Category Archives: Bloggity Blog

Blog-like blogs here. Short, even prattle. Hence, this folder of brief miscellany.

Bread Gone to Pot

If New York Times food colum­nist Mark Bittman ran his “Min­i­mal­ist” piece “The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work” in Novem­ber 2006, then this has been my go-to method week-in week-out for 6 1/2 years. I began bak­ing bread in about 1989 so I’ve tried lots of recipes. Bittman “dis­cov­ered” Jim Lahey of

Skillet Squash

I love roasted veg­eta­bles, but to me they’re a nui­sance. Fill two cookie sheets with chunks of veg­gies, after toss­ing with oil and herbs in a big bowl, bake nearly an hour, return­ing to toss a few times, and you get at most three serv­ings. So find­ing com­pa­ra­ble fla­vor in Mark Bittman’s “Pan­fried Pump­kin” inspired

Pizza Sans Sauce

The prob­lem with home baked piz­zas is crispi­ness, because who has a oven that goes to 700 degrees? I’ve fig­ured out a solu­tion: Make the tomato sauce on the pizza while it’s bak­ing. (If you are fine with thick crusts or pan piz­zas, best if you move along now, as you have it easy.) The issue

Kabocha Theater

Thanks­giv­ing. America’s Feast Day. It was yes­ter­day. Before I for­get what my notes mean, here are two of the dishes whose recipes I’ve been tin­ker­ing with for years and now have just about set­tled on. We don’t eat meat — well, a piece of salmon maybe every month — so we keep exper­i­ment­ing with the hol­i­day meal

Theme (Swan) Song

It’s time for a change. Way past time for the blog Brick. As of today, because I couldn’t stand wait­ing for July 1, the begin­ning of a quar­ter, or June 1, the next detail-fixated date, I have changed the theme of this blog. Theme is what wordpress.org calls a tem­plate. The theme orga­nizes the over­all look,

The Last Irish Soda Bread Recipe

In Food Sec­tion World, this long-evolved Irish Soda Bread recipe would be pub­lished before St. Patrick’s Day. But in Brick World, I bake a loaf on St. Paddy’s, rely­ing on col­lected recipes and some­times a new one that pops up. Brick could sched­ule the recipe for March 16, 2013, but why wait? Every news­pa­per every year

Economical Greek Yogurt, No Way? Whey.

Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pol­lock Though we who note the news have known about the Greek eco­nomic cri­sis for quite some time, it seems to have come to a head here in the first week of Novem­ber. Maybe if Greece exported more of that sunny yogurt, the bud­get would teeter back a bit. But in check­ing

Spread It

Face­book often is pos­i­tive, and right­fully so. A Brick from 11 months ago sup­ported that: The Future Just Showed Up: Like. Face­book is not all feel-good happy talk but con­tro­versy and delib­er­ate neg­a­tiv­ity get moved down and out quickly — posts get “hid­den” and friends become “unfriended.” My last week­end post fell in between. Sun­day

3 Cheers for Saturday

What, not four? Oth­ers are pun­dit­ing U.S. econ­omy very well. Why there’ll always be real estate agents and con­trac­tors In the Home­Style sec­tion of the Sat­ur­day regional/state paper is the weekly Per­sonal Space brief. Most weeks the sub­ject, who is asked about her or his home and some bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion, maneu­vers to plug their busi­ness or

Blog On, Blog Off

This col­umn first was pub­lished in the August 2011 newslet­ter of the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists. Instead of pol­ish­ing this col­umn, I should be sewing nametags into my clothes, shak­ing out my sleep­ing bag for Word­Camp. If I showed up with that stuff, even the geeks there would laugh. We’re all geeks at Word­Camp.