When I was originally figuring out my living arrangements for school and decided I was cooking for myself, I budgetted a lot of money for eating out, figuring that I _could_, considering the savings on rent.

But I hate eating out. The food on campus is awful. In an emergency last night between a meeting and WCF, I had the special at a major campus eatery. Terrible. For the $8.50 that cost, I could’ve made three meals each twice as good. And I’m not a chef. Definitely not a chef.

But I had a nice piece of success Thursday after the bananabread fiasco. I thought I’d make Pizza for the other Mike and I. Now, I know making pizza is supposed to be really difficult, but I also knew that my sisters and I had had a moderate amount of success with it a couple months ago at home. Well, it worked famously — absolutely delicious. I bought a slice of Pizza Pizza today just as a control variable to make sure, and it was sort of lousy in comparison. :)

I might as well take this opportunity to link for the first time to my other big project — the [Quickcook Database](http://quickcook.net). It’s not finished, but there’s still a lot of great meals there that my family members and I have contributed.

It exists primarily to provide me with things to consume so I don’t starve, and secondarily as a playground for me to work on my PHP and MySQL skills. It’s not supposed to be a gargantuan beast the way some recipe sites are, just a small collection of honest, reliable, simple food ideas. That said, the database behind it is far more sophisticated and intricate than anything I’ve seen anywhere else to date.

I’ve updated the [Pizza Recipe](http://quickcook.net/recipe.php?id=40) to reflect my observations from the other day. And I’ve got the other half of the dough in the freezer for another time.

Mike

Chemistry lecture was cancelled today, so I had a few moments this afternoon and thought I’d try my hand at baking a banana loaf.

Well, something went wrong…

I took it out after an hour of cooking, plunged a knife into it, and realised it was still mostly dough inside. Was it missing some key ingredient that I neglected? Is the tired old oven in our kitchen just not able to hit 350F any more?

I stuck it back in for another 20 minutes. The results can seen on the right. Yes, it was cooked all the through. No, it wasn’t burnt. Yes, it is in many small chunks. Yes, I did grease the pan.

Baking is sort of like studying. You spend time studying in order to purchase the satisfaction of a good mark on the test — and that of having learned something new, but it’s less tangible. When you bake, you invest time in the present, and the payoff is a yummy snack.

Well, I’m pretty sure that loaf’s pieces will be yummy when I consume them slathered in butter with chunks of cheese and a tall cold one of milk… but not quite the way I envisioned it.

Mike

EDIT: It seems that all unsatisfactory results were the product of a single miscalculation. I used a slightly smaller pan than was recommended in the recipe. This caused the loaf to be a lot thicker, and therefore not cook properly in 60 minutes, leading to the overdone crust and subsequent disintegration.