How to Not Self-Sabotage and Get to the Heart of Things All in One Day

(This post, and whole train of thought, was inspired/begotten by Lisa Sonora Beam’s post here. You probably ought to check it out before reading this.  It’s incredibly brave. And thanks to Karol for linking it in, or I would have completely missed it.)

This blog was about to disappear forever.  Here’s why.

1. I am incredibly uncomfortable with promoting myself or my work.  I guess that’s as good a place as any to start. Parts of me don’t want to be popular, or famous, or they want to keep my street cred, whatever that means, or stay “indie.”
2. I am guilty of allowing “self-awareness” to deteriorate into “navel-gazing” more times than I care to admit. It might be what I’m doing here, except that I’m recognizing it in myself and trying to help other people notice it in themselves and take action.
3. I’ve always been a writer.  Which means I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the written word.  It means I’ve got a lot of ego tied up in what I write, and what other people think of it.  It means that I have traditionally spent a lot of time working with how I say something and much less on what I’m trying to say.
4. I am tremendously uncomfortable in social settings, around any large groups of people.  Which is ironic, because I spend my workdays in a big room with a bunch of teenagers.
5. This makes me socially awkward and an introvert and uncomfortable self-promoting.  And the circle starts again.
6. (Not a big secret: In order to have a successful blog, you have to self-promote.  Therein lies the quandary.)
7. (Also not a big secret: This is really scary to write.)

Here’s a list of the projects I have started in the last 5 years, probably were worth finishing, that never got done:

1. At least 3 novels.  That I can remember.
2. Never submitted a poem to any peer-reviewed journal, even though it’s probably what I’m best at writing.
3. 4 or 5 albums worth of songs, recorded on my laptop mic, but never pushed further.
4. An e-book.  A family cookbook.
5. Re-learning the violin.
6. Who knows how many gardening improvements.  Self-watering containers.  Irrigation systems.  Mulching.
7. Training for a triathlon.

And I almost added this blog to that list.

Here’s a bigger secret: I can be marginally successful (and almost always have been) without trying very hard.  With many things in my life, especially the art-related ones, I’ve operated around 65-70% of my capacity. And that’s been good enough.  I’ve impressed some people, tossed some sparklers up in the air, you know, really basic stuff.  (I don’t mean that to make me sound all super-talented or smug or whatever.  I mean that I’ve been wasting a lot of my life playing Wii.)

And I realized something about 2 weeks ago: this blogging thing, if I want lots of people to read and care and pay attention, is going to take more than 65%. I don’t define success as being a millionaire (how minimalist would that be, anyway?), but I would like to make some money off my writing. More than that, I want to write for reasons other than inflating my ego.

I want to help people.

You can call what happened to me the “attack of the lizard brain” or the onset of “the resistance” or however you want to dress it up.  But it stopped me cold.

Whatever you call it, I was repeating the same cycle: lots of momentum to start with on a project that couldn’t possibly be completed in a sitting or two, fizzling out, and quitting once I got to my 65% “max.”

Here’s why I’m not quitting:

1. I like writing.  Most days.
2. I like helping people realize they can do more than they think they can.  And that involves me doing more that I thought I could.
3. I want to prove that I can sustain something majorly big and artistic.
4. I need to stretch my limits, especially with respect to self-promotion and interacting with other people.  I realized this week how many of the big bloggers I spend time reading are socially anxious or introverted or feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there. If they can, so can I.
5. 65% isn’t good enough.  Especially if I want to tell a bunch of teenagers to give me their best every day.

I wish there was some forthcoming pronouncement about how to stop self-sabotaging  (i.e. quitting just when you’re starting to make some progress).  But I don’t know that there’s a way to stop except

1. Recognize that’s what you’re doing,
2. Ignore the voice in your head that’s trying to get you to stop, and
3. Keep moving forward.

