Sorry it's been a while, but life gets so busy! Last Thursday was our last regular Thursday youth group--and it went VERY WELL! I'm glad that I got to preach my last message to an attentive and receptive group of kids. :-) It made me feel good. This week was my last Sunday at Cascade, and I was thankful for the opportunity to publicly thank the congregation for all their support over the last 25 years. It was sad, but not quite as sad as I had feared it would be. I guess things are already changing so much that it makes it easier to leave. Yesterday we had our final small groups. That was kind of sad, but both of them went well. Tomorrow night is our youth group's Finale Banquet. I've got a lot to do to finish preparing for it, but I'm looking forward to the evening. :-)
As if all these "lasts" aren't enough, Friday night will be my last night in my apartment. On Saturday the 22nd I will be moving in temporarily with my dear friends the Smarts, who have been gracious enough to clear out and fix up a room for me. Since I'm going to be moving so soon, I've been trying not to buy any groceries and instead eat up my canned goods so I don't have to move them! Well, I had some friends over last Saturday for home-made pizza and I had some extra pizza dough that I left in the fridge for future use. Today I decided to make a pizza that I could eat for my meals until I move. The dough smelled odd today--as if the yeast had fermented. In fact, it smelled very much like a nice red wine--great for drinking, not so great for pizza crust flavor. I quickly whipped out my trusty laptop and allowed my old pal, Google, to assure me that sometimes dough smells like that, but that the fermenting scent/flavor bakes out. Hooray! So, I rolled out the dough, smothered it with sauce and topped it with turkey kielbasa and TONS of olives and cheese (trying to get rid of what I had left).
Fourteen minutes later, I pulled it out of the oven, and cut myself a slice. That's when I discovered that Google had betrayed me. In fact, the pizza did still smell AND taste fermented. I forced myself to finish the whole piece (because of course, there are children starving around the world who would probably be happy to eat fermented pizza). But by the end of that piece I was looking for ways to rationalize throwing it out. I was, afterall, going to the store later on--what if the pizza crust impaired my driving abilities? In the end I comprimised: I peeled all the abundant cheese and toppings off of the pizza and saved "slices" of toppings in the fridge for tomorrow (or else I'd only have canned corn and frozen spinach to eat), but I tossed that nasty crust! Unfortunately, after eating one "topping" slice, I'm not sure if I'll be able to stomach it tomorrow. It's odd how a bit of bread under the cheese and meat make it more digestable, but without the crust the other stuff seems really bad for the stomach. Anyhow, I need to go work on some stuff for our finale banquet, but I just wanted to relay my fermented pizza experience and leave you with a photo of my "topping" pizza.
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