My pizza keeps sticking

January 17, 2025 11:20 AM

I really want to get better at making pizza. I love pizza. I extra love leftover pizza. But I'm not very good at making it, and by making it, I mean I'm still buying pizza dough from the store.

So what I've started trying recently is to let the pizza dough sit out on the counter for a bit, until it's about room temperature. After I've done that, then I start pulling it into pizza shape. It seems to be working out well! I'm getting lots of nice bubbles in my pizza, and I love the bubbles.

Unfortunately, it looks like my pizza pan is becoming less and less non-stick. I could not get this pizza off the pan. I was trying to use my spatula to scrape it, but that pizza dough just would not budge, and I ended up with this mess at the end:

Okay, I probably need a new pan. So I ate whatever I could scrape up from two slices of pizza, and then I just let the rest of the pizza sit there on the counter while I started playing video games with my sister. About an hour later, I started hearing noises. It had a crackling quality to it, and it sounded like pieces of the wall were coming apart and falling down. It honestly kind of freaked me out a little bit.

I walked over to where the noise was coming from, and it turns out that it was from my pizza! The stuck bits of pizza crust were popping right off the pan! After a few more minutes, almost all of the pizza crust was loose! I don't really understand the science behind any of this, but it made me think, "maybe I can still use this pizza pan."

So, against my better judgment, I tried to make another pizza a few weeks later. Maybe I just needed to use way more flour. So I dumped a huge pile of flour on the pan and the dough and my hands. I did the same thing where I let my dough sit out for a bit, and this time, a huge bubble formed before it even started cooking.

I poked at the bubble a little bit, but I didn't want to pop it, so I just worked around it and added the toppings right on top of it. I threw it in the oven and once it started cooking, that bubble just got bigger and it was crazy looking. I wish I could have gotten a photo while it was still in the oven, but you're just going to have to settle for this:

It deflated pretty fast once I pulled it out of the oven. And even though it was kind of weird looking, I actually thought the giant bubble was pretty tasty. But I know what you're thinking, did it stick???

Yeah, it did. Not as badly as the first time, but enough for me to conclude that I need a new pizza pan. (Okay, I know I determined this a few weeks ago) The pieces that didn't stick were completely covered in flour, and I was standing over a trash can trying to remove as much excess flour as I could before I ate it.

That pizza pan has now been thrown out, and I think I'm going to take a little break from making more pizzas. (There was another pizza attempt in the past month that is not represented in this post) But I do still have a lot of pizza sauce left 🤔

Seafood Blend: Part...3?

May 26, 2024 1:52 PM

Way back in the early days of this blog, my sister and I made a seafood skillet dish. It was...okay. Guess that's why I was never compelled to make it again.

Until today! I was thinking that I wanted to use up a tiny amount of frozen peas, and I had read this old blog entry and saw that the dish had peas, but apparently I thought there were too many peas in it. Well, it's been over five years. Maybe I can make it better this time.

I had told myself that Trader Joe's seafood blend was terrible, so I bought a different seafood mix that I found at the Korean store. Honestly, when I saw it, I was skeptical. I wasn't sure if the mix of squid, octopus, shrimp, and mussels would go well here. But I got it anyway. I also told myself to double the amount of seafood, and since this was a 1 lb bag, I figured I would use up the whole thing. I did not end up cooking the seafood first though. (I probably should have though)

This may have been worse than when I first made it. 🫠 At least the first time, I managed to make it look pretty. I knew this was going to be bad when I went to stir all the rice and seafood around and saw that the heat was not getting distributed evenly and that some of the food was overcooked and other parts were not getting cooked at all.

I turned up the heat a little and kept cooking it longer so I could hopefully get the seafood more cooked, but I think I just ended up overcooking the rice and it got all gummy. I also took some bites of seafood and it was...not great. I think I had way too much in the pan.

Okay, so, if I decide to make this again, I now have a new set of notes to follow:

• Buy a frozen seafood mix that has shrimp, calamari, and scallops. I don't think it matters if it's Trader Joes or some other brand, but I don't want any octopus.
• Use 1 lb of seafood, and 1 cup of rice. Two cups of rice was way way way too much for my pan.
• Only cook the rice for 10 minutes before adding the seafood. All of the water had basically evaporated by the time I added the seafood, which probably contributed to it not cooking well. (Or, cook the seafood separately like I said to do five years ago :P)

Two attempts at pizza

February 19, 2023 9:34 PM

About a week and a half ago, my boyfriend and I decided to make some pizza. We went to the store to buy some pizza dough and toppings, but after walking around for a while, we realized that the store doesn't sell pizza dough. At least we couldn't find any.

