Sourdough wheat pizza blends delicate, rustic flavor

I am reasonably sure I’ll never find “the dough” for me.  Of course, I used to say that about soul mates until The Bride came along, so I’ve learned never to say never, at least with much conviction. Hence, “reasonably sure” sounds more accurate.

More than once we’ve eaten our Friday night “make in” Pizza and The Bride’s spoken with a bite still in her mouth, her hand at her chin to catch stray cheese and her mouth in a bit of an Ah shape to guard against the heat all while saying, “This is Effin good.”

“Really?” I ask.

She’d swallow and say, “Yeah, this is the best you’ve made. Don’t change a thing.”

Then I go and change it. So instead of asking her now if she likes it, I say, “But is it as good as Tony’s?”

It never is. It’s almost an unfair question because I’m not sure anyone will ever be as good as Tony’s.  Case in point:

This thing is SOO MUCH better than it looks. And when you write a beautiful, definitive, perhaps THE ONLY pizza cookbook a person needs like this:

 

…you got it going on. So it’s no shame not to be better than @tonyspizza415, and it gives me license to keep experimenting with doughs in search of ms. right.

All of which leads me to … my sourdough wheat pizza crust. In it, I used many of the tricks I have tried other times, including:

• working some seminola into the dough for that complex texture and durability it provides,
• using an egg (which I normally only use in pasta dough) because I’m told it adds a bit of bite to the crust along with some lightness to counteract the heaviness of the wheat,
• a sourdough starter I made from 50 percent whole white wheat and 50 percent bread flour,
• and my usual dashes of salt garlic and olive oil.
• After about five minutes of kneading the grittier dough started to mesh with the lighter ingredients to become a sturdy, yet silky ball in my hands. I felt a great deal of promise lay in the bowl as I oiled it and set it for a good few hours of rise.

Note: I normally don’t do a lot of kneading or excessive rising for my pizza doughs. The simplicity of it is part of the beauty. Pizza doughs are easy to make decent, yet crucially delicate and complex to get that perfect snap and al dente mix that makes a crust like Tony’s so… Tonyish. This one, because of the wheat and because of the egg I decided to both knead more and let more time to rise, yet another experiment.

Finally, I did add a teaspoon of yeast, which I really don’t think is necessary. The sourdough starter has plenty enough activity after nine days of feeding, stirring and living, but with the density of the wheat and the texture of seminola, I wanted some backup.

And the results?

The crust was a nice blend of rustic texture from the seminola and wheat but delicacy that made it better than a slice of cardboard. The sourdough gave it a complex flavor I really love. The lift was good too. One complaint was it was a tad crumbly. In short…

I love it, but …

it’s still not Tony’s.

Sourdough Wheat Pizza Crust

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cup white wheat sourdough starter (here’s a good recipe, by Nourished Kitchen… mostly I stress a high quality starter and a good doughs to feed it. I got mine from Italy).
• 1 cup bread flour
• 1/2 cup white wheat, 1/2 cup seminola from Butte Creek Mill.
• 1 tbl olive oil
• 1 tbl honey
• 1 egg
• splashes of salt, crushed garlic or dry
• 1/4 cup luke warm water with 1 tsp of yeast

Directions:

1. Mix yeast and water and let stand.
2. Sift doughs together and make a well. In the well crack the egg and pour in olive oil, garlic and salt. Stir with a fork outward until mostly blended.
3. Add in sourdough starter and water and begin mixing with your hands. Add white wheat flour as needed until it’s not sticky.
4. Knead for five minutes.
5. Place in oiled bowl and cover for three hours. Punch down once or twice as needed.
6. Roll out the crust into your best pizza shape and let stand for a few minutes (or more) covered with a towel (this really helps the slide-ability of the dough. If you want a crisp, extra thin crust skip this step because it does rise a bit).
7. Sauce, cheese, toppings and slide into a 500-degree oven for 9-11 minutes.
8. Top with dried red peppers, parmesan cheese. Let stand for five minutes, slice and serve.

Sourdough starter lives, breathes, excites the dough

I’ve put off doing my own sourdough starter because frankly the science of it all scared me to death. I just seemed so hard.

