I love to bake and cook from scratch. I seriously love it. I am a bit of a snob, especially with baked goods. I just don't believe in
that "if you make it at home it is homemade" and you then pull out a package of dry brownie mix. Yuck! Seriously, it is so incredibly easy to make brownies by scratch. And if I make it from scratch I can sneak in white wheat flour (weird name, great high fiber flour), healthy oils, wheat germ, etc. I am always trying to lose weight or at least maintain, so I refuse to waste my waist on sub-standard desserts. ;-)
Yes, I do love to cook and bake. However, like many of you out there I am sure, I don't do it as often as I would like. There are times we eat interesting dinners such as a piece of cheese, a small box of raisins, a hard boiled egg, some strawberries and some peanuts. I call it our Snack Dinners. Yes, sad isn't it...
Some days I can't wait to make a new creation, and I love to make homemade pizza. I am always looking for the perfect pizza crust, and I tried this one today. I added the water first in the machine and added a pile of fresh herbs from our herb garden (the only type of garden I can grow apparently) to the crust and smothered the pizza with chedder and goat cheese and fresh basil. And it turned out pretty good! I made the outside crust too thick (the chickens are going to be doing a happy dance), so next time I will make two smaller pizzas.
If you haven't checked out Recipezaar yet, please do. I have found every recipe I ever needed there and you can sort them by ratings. I love reading ratings. I have found great recipes for homemade pudding (I won't eat that supersweet boxed junk anymore), smoked ribs, cobbler, mayo, spiced wine, etc.
See, I am a simple hausfrau at heart. I get more satisfaction feeding my family a delicious homemade pizza than from any job I worked and got paid for. I also get huge satisfaction from a clean house, but for some reason cleaning isn't as exciting to me as cooking. ;-)
I edited this pizza photo in LightRoom with just basic contrast adjustments. I love doing my editing in LightRoom, but I rarely end up using LightRoom presets while I use actions in Photoshop all of the time. I find it so easy to quickly edit a photo in LightRoom that presets really don't save me much time, unless I am doing something really arty. I am curious if Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
is going to be worth the upgrade. I finished the photo off using my Web Rounded Corners Photoshop action (I love my web actions!).I will be releasing the Urban Grit tutorial and action in the next day or two. I hope you are having a great week.
