Bring Us Some Figgy Pizza

When Coley and I spotted fresh figs at the St. Phillips Plaza Farmer's Market last weekend, we snatched them up right away. About a year ago, our friend Linda brought fresh figs to our house for pizza-making night, and so I dug up this delicious fresh fig and fennel pizza from Food Blogga. The pizza was divine, and I've been dreaming about it ever since! Mmmm, caramelized figs, fennel, and shallots, with blue cheese and rosemary.... you know you want to try this one out.

Because of certain Christmas carols ("so bring us some figgy puuuuuuding...."), I thought figs were a winter fruit, and tried to find some this past winter to make the pizza again. Turns out figs are actually the flowers of the ficus tree, and get harvested twice a year. The breva crop grows in early spring off of last year's shoots. The main crop grows in the summer on this years new shoots and is generally the tastier crop. But I didn't read up on figs on wikipedia straight off the bat; instead I learned the hard way that you can't find fresh figs in supermarkets during the winter, and that dried figs make a terribly disappointing substitute for fresh and ruin the fig and fennel pizza.
This story ends happily, though, because remember Coley and I just bought figs last weekend! A couple nights ago we finally got around to making the pizza again, and the results were again fantastic. I suggest Food Blogga's recipe to everyone. I also learned through my wikipedia consult that figs are an excellent source of calcium (who knew!) and that they are the oldest known crop cultivated by humans-- fossil remains show that people in Jordan Valley were cultivating them back in 9400-9200 BC. It's triple-fig fact win this weekend!

Coley Makes Everyone Else Look Like Lazy Sacks on His Day Off

This is my husband Coley.
On Memorial Day, Coley
1) Brewed a nice American pale ale:


2) Baked fresh French bread:

2) Made some lovely sun tea with fresh mint and lemon rind:


4) Re-hung the string lights that go across our roof, which were drooping:


5) Resurfaced our old coffee table with cool retro baseball cards, complete with a nice polycrylic finish:

(How awesome is this?!)

The purpose of this post is not to brag about my energetic, prolific, creative genius of a husband. The point is just to remark on his unlimited energy for projects. How remarkable!

Posting for 2010

Well jeez. It has been forever since I wrote anything on this sad excuse for a weblog.

I might try to just post lots of photos and do a photo-blog in 2010, to lower the ambition bar a little. Then again, Coley usually hoards the camera in his backpack, so maybe even that won't help me keep up. We shall see.

Anyway, Coley and I hiked Wasson Peak in the Tucson mountains on New Year's day 2010, and it was so hot in the sun on the way up, that I wished I had worn shorts with my tank top. In the middle of the winter! Imagine that!

The saguaro cacti are easy to anthropomorphize, with all their expressive, twisted limbs. It was my dear, sweet mother who once visited and exclaimed something to the effect of "those cacti look like they're flippin' me the bird!" Anyway, I always enjoy taking photos where people pose like the cacti. Here's my latest opus in that series:

Our cool little camera has a panorama feature that I really enjoy using. Here's the city of Tucson and the Catalina Mountain range shot through some of the Tucson mountains at a little rest spot before Wasson Peak:


And here's a closer-upper of the Old Pueblo from the same vantage point:

OK! Gotta go see Fantastic Mr. Fox for $1 at the cheap-o movie theater, yet another excellent feature of Tucson!

When the Moon Hits your Eye...

OK, it's been over half a year since I posted on this blog. But I was just waiting for something this exciting to blog about!

I am PSYCHED about the awesome pizza Coley and I have been making lately! Coley got inspired a few weeks ago by this video of Jill Santopietro of the NY Times making pizza "in her tiny New York kitchen." He pulled out our beautiful blue Kitchen Aid mixer for its maiden voyage, and ever since, it's been homemade pizza or no pizza for us! You can do it too! It's pretty easy-- just check out Jill's video, and she'll show ya how (I want my brother to marry this girl).

Check out this close-up of our masterpiece from 3 nights ago. You know you want a succulent bite of the kalamata olives, feta cheese and home-grown basil on there. You could make this in your kitchen, too! It's pretty easy-- just check out Jill's video, and she'll show ya how (I want my brother to marry this girl). Our friends Dan and Mia taught us a couple tricks for easier transer to the pizza stone: 1.) a ton of corn flower underneath the dough on the sheet on which you're preparing the pizza, and 2.) wait for your homemade sauce to cool before putting it on the dough. Even when the transfer goes slightly awry, though, the good news is that a mangled-looking pizza pie is still a delicious pie when the whole thing came from scratch!

Sweet, Chocolate-y Victory!!!

Last night marked The 1st Annual Tucson Homebrew Chef Competition. Experienced brewers from all over Tucson presented their best porters and stouts in a blind taste-test to a panel of world-reknown experts for rigorous and grueling comparison.