I say seemed, because I never really took the time to research it. I first wrapped my brain around the idea that sourdough had to actually sour from a friend who owned a restaurant that made sourdough pizzas. As he explained the process of “feeding” the dough perpetually, I couldn’t really grasp it. He made it sound like The Giving Tree, a perpetual, evolving thing that just keeps growing and providing… manna like, I assumed.

Years went by and I liked the idea of making sourdough bread and pizza dough and what not. But the science of it held me back. I harked back to freshman science when I was about to fail the “sludge” experiment so I just ate it and wrote down what I tasted well enough to get a C and pass the class.

But in the past year as my dough projects in the Test Kitchen grew increasingly complex, I knew I wanted to do sourdough most of all. Still, for some reason the block in my brain stopped me from actually learning how to make it.

On impulse I bought a couple of cultures off Amazon. When they arrived, I glanced over the five pages of instructions, full of complex terms and regressed back to high school. I set the packets aside.

Weeks passed. Stupidly.

Until finally I just got fed up, dumped the culture in a bowl and read the first page of instructions to get the (dough) ball rolling. I figured I’d adopt the ole AA mantra: One day at a time. Besides there were two culture packets. I could screw one up I reasoned.

As it turns out there was no reason to feel intimidated. I finally went Internet surfing and read through the relatively simple process of starting dough and turning it sour. My culture gave me a leg up and a good taste.

I had my doubts the whole time it sat there, with me “feeding” it (which means dumping in flour and water, really… that’s it). I ignored the ideas of making my own proofing box and carefully watching temperatures and just left the thing on my ledge very much like when I am told every kid does at some time when she sticks toothpicks into an avocado pit and watches it sprout over time.

Eventually the thing took on a life of its own and soon bubbled happily over the rim of the jar. I found an easy “starter” sourdough recipe for those using a start the first time and soon was making bread.

*This was a herb and chili powder wheat sourdough:

Now I’ve got about three jars ready to go for future sourdough inventions (the seven-grain lemon pepper sourdough was delightful) and my “starter” chilling in the fridge until the next time I need to zap her back to life.

I’m still not sure how it all works, and I know I could probably do it better. The kneading process was pretty much the same, but sure smelled rich and flavorful and yes, sour.

With a little thought it could become more science and less magic, but for now, I’m happy with the magic. I don’t understand what’s going on in there, but I like eating it, which come to think of it, isn’t too far off from freshman science class after all.

 

Food, work, prayer: An unexpected good day

Mania can be a wonderful thing in moderation. I had a nice blast of it yesterday.

If I had to pinpoint one change — the biggest change — in my life in recovery, it’s that I have energy. I am interested in so many more things than when I was drinking. These interests motivate me and infuse me with life. I guess it could be construed as manic behavior, but it’s not hyper. It’s an energetic calm. I like it. It’s a gift of sobriety, and it played out nicely yesterday:

I wrote a story before 7 a.m. Then finished the overdue revisions of my book proposal. Then baked a pot of black beans. Then made homemade tortillas. Then with the kitchen back in service after a month of solitude, I went full force into Effin Artist favorites: I made a nice wheat bread with flax, paprika, chili and pepper.

I made decadent triple chocolate cookies.

I then remembered I had lost my wedding ring a couple of weeks ago in my pond. I know I lost it in the pond. The cold water made it slip off, I was certain. I had thumbed the blank spot uneasily for days, so I decided to go get it back.

I drained the entire thing and sifted the gook through my finger. No ring! I prayed for my ring while I fixed the pond all up and reworked the little waterfall to make it flow better.

Stinking like a dead fish I decided to weed the driveway, move the planters into the back yard (protected from the deer that gave them a haircut in my absence), filled the pond and while tweaking the creek found my ring!

Back inside I showered off the gook and decided I was hungry. I made homemade fish tacos. One bite and I was envisioning an Effin Artist taco truck in downtown SF charging $10 bucks for these with a line so long it blocks traffic. Wowsa. The Giants pounded the Twins while I ate.

The cookies capped off the manic day along with a prayer of gratitude for both the day and my ring (and a little cheer for the Giants win).

Good days aren’t always easy to find, but a little work, a little creativity, a little prayer and a most unexpected, welcome, grateful tired ended this one. A very good day indeed.

Dinner for Mom turns into impromptu test kitchen

I invited my mom for dinner the other day. A simple dinner. Pasta, bread. Italian food. No biggie.