So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’ll write more about peaches later this week.  :)

If you love what you’re reading here, Facebook it, tweet it, or whatever makes you happy.  If you’ve fallen victim to the self-sabotage monster, I want to hear about that, too.  Maybe we can help each other.

photo by Cl@re Bear

How to Put Down Roots & Still Live the Life You Love

Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.  (Wendell Berry)

To be an effective gardener, you have to pay attention to the roots of your plants.  Roots deliver nutrients and water to the growing plant, and if they are shallow, constricted, or otherwise deprived, then the food you were hoping to grow will simply not come to fruition.  And if you pull a plant up by the roots without providing some quick source of water (and eventually soil), the plant will die.  That’s why all the commercials for Roundup and other weed killers preach that they “kill the roots, so the weeds won’t come back.”  If you kill the roots, you kill the whole plant.

But here’s the thing:

Humans have the same needs. If you have no roots or poorly tended roots, it’s very difficult to thrive.

Human beings crave “home,” a place where they can set down roots.  Obviously, there are as many definitions of “home” as there are people in the world, but I see a few elements in common:

• We need a place to belong.
• We want a place where others will look out for us.
• We need a place to rest and recharge.

Lest this be dismissed as ramblings of a Southern non-city dweller with a pastoral world-view who still gets his milk delivered to his front door by a man toting glass bottles in a wire crate (no, I don’t), let’s examine the proposition a bit more closely.

We need a place to belong.

In the garden, certain plants grow better beside certain others. The fancy name for this is “companion planting,” and I think that’s apropos for the human part of the discussion.  Like cucumbers and dill, or tomatoes and basil, or the aptly named “Three Sisters” (corn, pole beans, and squash), humans tend to thrive when they are in the place they belong–a place where they get the right amounts of sun and shade and, yes, companionship.  Which leads us to…

We want a place where others will look out for us.

Good companions serve many purposes.  They laugh with us when we’re happy.  They defend us when we’re under attack.  They attract beneficial predatory insects that will suck the life force out of Mexican Bean Beetle larvae.  They provide a living mulch to protect our roots from the hot sun.

We need a place to rest and recharge.

The plant corollary here is night and day (I mean that literally, not metaphorically).  Most vegetable plants need around eight hours of sunlight a day to produce at optimum levels.  However, what is often ignored is that plants need the night as well–to cool off, to “recharge.”  Think about it like this: we all know that exercising is good for us, but what if we exercised for twenty hours a day?  We couldn’t keep up that pace for very long–we’d go from “in shape” to “unhealthy and sleep deprived and probably malnourished” in a matter of a couple days.

Home–where our roots/family/favorite chairs are–gives us all these things.  And the less crap we have in our living spaces, the more restful and peaceful it feels.

So many of the minimalist writers write about being able to move anywhere in the world with just a bag on their back full of everything they own.  I have talked to a few of them, and am convinced that the most awesome minimalists in the “live anywhere” vein don’t really believe that because you can live anywhere necessarily means you have to change locations with the seasons (even if they do).

Unfortunately, many readers misinterpret the word “minimalist” to mean “ascetic” or “itinerant traveler.”  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, if that’s the life you want to live.  But that’s not my life, and it’s not my minimalism.

At its heart, minimalist living is about living the life you love and not letting possessions get in the way of your happiness.  The life I love is a rooted one: rooted in family, place, garden, and home.

Further Reading:

Tammy did a post on community building last week.

Adam Baker wrote about coming home from a very long time in Thailand with a 2-year-old (I can’t imagine!).

Karol Gadja is a world traveling minimalist who is currently residing in Wroclaw, Poland (until it gets cold; I can’t blame him there), because it is/was the home of his ancestors.  He wrote a great post about a bike ride to find the cemetery where 2 of his grandparents are buried.

Leo Babauta had a recent blog post at mnmlist.com about selecting a new neighborhood that “felt right” to him and his family.

All these people were and are responding to the same urge: if you can’t have a small town, then you find a “town” within a city, a place that makes you feel like home.

