Hey there, Hungry Ninja. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re hungry, but pizza? Pffft. That’s not ninja food. Because, after all, the origins of the ninja path and the pizza foodstuff do not coincide. They don’t even run parallel. Different continents (more or less). Different hats. And when the ninja masters of yore threw around objects, I’m sure you’d tell me, they were far pointier and deadlier than pizza dough. I agree with you, Hungry Ninja. So I can see where you’d get this idea:

It’s perfectly understandable. But Hungry Ninja, I am here to tell you that contrary to initial judgments, pizza does indeed fit quite well into the ninja lifestyle. Let’s look at how.

Now, the beauty of pizza, Hungry Ninja, is that it lends itself to a myriad of interpretations and toppings. But before we delve into that aspect, let’s discuss another one of pizza’s strengths: it can be prepared in stages, thereby fitting itself quite easily into the busy ninja lifestyle.

First, you will need some pizza dough. Since you are a ninja, this will be easy to acquire. On a day when you are not vanquishing enemies, you might decide to set some time aside to make your own pizza dough, but this is not strictly necessary. Frozen dough is found at many grocery stores. Alternatively, suppose one of your nemeses is a baker. Time your defeat of the baker just right, which of course will be no problem because you are a ninja, and snag up some rising pizza dough as part of your spoils.

Once you have your dough, you will need to let it rise. This may seem like an onerous, time-consuming task, but keep in mind that you do not have to be present. Use the time for further training in your ninja arts, strike fear into and/or disembowel another mortal enemy or three, wash your ninja hood, or get started on the toppings for your pizza. The toppings are where you can really let your ninjahood shine!

Suppose during the dough’s rise, you do indeed venture forth to vent your fury upon an adversary. After you have proven triumphant (which of course you will because you are a ninja), don’t be too quick to dispose of the carcass or display it as a warning to all who would defy you. Instead, take a step back and think, What might go well on my pizza?

Hungry Ninja, I herewith humbly offer a few suggestions.

Drain a bit of your opponent’s blood to use on the pizza either straight or as a tasty reduction sauce. But don’t stop at the blood; if you were able to resist tearing the still-beating heart from your adversary’s chest, instead take it to cut into chunks for your pizza. Likewise, you may do this with the liver, kidney, or brain–

Whoops! Maybe not the brain, unless you a Hungry Zombie Ninja.

Other options, and what’s pictured below, include chicken sausage, fresh mozzarella, green onions, and garlic scapes.*

*Ingredients perhaps more suitable if Mrs. Ninja will also partake

 Now that you have your toppings ready, let’s return to the dough. After its rise, you will need to stretch it out.

Ninja Tactic! For a circular crust more so in the shape of a yin/yang symbol, oil the outside of a bowl, place it on the counter upside-down, and let gravity, which is not your mortal enemy, do the work.

Dough Tactic!

Now’s a good time to preheat your oven, if you haven’t already. You’ll want it at 400 degrees F. (And I know ninjas are probably more likely to use Celsius. But you are a ninja, so you can figure out the conversion.)

Double Ninja Tactic! Use a pizza stone, and store it in your oven. Not only will your oven heat more evenly and provide your pizzas with a crisp crust (because soggy bottoms should have nothing to do with ninjas); it may come in handy if ever under attack in your own home. Say you are cornered in the kitchen. Your enemy does not know that you have a solid disc of stone in your oven. You may use your ninja reflexes to yank open the oven door, remove the stone, and fling it at your nemesis, speedily decapitating him or her. Of course, if the oven has been on the stone will be hot and may perhaps burn you, but you are ninja and so can take it, while doing further harm to your enemy. Win-win for Hungry Ninja, lose-lose for your unwise ninja enemy.

Hot stone ready for use in decapitation or pizza-making!

Your stone should heat, ideally, for around an hour. Then parbake your pizza crust for 6-8 minutes. This will ensure that the crust is baked through and does not have a doughy center after you’ve put on the toppings. Doughy centers should also have nothing to do with ninjas.

So now your crust is parbaked. You may wrap it in plastic and freeze, particularly if there is a certain foe whose heart you feel would make a sublime topping but whom you haven’t gotten around to dispatching yet, busy ninja that you are, or, if you are ready, top it with your ingredients. Turn up your oven’s heat to 450 degrees, and bake until the crust is golden brown and the adversarial blood sauce is bubbling.

Not adversarial blood but still tasty!

And there you have it, Hungry Ninja–pizza! I hope you now see just how easily pizza can work for you. Ingest your enemy’s life force and enjoy!

Disclaimer: This ought to go without saying, but this post is written for entertainment purposes only. I do not advocate using pizza stones to decapitate people, and cannibalism is just icky.

1

Foster a deep love of winter squash, pumpkin in particular, that leads to compulsive purchase of the gourds at grocery stores and farmers market, even though you receive more than enough vegetables through your CSA and will supposedly receive winter squash from the CSA in the near future. Develop collection of the gourds and roast and puree some.