Until I started cooking.

I decided to make the pasta.

Soon I was kneading a silky yellow 00 flour with Seminola pasta, flecked with fresh basil into beautiful dough balls. I felt inspired and turned to making bread. I went to my go-to bread, a multi-grain Sicilian bread that is hearty and full flavored.

Then I decided I wanted some dessert so made a Ghiradelli double chocolate chip concoction that demanded ice-cream. Out came the ice-cream maker.

The whole plan started with a single eggplant, because I thought fried eggplant with my sauce would be a good mix.

So the process of frying the slices joined the baking bread the churning ice-cream maker and the rising pasta in a flour-dusted cacophony that filled my kitchen with life even though I was home alone awaiting my mother and step-father’s arrival.

I hadn’t intended to cook all afternoon. I hadn’t intended a lot of things. But I loved the result, which filled our table with incredible homemade delights. Everything could have been bought at a store and made in about 30 minutes.

No thanks. The four hours were well spent and the food was much, much better.

Besides, isn’t Mom worth it?

 

News From the Test Kitchen: Play dough mixes and matches

The schedule didn’t have another week of dough on it for the test kitchen. But the schedule ended up crumpled into a ball once we went to visit our latest WeBromance, The Butte Creek Mill. With all that flour we had to get into the test kitchen and have some fun.

I love the experimentation of dough, which is why I return to it often. The dough itself is alive and changing each time, with so many types of flour combinations to be explored. Beyond that are the expressions: pizza dough, pasta, tortillas, pastries, croissants, buns, rolls and of course, my favorite: breads. Then finally there’s the flavor combinations in an inexhaustible arsenal of options. We’ve made some great breads, but haven’t scratched the surface of what we can do with dough.

This week we’ll push forward even further into the unknown. We started with the end in mind however. Unlike past test kitchen’s where we decide who will get a surprise package of what we make in the mail through the online debate, this time we awarded the winner from the start.

The Bride and I have a penpal named Sue. I know it sounds old fashioned, but I didn’t know Sue when she decided to write me a letter while I was in rehab. She knew of me and simply felt a spiritual prodding to encourage me. Her letter arrived at a time of deep spiritual challenge for me — my “dark night of the soul.” We started exchanging letters. When The Bride decided to get sober, I recommended she meet Sue. They got together and well, we’ve all been friends ever since. Except to this day, I still haven’t met Sue. Our penpal relationship has extended from pen and paper to emails, but it remains and important, distant friendship.

After one of our posts on facebook, Sue responded that she simply couldn’t wait for the day she could try my bread, and well… that’s all it took. She’s this week’s Test Kitchen winner and this first bread of the week, was created in her honor. I just hope it doesn’t suck.

The Bride tells me often to keep it simple. I’m often mixing flavors in ways that challenge her less than exuberant desire to try new things. “Can’t you just make wheat bread,” she asked me a couple of weeks ago (which I did, just to show I’m not obtuse).

But for this week, it’s a back to the wild west of combinations. I call this one Floral Seven Grain Bread, because it has so many wonderful scents it’s like a flower garden.

I combined rosemary, roasted garlic, parsley and blackberries with seven grain flour to make this bread.

The dough has a pretty purple hue with flecks of fragrant spices.

And I created a couple of different styles of expression, including a boule’ and a pan with braided top. One I drizzled with blackberries for extra flavor and the other I dusted with flour.

The key is to allow subtle flavors to merge. If anyone overpowers, I’ll have missed my mark. But as the bread hits the oven, even as I write this, I am cautiously optimistic. Either way, Sue will have to be the final judge.

I just hope its as delightful as Sue’s friendship has been for The Bride and I.

WeBromance: Wheat unchanged at Butte Creek Mill

It had been a couple of months of nose to the grindstone life for The Bride and me until last week when we simply carved a day for fun. Little did we know we’d end up completely thrilled to be nose to the grindstone.

Or millstone more accurately, I think anyway. I’m still not sure how it all works. I just know that my quest to sift through all the Frankenwheat scare, carb bashing, flour flogging and all the hype that takes the fun out of dough got a hell of a lot of easier when we visited the Butte Creek Mill in Eagle Point, Oregon.