... Okay, so actually this was a house-party competition between 6 good friends. Coley and I brewed a beer together, and four of our other home-brewin' buddies each brewed their own competition beer. And around 60 of our collective friends came to judge (and drink lots of free booze).

Each party-goer ranked the five beers on appearance, aroma, and flavor (with the results from each of those categories being given increasing weight in the overall judging). Coley and I brewed a mocha porter, in which we used fresh, dark french roast coffee beans and dark organic chocolate. We messed up the brewing process and accidentally made it too thick and rich (didn't quite sparge enough), getting just over 2 gallons out of what was meant to be a 5 gallon batch. Our friends' brews included a chipotle-pepper porter, as well as one with maple syrup, vanilla and nutmeg.

In a surprise underdog ending, Coley's and my beer really cleaned up, sweeping each of the three categories as well as best overall brew!

Our prize was this awesome NASA stein (circa 1990). It has relief pictures of the first steps (giant leaps) on the moon, astronauts after a victorious landing in the ocean in rubber rafts, and a majestic scene of a rocket taking off into space. Having this prize come home with us is kind of ironic, considering we were the only contestants who don't study astronomy for a living. Of course, those guys will have the chance to take it home after The 2nd Annual Tucson Homebrew Chef Competition....

As we've only been home-brewing for about a year, this accomplishment is really a milestone for Coley and me. I must say, we never would have come this far without all the tutelage over the past year of our expert-brewing astronomer friends. We recognize that we have stood on the shoulders of giants.


Recipe for Suz and Coley's Mocha Porter:

Grains:

• 11.25 lbs American Pale 2-Row
• 13 oz English Chocolate Malt
• 6 oz Carapils
• 4 oz American Black Roast Malt
• 1 oz American Roasted Barley

Hops:

• 1 oz Northern Brewer Hops
  
• .75 oz Cascade Hops
  

Yeast:

• California Ale Yeast

Extras:

• ~ .5 lbs. Dark French Roast Whole Coffee Beans
  
• ~ 1 (small) stick of Newman's Own Dark Organic Chocolate
  

Let it Snow

On December 21st, my friend Sarah sent me this picture from a snowstorm that day in Massachusetts.


I was horrified! From my sunny home in Arizona, this looked like a totally different planet to me. It was hard to imagine my friends and family were really experiencing this kind of weather while I could step outside in a T-shirt to check how the jalapeno pepper plant on my stoop was growing. I worried about traveling home for the holidays. A wild ice storm might tear the wings off of my plane, which would then burst into flame mid-air and crash horribly to the ground. Or my dad's car could get buried in a snow drift on the way to pick me up at Logan airport. Or I might be lucky enough to make it home, only to get snowed in with my family. Stuck indoors, we'd die of starvation, and cobwebs would grow on our skeletons sitting by the fireplace with its stockings hung there with care.

On the phone, I told Sarah I was scared of coming home to all this snow. "Suz!" she scolded me, "you grew up here!" She was right that I was being ridiculous, of course. I made it home just fine and had a lovely Christmas with my family. The weather has actually been pretty mild, and even sunny my first few days here. Yesterday, my dad and I went cross-country skiing and snowshoeing respectively through the woods behind our house. We went over snow-covered eskers and past bubbling brooks, crossed those New England stone walls and through open pastures. It was beautiful! Now there's a fun outdoor activity you can't do in Tucson.


You can take the girl out of New England, and she might think New England is taken out of her.... until she comes home for a visit and remembers the totally different kind of beauty belonging to this place.

Incidentally, I g-chatted with another friend named Sarah today, who is a Tucson native and spending her Xmas there. She said that yesterday, it snowed in Tucson!

Wave of the Future Hits Geology, Baseball

One of my new geoscience friends was recently explaining to me a paradigm shift in the way people think about paleoclimate, from the way "The Old Guard" does science to the way "The New Guard" is doing it. Broadly speaking, The Old Guard sees a qualitative trend in some paleo data, and uses scientific intuition, developed over years spent in the field, to make some sweeping claims about the mechanism causing the observed effect, and that's that. But according to the New Guard, that's not enough anymore-- mechanistic hypotheses must be rigorously and quantitatively validated, or at least constrained. Climate modeling must be used to test one's claim to see to what degree it is consistent with the evidence in the data.

I couldn't help but automatically compare this New and Old Guard of geoscience to the evolution of statistical thinking in baseball (as cultivated by Billy Beane, and explained in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball). The old-school managers and scouts look for players with qualities like "a great body" and "good face" who embody their vision, from their years of experience, of a great ball player. Managers who espouse the new, sabermetrically-inclined view discard these traditional values. Instead, they do studies of the statistics of ball players to see which ones actually translate into wins for the team. Then, if they can find a fat player (and thus undervalued by the old guard) with a high OBP (which would manufacture more runs), then they can get this guy on the cheap to make their team stronger!

Now, this ain't a deep comparison by any means... I'm just excited to see people in all fields improving their field with some serious mathematics! Math is the wave of the future!