Recipe of the Month: Pizza Crust

I've been looking for a good pizza crust and finally found one I like. Even better, it can be done in a bread machine which means I can take a quick afternoon break at work, start the dough and it's ready by the time I get home from work. That was always one of my frustrations. Good pizza dough takes so long to make that it's not really practical unless it's the weekend.

Here's the recipe:
3/4 cup water
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon white sugar
1 Tablespoon dry milk powder
2 1/4 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon active dry yeast

Place ingredients in the bread machine in the order listed above and select the dough cycle. Start the dough cycle. Remove dough when cycle done and use for your favorite pizza.

I've also taken the dough out and refrigerated it for about 2 or 3 hours, then let the dough warm up again for 20 minutes and used. It worked fine.

Cucumber Overload

Here's the count so far:

• 6 pints of pickle relish
• 7 pints of dill pickles
• 5 jars of strawberry sauce (attempted jam but it didn't set)
• 1 jar of wild black berry jelly

(Ok, so those last two on the list aren't cucumber related...but they fit into my canning craze.)

It sure fills like summer with all the veggies ripening at once. I picked over 15 cucumbers at once last weekend and since Matt was shooting a wedding last weekend, I had plenty of time to do some canning. However after 7 jars of dill pickles and 6 jars of pickle relish, I'm feeling like I could be done with the cucumbers. Unfortunately, it looks like the plants are no where near being done.

I'm also feeling like I might be losing the battle with the squash. I think my sister secretly hates me because she planted 4 yellow horn squash plants but then left before they started to ripen. I think we've picked about 30 squash so far in the last two weeks. And I'm out of squash ideas.

But it's fun to have fresh veggies again and although it's a lot of work, I really do enjoy canning.

Any recommendations for what to do with yellow squash?

Finished Crazy Quilt

Finally finished the crazy quilt this weekend. I decided to do a simple binding and not do any borders since it seemed to distract from the craziness of the quilt. Overall, I'm quite pleased with how this turned out.

For detail shots of individual squares, see:  http://kirkynews.blogspot.com/2011/07/crazy-quilting-2.html