2

Read too many food blogs. Become inspired to do something unusual with the pumpkin puree sitting in your fridge and document the process using your crappy, five-year-old point-and-shoot. Select pumpkin gnocchi because– Well. Actual reasons matter not.

3

Find several pumpkin gnocchi recipes on the Internet. Elect to cobble three of them into your own. Select one to refer to for measurements, but Google around for measurement conversions because it seems everybody still gets out the measuring cups even though they are much less accurate and more work than weighing things using a kitchen scale.

4

Find a weight equivalent that seems fairly accurate. Plop your pumpkin, flour, and egg yolk in a bowl. Realize the Microplane grater you need for the nutmeg is currently in the dishwasher, which is running. Remove grater from dishwasher and give it a cursory dry-off.

5

Decide that “a dash of nutmeg,” as two of the recipes call for, is not enough. Grate your whole nutmeg directly into the bowl until you have a nice little pile. Inhale and enjoy the aroma.

6

Begin mixing the dough together. Realize that it is much too wet. Add flour.

7

Realize the dough is still too wet. Add flour.

8

Suspect that the dough is still too wet. Find more recipes on Internet with pictures detailing what the dough should look like when it’s ready to roll out into logs. Conclude the dough is, indeed, still too wet. Add flour.

9

Develop sinking sense that the pumpkin gnocchi is unlikely to taste of much besides flour. Add more anyway, as the dough is still too wet.

10

Check time. Begin to panic as you have to leave in an hour and the whole making-pumpkin-gnocchi thing is taking longer than you anticipated. Add flour.

11

Spill flour on self. Tell self for the fifth time that self really needs to purchase one of those cute aprons for times such as these.

12

Cheer as the dough finally starts to look cohesive enough to roll into logs on a well-floured surface. Proceed to do so.

13

Cut logs into gnocchi-pieces. Cut corners on shaping by just quickly pressing them with the tines of a fork, rather than the whole pick up and place in palm while gently rolling the tines of a fork across the dumpling’s surface bit.

14

Pause to admire gnocchi and mentally tell them that even though several are misshapen and they all probably taste bad, they are still cute. Even with the strands of pumpkin sticking out of some. Make note that the stick blender is not the way to puree pumpkin for gnocchi-making.

15

Cover in plastic wrap and leave gnocchi in refrigerator while you’re out.

16

Return home three hours later hungry and wondering how you will make the gnocchi palatable. Worry again that gnocchi will taste of nothing but flour. Think of the pumpkin swirl loaf you made yesterday and how, despite the “swirl” bit not coming through, it was probably a better use of the pumpkin puree. Particularly with your inspired addition of cardamom. Remember that you never took a picture of the bread. Do so now, when it’s sliced for freezer storage.

17

Conclude the sauce will be the key in attempting even minor tastiness of the gnocchi. Wish you had the time, and the ingredients, for a sage brown butter sauce, of which several of the Internet recipes include a variation. Settle for thinning out some apple butter with water, tossing in some cinnamon, and heating in a small skillet.

18

Feel dubious about the “sauce’s” unattractive brown color, in addition to still feeling dubious about the gnocchi itself. Prepare salted water to boil gnocchi.

19

Remove gnocchi from fridge. Select several to toss in boiling water. Pray they actually float to the top within a few minutes, as they are supposed to.

20

Watch gnocchi float to top of boiling water. Cheer. Remove from heat and drain. Pour unattractive sauce on top.

21

Eat. Enjoy the flavor of nutmeg (see, it was good to ignore the “pinch of nutmeg” instruction). Think to self that the gnocchi actually isn’t half-bad. Nice mouthfeel. Firm, but with a bit of give. And the apple butter sauce, while a tad sweet, isn’t terrible either.

22

Chalk it up to a semi-success.

Only I think mothballs are used in drawers and not the closet so much. I don’t know. I have never had to employ the use of mothballs. But that’s a tangent, anyhow.

So “inner bread baker” isn’t quite accurate, but nor would the more plebeian “amateur,” which I mean not as some naif of the bread-baking world, entirely ignorant of rising times and shaping and slashing loaves, but as an initiate studying the craft, as it were. That sort of amateur wants to become a master. Don’t get me wrong; I want to be a decent bread baker, and on the whole I think I am, but there are thousands if not millions of people better at it than I am. I enjoy baking, but I only do it as I need it, whether for the end product of the loaf or for the therapy/relaxation inherent with working with the dough. A serious amateur, I think, would bake to get better. Regularly.