So we settled on buying some pieces of flatbread instead, and we just put some sauce and toppings on them. One pizza had pizza sauce, tomatoes, pineapples, and onions. The other had vodka sauce, green peppers, and onions.

We also experimented and put one pizza on a baking sheet, while the other one cooked directly on the rack. I don't think cooking the flatbread directly on the rack was a good idea. It took a while for the toppings to get cooked, and which made the bread way overcooked and a little too crunchy.

It didn't taste bad though! It was a nice, filling meal, but it wasn't quite pizza. It just felt like pizza toppings on a piece of bread. So, the next week, I made sure to go to Aldi to get some pizza dough so we could have a proper pizza.

Doesn't that look great?! I was so happy when I took the pizza out of the oven.

...and then I tried to cut it up and I realized it was all stuck to the pan 😱

How do I keep managing to bake things and have it stick to the pan?! I've made pizza plenty of times before and I've never had this happen! I think I've used cornmeal in the past, and I just didn't add any this time.

It still tasted pretty good, but I need to redeem myself. I will make a good pizza.

My pasta keeps falling apart

September 11, 2022 10:26 PM

Yup, my brain is super focused on the Teochew site, and even though I'm not working, I still don't have enough time to do everything that I want to do! But, I've got time for some easy meals. I made Tomato Basil Pasta because I wanted to use up the rest of my ricotta.

So I buy some pasta, two pints of tomatoes, and some incredibly overpriced basil. My boyfriend noticed that there were 3(!!) boxes of pasta in my "pantry" (it's a container that sits on my counter) and he wondered why I needed so much pasta.

Well, we were very low on rotini, and we had a full box of ditalini, but ditalini is so tiny! I wanted bigger pasta pieces! So I bought a box of penne.

Cooking this was pretty easy. Just cut up the tomatoes, basil, and garlic and throw it all in the pan. But as I was boiling the pasta, I noticed that it was...weird looking. Kind of grainy. The rotini was fine, but the penne was not looking good. It was completely falling apart. I didn't even cook it for that long! It was probably around 8 minutes total, and the box says to cook it for 11-13 minutes. If I did that, it would be mush!

I must have gotten a really bad batch of pasta. It was from Aldi, so it's not the highest quality stuff, but I've bought penne from Aldi plenty of times in the past and I've never had pasta fall apart like that.

But, I guess it tasted good enough. I also still had half a box of it leftover, and I barely made a dent in my container of ricotta so I made the dish again. This time I decided to grocery shop at Trader Joe's, which was a good idea in theory, but it was a Sunday afternoon and it was packed, and as I stood in the store I wondered why I had done this because this is exactly what I've been trying to avoid during my sabbatical.

Never, never, NEVER, go to Trader Joe's on a Sunday. Same goes for Whole Foods.

On the bright side, basil from Trader Joe's was both a larger amount AND cheaper! So I should absolutely go to Trader Joe's for Italian basil in the future. (in the middle of the workday)

Aaaand, they had pumpkin mini cones! I had been so excited to try these last fall, and I never saw them, so this was a pleasant surprise.

Yeah, my pasta fell apart again. That's okay. I expected it. I'll still give Aldi penne another chance.

Shrimp fajitas

August 11, 2022 8:51 PM

I made shrimp fajitas today! I made this recipe close to two years ago, and it was awesome. And I made it again today, and it was...not so awesome. And here I am, writing this entry, right after I cleaned up because I need to make sure that if I make this a third time, I don't screw this up.

Just yesterday I was talking about how much I love shrimp and how I cooked my shrimp perfectly, but you know what I did today? I overcooked it. 😭 And overcooked shrimp is really bad. The recipe said to cook it for 6-8 minutes. 6 minutes is way too long. I can't imagine I liked overcooked shrimp in the past. Somehow past me must have known that and present me forgot. So, here are some things for future me to remember:

• Cook the shrimp for only 5 minutes
• Only use two limes total. Just put half a lime in the lime crema, and a lime and a half in the marinade.
• Use sour cream instead of yogurt
• Maybe use one green and one red bell pepper for color

Okay, honestly, not the worst shrimp tacos/fajitas I've made in the past few months. But I know I can do better!