Noms and Editing

I'm planning a major offensive on the baking front for Christmas Eve. I'm making my specialty giant Chocolate Chip cookies (I can only make six on a pan because the dough balls are a quarter cup) for the entire family as part of their Christmas presents--that's at least sixty cookies. And I'm making two pans of Michele's family's super-secret-recipe sweet rolls for Christmas morning breakfast. It doesn't sound like much. But it is. It's gonna be a wild time.

I have a firm due date for my next edit set as January 10th. Originally I thought "well that's gonna be a walk in the park." Then the last couple days I've been sizing up the holiday season and figuring out just how much free time I'm (not) gonna have. My brother moves to Saudi Arabia in January. One friend is in from San Francisco, another on leave from National Guard training, yet another in from DC. I have a wedding to go to this afternoon and I only get half a day off work each for Christmas and New Years because they fall on Saturdays. So I won't be able to coast through the rest of the edit at a leisurely pace like I planned but will have to pack it into the free time I find. Which is what everyone has to do. Makes me miss college and the 15 hours of free time I had every day.

Seeing so many people over the next few weeks I'm going to go for a record for using the words "my agent" as often as possible. It shouldn't be hard and I see most of my old high school friends infrequently enough that they won't want to stab me in the neck with a pencil after the thousandth time I've told them about my writing. Good times.

My in-laws were in town a couple weeks ago and got me an early Christmas present: A pizza stone. Ok, they got me several early Christmas presents, but the pizza stone is what I'm going to talk about now. I've used it to make four pizzas so far and I think I finally found a pizza dough recipe I like. It can be stretched and pulled and turns out nice and thin like I like it. I haven't gotten to the point of tossing the dough yet--though I want to some day. And I still can't quite stretch a perfect circle. It turns out as more of a derpy oval. With practice I will succeed. I bought enough mozzarella and pepperoni at Costco yesterday to cover fifty pizzas and stored it in the freezer so I want to make a couple of pizzas every week for... well, a while.

I have a goal to start posting pictures of my pizza and cookies and rolls and breads but then I finish making them and eat them because they look yummy and no photographic evidence is left behind. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually, though. I think Michele took a picture of those sweet rolls last week. I'll have to dig it up.