My latest WeBromance is really a fixation and fascination with the mill and shop and products itself.  But since everyone can’t get to the area to visit the mill, I can attest they will LOVE the products they can buy online, which earns this WeBromance status.

This “is the last water-powered grist mill, still commercially operating, this side of the Mississippi” the web site states. 

They still mill the wheat and make their various products, powered by the creek just as its been done for more than 125 years. I chatted up the owners to find out more. They don’t use GMO seed, instead getting their seed from a natural ranch in Montana. I can enjoy the Zen of making dough with healthy products in a true Hoof-to-head synergy.

The country store was… well, everything I hoped it would be. I kept snagging bags of different flours, yeast, spices and supplies. As soon as I got them home, I decided I simply had to display them on a shelf.

(Confession: The Gold Medal you see on the shelf will be firmly replaced by Butte Creek once it’s gone. I’m that in love with these products. It’s an exclusive for me, but as is well documented, I can’t waste anything. I wouldn’t sleep for a week if I didn’t use the Gold Medal.)

Next, I started baking, a new recipe I’m toying with called Floral Seven Grain Bread, using Butte Creek’s Seven Grain Flour. It’s rising as I write, so…

Well, if you see a post with that title soon, you’ll know I’m pleased. If not… don’t blame the flour, blame the baker.

The entire mill just fascinated us. We went into the basement to see the guts of the operation. The main beam is a tree carved into a beam by axes, oh, five generations ago?

The old mill was the retirement project of a married couple who moved south from Portland when they bought it a decade ago and pumped it back to life. The Bride — knowing something about a husband’s crazy business ideas — said the wife of the team looked tired. She wanted to offer to take her out for a massage while I volunteered to watch the store, which frankly, she should have. I would have loved that!

All I can say is I’m glad her husband had a thing for antiques and the vision to salvage this priceless mill for all of us. You can get their products online.

Since the vast majority of our readers won’t be able to tour the mill themselves, we pass it along virtually. Enjoy these photos and then click over to the store to stock up your kitchen. You’ll know why the Butte Creek Mill is our latest WeBromance.

The front room

The milling room

The grain elevator

The flour “shute”

The bottom of mill stone

The turbine

The wheat scourer and polisher

A little wheat plot grows right outside of the mill

Recipe: Old school Italian with new school wheat

As an Italian kid growing up wheat anything was an aberration. We didn’t eat wheat that I can recall. I never recall Nonie even having it in her kitchen. Perhaps she did. I just knew I didn’t like wheat, plain and simple.

Now all things white are truly the enemy of the first rule of a healthy food plan: eat right. To eat right, you need to avoid the white. Whites like sugar, potatoes, rice and flour play havoc in our bodies. So the deeper I get into making dough the more I try to incorporate wheat flour. Today I took an old school Sicilian bread I’ve made and modified ever so slightly, and worked in two healthier grains: stone-ground wheat flour and flax meal.  Follow along in pictures and learn to make this bread for yourself.

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups bread flour
• 1/2 cup flax meal (I used Bob’s)
• 1 cup stone-ground wheat flour
• 1 tablespoons brown sugar
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons powdered garlic
• 2 teaspoons chili powder
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cups lukewarm water
• 2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
• 1 egg white
• sprinkling of sesame seeds

Directions:

1. Mix the yeast into the water and set aside for about 8 minutes or so.
2. Mix all the dry in  a mixing bowl with your fingers like a rake. Cut in oil.
3.  Pour water into the bowl. Using a dough hook on your kitchen aid, set to low, mix for two minutes. Then turn up one notch and mix for five more. If you don’t have a dough hook, just do some old fashioned kneading for 10 minutes.
4. Take out of the bowl and knead for two more minutes. Form into a dough ball. Either put in an oiled glass bowl and cover with wrap or… break out the storage box like this:

I love it and you’ll soon see why.

5. After the dough has doubled (about 60-90 minutes) we’re going to fold it over. This replaces the old “punching” method in a way that still activates the glutton but doesn’t impact the rise and lightness of the dough. Pizza dough should be punched. You don’t want bubbles in your crust. Wheat bread needs all the lift it can get.