So now, it’s your turn: What makes you feel like “home”? Let me know.  I’d love to hear from you.

(And share via FB or twitter if you think this is worth sharing.  Thanks!)

How to Make Pizza By Hand, From Scratch, Without Torpedoing An Entire Day

There are few things in life as wonderful as a pizza you make by hand.  If you don’t agree with this general premise, you have either not made one yourself, you have made one badly, or you may want to go read something else.

Pizza making is a great skill to learn–it impresses people, it’s delicious, and it’s actually pretty easy.   The old way, where little old men and ladies woke up at 4 in the morning to punch the crap out of huge dough balls in little pizzerias, is also incredible, delicious, and completely unrealistic for how we live our lives.

Because so few things in life measure up to a properly assembled homemade pizza, I have been on a personal quest for probably 5 or 6 years now to figure out the best possible way to construct one. I have spent most of my time on recipes for the crust, which, as any pizza fan knows, is the single most important factor in the eating experience.  Great crust can salvage mediocre sauce or half-plastic cheese (though I wouldn’t recommend half-plastic cheese in any circumstance), but no brilliantly rendered sauce or high-end buffalo mozzarella or expensive toppings can save a poor, soggy, greasy, over-thick crust.

I have to admit these things and set these parameters before we get started:

1. I am a pizza enthusiast.  Maybe a little bit of a snob.  I prefer to think of it as “passion.”
2. By “pizza,” I mean the bread-cheese-sauce-basil combo that originated in Napoli, whose Italian descendants brought it to New York.  The deep-dish heart-attack-on-a-platter Chicago-style “pizza” does not count in my world.
3. Proper crust should be both thin and chewy.
4. Every pizza enthusiast must have his or her Holy Grail pizza place, where the best in the world resides.  For me, this place isn’t in Italy or New York or LA or San Francisco; it’s in Asheville, NC.  (Which is convenient for me.  Plane fare to Naples would get prohibitive.)  It’s called Marco’s, and if you’re ever in the area, you should check it out.
5. Since you’re here, reading a blog about simplifying old-time skills (and reading a post about making pizza from scratch without torpedoing a whole day), I would assume you’re interested in a quick and easy pizza-making experience.  However, if you want the best of the best, the highest-end-but-longest-taking pizza making experience, you need to go here, to Peter Reinhart’s recipe.  It is ingenious, but it takes nearly 2 days.

The Crust

Now that’s settled.  Laura and I have found that the bread recipe that we use for our normal loaves works great for homemade pizza as well.  Ideally, you’ll have some of this in the refrigerator and you can just pull out a bit of dough.  (If not, see the original recipe linked above–you’ll just have an extra hour and a half to wait.)

Again, this dough/crust isn’t as good as Reinhart’s, but it’s a far-more-than-acceptable substitute–about 95 percent as good for 1/10th the effort and time.

So take a couple (or 3 or 4, depending on how many you want) grapefruit-sized handfuls of dough out of the bowl/container and form them into quick balls, and set them down on a floured surface.  While they rise a little bit (say, 20-30 minutes or so), you’ll have time to do the following:

1. Turn the oven on: 500 degrees (or as high as it’ll go–professional pizza ovens usually are set at 800-900 degrees–you’ll have to adjust cooking time, though).  Put in the pizza stone to preheat, if you have one.
2. Make the sauce (yes, from scratch–I’ll get to that in a second).
3. Slice/grate the cheese (yes, more notes on that, too).
4. Prep the rest of the toppings.

All of that in 25 minutes?  Yes, truly.

The Sauce

A good pizza sauce is something I struggled with for a long long time.  For a good while, I gave up and just used diced tomatoes straight from the can, no seasonings added, or, in a pinch, a jar of pre-made spaghetti sauce.  Both not great choices.  A great pizza sauce, to me, is like the referee at pretty much any sporting event: if you don’t really notice it, then it did a good job.  When it’s noticed, it’s usually because something went horribly wrong.  It’s an important accent, but and accent nonetheless.