So I’m not a true amateur and I don’t like the term “inner bread baker.” But I am definitely a sourdough snob. I do use dry yeast, but I get a greater sense of satisfaction from using my sourdough starter. I baked a loaf of sourdough bread today that was my best riser that I recall. It’s going to become a bread bowl for an artichoke cheese dip so I haven’t tasted it yet. But the rise was impressive enough to make me consider an activity more suited to an amateur bread baker than whatever I am: take pictures. Hey, it would be more interesting than taking pictures of myself writing. I mean, people like food. It has universal appeal. The creative process, however, not so much. Particularly since a great deal of it involves me staring at a blinking cursor.

Anyway. Why I’m a sourdough snob. There are those who argue that the flavor profile of a sourdough loaf is superior to that of an active yeast loaf, due to the slower rise and slower development of the wild yeast of the sourdough. Also, some have extolled the variety of sourdough. My sourdough should have a different taste to it than my mom’s sourdough, or a San Francisco sourdough, since the yeast spores in my kitchen differ from those in my mom’s kitchen and those in San Francisco. So yeah, there’s the flavor thing.

Aside from that, though, I just like the concept of sourdough. It’s almost like alchemy: I mix together water and flour and set it on my counter for a few days. I forget about it, and all on its own it starts getting bubbly and frothy and develop a pleasant, yeasty aroma.*

But it’s not alchemy, of course; it’s nature. Or science, if you start getting technical about the “how” of it. Both/and. But still, in this world where, were technology to be somehow stripped from my life, I would likely die** that making a loaf of bread is so simple does almost feel like magic.

The ingredients of my sourdough loaf are bread flour, water, whey (which could account for the nice rise), and salt. Since the yeast spores are from my kitchen and not a little packet, it’s about as close to “homemade” as you can get.  And people have been making bread like this for thousands of years. It is, well, neat. Yes, I am aware of how inadequate that sounds.

Still. That’s why I’m a sourdough snob.

_______________________________________________________

*Well, pleasant to me. Some people don’t like the smell of fermentation.

**I’m not being facetious; it’s currently 10ºF and feels like 0º according to weather.com. Plus, I’m not sure how long I could gather foodstuffs before eating a poisonous berry or mushroom. I’m botanically ignorant.

2. My FREE KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer arrived today, just six days after I ordered it last week. Charging groceries and the like to my credit card and paying it off each month can be a good thing. Baking of some sort will have to figure into my weekend so I can test it out. Right now I’m thinking a basic chocolate chip cookie dough recipe, but with dark-chocolate covered goji berries replacing the chips. That way I will get at least some of them out of my kitchen, as they’ve proven to be a snacking food.

That is all. I have a write-in to get to.

I will remedy that this weekend. And I missed my exit because I was thinking of all the iterations I might try on the recipe: What if I did a sourdough version? Not the best idea since my sourdough baking still leaves something to be desired, and especially since the weather’s turning colder, so the rise would be even slower… hmm. What if I tried adding whey to the dough to give it a bit of oomph? But I don’t have any whey on hand and probably won’t strain yogurt before the weekend–

And I want a nice, gooey filling. Preferably maple. But how to make a gooey maple filling? It’d need butter or other fat, since the dough would absorb the liquid from the maple syrup. Could also add brown sugar, but would that mask the maple taste? Wonder if I could find a filling online that I could modify…

And so on, until

Oh crap, that was my exit!

I am trying not to think too deeply about what this means for me as a writer. I don’t believe I’ve ever missed an exit because I was ruminating about  characters or plot. And I’m also trying not to think too deeply about what this means for NaNoWriMo in particular.

Hey. I do have an idea. And characters. And things the characters will do. Even if those lists aren’t particularly long yet, they’re existent.

Besides, I kind of like to wing it.  More of a challenge for the ol’ imagination. Really stretch it to its limits. Flex my creative muscles.

Cough.

Anyway.

Since I’ve posted previously about my love of pumpkin, it likely doesn’t come as a surprise that I’ve taken to hoarding pie pumpkins. The last few times I’ve gone to the grocery store, I’ve had to resist the sudden leap of joy: They’re still here! I can get one! (ignoring that it’s unlikely they’ll disappear from supermarkets until at least Thanksgiving. And if that happens, it means there’s a pumpkin shortage.*)

Because they’re still sitting on my kitchen counter. Well, I’m down to one intact pumpkin, but still. I have a bit of puree left from my first pumpkin, all the puree from my second, and the third is patiently waiting its turn to be gutted, roasted, and bludgeoned to a pulp.

Some of my current puree will go toward making pumpkin chili for the chili cookoff/Halloween party at my work. Never made pumpkin chili before–and I’ve never participated in the cookoff–but I figure I’ll give it a go. Some of it I’ll add to my morning oatmeal. And the rest for those luscious cinnamon rolls. It’ll make for a lovely Halloween breakfast, a pre-NaNo fortifying treat.

Maybe I’ll miss some exit on Saturday as I panic about NaNo. Or reminisce over the taste of the cinnamon roll; whatever.

*A pause while I clutch my chest in fear and whimper. I must be strong.