So the fold… First, wet your hands and then fold it about 2/3 over on itself. Then turn the dough and do it again. Check it out:

Then fold it the other way exactly the same and flip, seam-sides down so it looks like this:

Let it rise again for 30-45 minutes and repeat. Wait another 30 minutes and do it a final time. After 30 more minutes or so take your beautifully smelling dough out and set it up on a prepared peel or a baking sheet.

On the peel, form into a free-form shape of your loaf. I don’t like bread pans. I like it to look more natural.  Like this loaf of Sicilian Bread I made last Christmas:

It’s a bit more beautiful than a square loaf pan don’t you think? Anyway, cover the loaf with a towel and let it finish its final rise. All this gentle lifting will keep the loaf larger and lighter and resist the wheat’s heaviness. Go ahead and pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees.

Take a knife and cut a slit. Then brush the top with egg whites and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Now that’s it ready slide it into the oven.

After it’s been in the oven about three minutes, sprinkle some water on it with either the splatter off a brush or a spray bottle. This will help the crust color properly. Do it once or twice more within the first 10 minutes. Let it cook for a total of 42-45 minutes. It will sound hollow if you pound it with the heel of your hand when it’s done and it will look like this:

Effin beauty, a mix of old school Italy with a little new school wheat.

Springs bursts from the ground and branch

We didn’t get a winter on the West Coast. My snowboard gear remains packed and ignored. But even so, the first blooms of spring this year lost little of their luster. I noticed the explosions taking place on branch, vine from soil on recent runs through the wilderness I live near. I’m excited about planting the garden. I’ve already had to weed twice.

It’s exhilarating. No season bursts with the grandeur of spring. But this year I got a special spring surprise that made me feel like a kid again.

The story goes back a few months, longer than that really, back to when my daughter adopted for me an olive tree in Italy. A new webromance broke out. I love Nudo. I love their emails, I love their idea to adopt trees. And mostly I love their oil.

Next came the contest. The creative folks at Nudo experiment infusing oils with different flavors. To promote two new ideas — rosemary and coffee flavored olive oils — they held a contest for recipes using the oil. With my daughter’s help we submitted a recipe using both, Coffee Chicken Pizza with Rosemary Olive Oil Fried Apple Rings.

Well… yippee skippy, we were one of five winners chosen by the good folks at Nudo. They sent us samples of both oils and a letter that felt like a little gold medal…

(I’m easily pleased as you can see).

Amanda became the Test Kitchen’s first visitor so we could put our recipes into action.

We took our recipes and their oil and soon the kitchen was filled with goodness.

Like apples:

And pizzas:

And these ideas cooked up in our minds so cooked up deliciously in our kitchen.

We ate like Romans!

OK, it’s easy to get distracted by great food, but I was writing about spring. Well, part of this tree adoption thing included an actual tree of my own… like a foreign exchange student. In the deep chill of our snowless winter I opened the can, followed the instructions and watered very, very little the little gravel base.

And I waited.

And waited.

And waited… and nothing happened.

And I felt sad. Like I had been a poor host home for a wayward Italian olive tree… until…

Spring!

All is right in my world as my little tree awakens and stretches and makes her way upward, just like me this year, small and tentative and yet so filled with potential harvest.

What’s not to love about spring?

Still playing hide the leftovers

I’ve written previously of The Bride’s finicky eating habits. For the most part we’ve resolved these differences.

I eat anything. Anything. I see any food as good if you find a good way to prepare it or pair it. Even my least favorite food, raisins, I’ve learned to like in certain things. The Bride simply doesn’t like a lot of things no matter what you do with them, like onions and fish, which really cramps my style.

Cramped style or not, we manage… with one notable exception: leftovers.

I’m ridiculously neurotic about waste. Waste pains me. It pains me so much that if you go back through my blogs, the longest, ranting, neurotic-filled posts fall under the category of “Thou Shalt Not Waste.”

The Bride could care less. Before we married she thought a doggie bag was a designer purse for poodles. And all these years together has done very little to help us cross the deep, deep divide.

To be fair, all the movement… all of it… has been hers. I’m more nutty about waste now than I used to be. Much worse. She’s become very conscientious and aware in many areas of waste. But the gap remains, particularly around food.

Try as she might, that girl just doesn’t like leftovers. I can’t imagine not eating them. You eat a great dinner and, thrill of thrills, you know you can have it again for lunch real soon! This is largely why I eat lunch alone most days.

