beam and kombucha bottles.

I dutifully opened a bottle of wine last night to use in our oven.

It was subsequently packed full of a perlite-earth mixture, topped with a smooth layer of sand, and then the brick floor went down. Sorry for the scant photos; I had to wash my hands every time I took out the camera.

Over the brick floor, we mounded a dome of damp sand.

We smoothed it out a lot after this photo was taken.

Then we shaped the oven itself out of cob, over the sand. No photos of this process whatsoever. I should be fired. But I was living in the moment!

Somehow, by the end of the day, we had this.

Just like my mother, Owen has a passion for clay.

As I mentioned, when the cob is dry all the sand will be scooped out and you will see just a domed oven. It needs some prettification and plaster and I personally favor a brick arch to define the door (the teacher showed us how to do this.) Also, I don't love the beehive coils; I prefer a smooth dome. But I do think it's a beautiful little oven.

There are many, many details I couldn't write down because my hands were covered with cob and just a day later I can't remember them. What ratio of sand to clay for the base? For the dome?  How much? Mix it until its the texture of oatmeal? Or a milkshake? Etc. I wish I had a recipe, but I guess I'll figure it out as we go along. I have a lot of regular work this week, but Owen and I are going to forge ahead, try to get something done on the oven, however small, every day.