(Let me also say this: the men and women that work at America’s Test Kitchen are geniuses, as far as creating vastly more efficient methods for making American classics.  The sauce recipe I’m about to share with you is adapted from theirs.  Credit where credit is due.)

(Another very important note: “Tomato Puree” and “Crushed Tomatoes” are NOT the same thing.  Tomato Puree has a good bit of tomato paste in it, which makes for a disgusting sauce.  Trust me.  I wish I didn’t know that from experience.)

Ingredient list:

28-oz. can crushed tomatoes, butter, 2 sprigs oregano, 2 cloves garlic, pinch sugar (and salt/pepper/other additions to taste)

1. Take a sauce pot and put it on a medium-heat burner.  Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter in the bottom.  When that’s liquid, grate about 2/3 of an onion directly into the butter.  Add 2 sprigs of fresh oregano, leaves removed and chopped finely.  Cook until onions are slightly golden, about 3-4 minutes.
2. Add 2 cloves minced fresh garlic (or more if you like).  Stir around until aroma is released, about 30 seconds or so.
3. Add the can of crushed tomatoes and the pinch of sugar. Also, you can stir in the other “to taste” ingredients–I like a little red sweet pepper myself.  Stir, lower heat, and then stir occasionally over the next 10 minutes (at a simmer).  (Note: the amount of salt you’ll need changes depending on whether you used unsalted butter.  Another one I learned from experience.)

Guess what?  You have sauce now.  It works great for spaghetti dishes, too–especially with mushrooms.  And you’re probably still only 15 minutes into the dough rising.  Awesome.

Now you have time to prep cheese and other accoutrements.

A Note on Cheese

This is a short note.  The higher quality you can get, the better your pizza will be.  Some store-brand ingredients are just as good as their name-brand counterparts.  Cheese is not one of those.  Consider it money well spent.

(I have heard, actually, that making your own mozzarella isn’t that hard.  We haven’t gotten that brave, though.  If it’s something you’re interested in doing–and we will be experimenting with it at some point down the line–check out Ricki Carroll’s site.  She’s the Make-Your-Own-Cheese Queen.)

I prefer to slice my cheese and place it in rectangles around the pizza instead of grating it.  To each her own, though.

OK, So Now You Are Ready To Do Some Assembly, Right?

If you have a pizza peel (those cool wood/metal paddle-looking things that you see in pizza restaurants for taking pizzas out of the oven), flour that up.  If not, flour up a cookie sheet (the flat ones without the edges).  Put a little flour on the top of a dough ball, and put the ball on the floured peel.  Roll out the dough with a rolling pin (one drawback to this method is that the dough, in its infant state, is too stiff to really stretch by hand or throw in the air–you’ll have to find some other way to impress your friend or your date).  Make it pretty thin.

Spread on the sauce.  Make sure you’ve put enough flour on the peel–make sure the crust slides around freely, or you’ll never get it in the oven with the toppings on.

Add topping(s).

Put cheese on top.

Drizzle olive oil atop the whole shebang.

Slide it in the oven.  Bake for around 8 minutes, depending on your oven temperature.  I like to wait until the cheese starts bubbling.

Toss on a couple of thinly sliced basil leaves for garnish (chiffonade-d, for the foodies out there).

Eat.

In Closing

If I’m calculating right, and if you didn’t stop after the first pizza to eat it because you couldn’t stand how good it looked, and you had dough already in the refrigerator (which I almost always do), then you just went from refrigerated dough, a can of tomatoes, a block of cheese, and some herbs to 3 pizzas, ready to eat, in around an hour.

Congratulations.   Enjoy.  And if you like what you’re reading here, share with the world via Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other sits brings you joy.

Thanks for being here.

UPDATE!! Here’s a picture of a no-cheese pizza made with the above method by a loyal reader! Thanks for sending it in.

Top photo via Flickr by zobeiry