So what do I do? I hide the leftovers. Just like when our kids were little. I sneak in the things she won’t eat.

For awhile the Bride was catching on… and starting dubiously cutting into many “fresh” dinners looking for stealth leftovers. Eventually I think she figured out that if she kept pushing this she ran a real risk of starvation. She’s less inquisitive these days. As I said, all the movement on this issue is hers. It is one area I’m oddly, weirdly, rarely, intractable. I don’t even know why, but it’s beyond me.

The one upside in this whole thing is I’ve gotten really really good at hiding leftovers. Whatever I cook one day, gets a new outfit of pasta or rice or tortillas the next day, all dressed up and looking brand new. Steak one day is fajitas the next. Chicken breast becomes chicken stir fry becomes chicken salad. Leftovers aren’t static, they evolve.

And you know what… some really good shit results.

An experimental coffee pizza soon became coffee-flavored chicken, which ended up in a pasta lunch. Three meals from one experimental sauce. I look back at that one fondly.

Let me ask you, Does this look like leftovers to you?

Well, the pasta was extra from a big plate of Alfredo. I tossed it in the freezer. The vegetables were the ones not used the day before in a stir-fry. I needed a quickie meal. Poof… pasta primavera.

The Bride loved it and never suspected the pasta was leftover.

I call that progress.

Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery? | Mother Jones

“What has been the staff of life is now perceived as the spirit of disease,” he says. “Symbolically, you can look at bread as a representation of our society through history,” he says. “If you look at gluten as what holds bread together, and you look at bread as what holds our society together, what is ‘gluten-free bread,’ then? Is it not a symbol of our times?” McDowell calls the rush away from bread as it’s commonly made now a “wake-up call” and “opportunity” for bakers to reestablish bread as a healthy, delicious staple. And he sounds genuinely undaunted by the project of doing just that.

via Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery? | Mother Jones.

This story best sets the stage for a new periodic series I begin today, called The Wheat and the Chaff.

We live in a world where “Frankenwheat” has replaced a simple grain that once represented the one thing even the poor could count on to feed them. The Israelites survived on “manna” bread from heaven. American’s are dying because of the stuff the Gods of Our Food and Health (i.e., big business, their lobbies, and the politicians who eat campaign dollars out of the hands) feed us lab-created and modified, super-sized creations. We may not fully understand the full scope of the American Industrialized diet, but we know this: It’s killing us.

The fact that a “bread lab” — as the excellent story in Mother Jones points out — exists tells us all we need to know about how our futuristic food dream has lost its way. We left behind all that the God of creation, who transformed the fish and the loaves to sustain thousands, meant for us to create something far different.

The Wheat and the Chaff won’t be just about food, but about misinformation, with a heavy focus on food and health, two topics of importance to us at EffinArtists.com. Thanks to the overwhelming tendency of Internet media and social networks to sing to the choir of their respective sides, much of what we read and write is about all the things we want to believe is true. The internet has become a noisy space filled with words — opinions run amok, mine included, I confess — that convince rather than educate far more often than not.

So we will take a look at compelling topics to sort out the best we can, the Wheat from the Chaff, the truth from the lies, the healthy stuff that makes us grow from the weedy stuff that tangles and deceives. If you have topics of interest you’d like us to look into, please reply below. We have a few in mind:

1) In a world where wheat bread is no longer true “wheat,” just what can those of us who love to make dough into food use that’s healthy and whole.

2) All the craze of fat burning remedies, including Dr. Oz’s latest wonder pill, Garcina Cambogia, will get a thorough, unbiased review.

3) Buying seeds that are still seeds, not lab creations.

4) and one personal pet peeve, what exactly are those “laws” that make us get new prescriptions for our eyes every two years when our glasses work just fine (ok… perhaps I’m losing my unbiased approach here because I’m looking through broken glasses with one lens and it’s irritating I can’t get a replacement without the added expense… sigh).

Anyway, you get my point. Misinformation rules the day. At least here a couple of time a week, we’ll separate the wheat and the chaff, allow others to post replies to bolster or disprove our work, give free forum to informed voices and try to take a few topics and end up with a few things we can “know” for sure.

Join us. Topics? Reply below. You are invited to join us and chime in.