Daily Twitters

• 13:51 Happy to be heading back home to Atlanta after half a week in NYC #

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Daily Twitters

• 11:50 this is hot: listen to this thievery corp remix of busta rhymes' dangerous(siik remix) at awe.sm/19YG @hypem #

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The pizza still needs work but ain't half bad

The pizza needs some work ... but, its getting there.

For those of you who don't follow my twitter/facebook stream, I recently tried my hand at some homemade pizza. The inspiration and the foundation for the pizza, was a great pizza dough recipe I found online ... i mean, it just had to be great, after all the blog post was titled - Best Pizza Dough Ever Recipe

One of the only downsides to this dough recipe is that you need to let it rise in the fridge overnight, so its not for the impatient. The recipe made enough dough for six 12-inch pizza pies, so the next day I froze 4 of the servings and set out to attempt to make my first batch (2 pies) of homemade pizza.

Take 1:
Batch #1 was a disaster, the good news is that it wasn't the crust's fault. It actually tasted decent, the problem was that it wasn't even remotely crispy. The issue was that my oven maxed out at about 500 degrees and the recipe called for a 800 degree oven. This coupled with the fact that I had too many toppings left a lot of room for improvement. Also, I wasn't using freshly made sauce.


hmmm, ok that wasn't even close, so let's fast forward a couple of days and i went for batch #2.

Take 2:
The reason it took a couple of days was I had to move some pizza dough from the freezer into the fridge to thaw and I forgot to do it the night of the batch #1 fiasco. (btw, in case you are wondering, all of the photos are from batch 2, batch 1 was definitely not photo-worthy)

Once i let the dough thaw in the fridge overnight, I let it rest for a couple of hours on the counter where it rose even further. I've gotta say, having the dough ready to go made batch 2 a breeze. Plus my limited (read: only) experience tossing the dough from batch 1 went a long way - this time I didnt get any on my face or the wall. Not to mention, this time, the pizza was actually round. Anyway ...

I lowered the rack hoping to get the crust crispier this time and went easier on the toppings. It turned out significantly better than the first batch but still needs some work. A) The crust was still underdone, and B) there were still too many toppings. That said, I was significantly less ashamed of this significantly less embarrassing attempt, so I took some photos for you.

Lessons learned:
1) Crust is key: I'm going to invest 20 or so bucks on a pizza stone for the next batch. A pizza stone is a ceramic surface that you put in your oven (prior to preheating) and cook the pizza right on top of it. Apparently those go a long way in crisping up your crust. Here's one I found at Target. Hopefully they have it at the Target by my house. If that still doesn't work, I'll try baking the crust a bit by itself first prior to putting the sauce and cheese on it. Short of that I'm at a loss since I have no intention of replacing my oven.

2) with regards to toppings, less is more: I have to fight (and fight hard) to resist my natural inclination to go heavy with the toppings (esp. sauce and cheese)
a) this is a pretty thin crust, so structurally it should support less toppings, and
b) the less topping the more the crispier the crust will be


Upsides:

• The crust is tasty and fairly easy to make
• I can say i know how to make pizza from scratch

Downsides:

• It is a multiple day affair
• oven doesn't get nearly hot enough
• calling delivery or DiGiorno is definitely much faster.

Here are some more photos from my first (technically second) foray into homemade pizza.

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Mark Cuban's Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can

Mark Cuban's Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can « blog maverick

Mark Cuban has some interesting albeit unsolicited (as usual) advice for Rupert Murdoch on how he should better monetize his media empire.
Basically, he suggests:

• stop lining the pockets of news aggregators (i.e. newser.com) and block traffic that they send. The added revenue you're getting from the traffic they send pales in comparison to 
  
• bundle online access to all of your news outlets (except WSJ) together with books, films, etc from other parts of your empire ... basically, pad the perceived value of the news outlets
  
• sell the bundles as a monthly subscription with a long term contract (>1 year)
• re: the WSJ - its really the only property you (Rupert) has worth selling ala cart since it can "move markets"
• finally, re: myspace - spend some money on your music division and tie up exclusives with certain bands ala Walmart to be the only retail outlet for the release.
  

He uses many more words but that's the jist of it.

Can't say I disagree with him, yet I really doubt it would work. Read it and tell me what you think.

On another note, and in the interest of full disclosure,** I was twice interviewed by Fox...

** here's a couple of videos from a year and a half ago when i was interviewed by Fox Business for yoonew.





I know you'll forgive the blatant self promotion ( bsp :-)

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Posting my first blog via flock

Trying out flock for the first time .... dunno where I've been. But finally tried it out late last night. And it seems pretty awesome so far.

Flock, "the social web browser," allows me to browse the web, keep up on my rss feeds, post blogs, twitter, and more all from one app. I'm running it on OSX but looks like there are also windows and linux versions.

If you see me post more often, then you know its working. Ironically, i attempted to update my twitter status for the first time in 2 months but twitter was down and still seems to be.


ps - i'm tagging this as a slumpbuster post since this is the first post in way too long. I'm curious to hear/learn more about slumpbusting posts, since if i had one everyday i'd surely be out of my slump

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