My brother-in-law in Vermont has hosted the family for New Years for about 12 years. Most years one of the highlights is pizza night. He has an homebuilt, outdoor, wood-fired pizza oven, which he fires up a day ahead to get it nice and hot. He has a professional-chef friend who makes and tosses the dough, and a veritable crew to prepare the toppings, top the pizzas, and slice and serve them. This year I was topping master, planning and organizing the toppings, designing the toppings combos, and topping most of the pizzas that were made. It is a fairly foodie group, so as with spacific there were some fairly unusual toppings and/or fairly unusual combos. Sauces: Red, white, pesto Cheeses: Mozerella, asiago, chedder, blue, goat Meats: Pepperoni, italian sausage, pesto chicken sausage, bacon, hamburger, meatballs, ham, roast chicken, shrimp, procuitto, Vegs: Diced tomatoes, roast red peppers, artichoke hearts, fried eggplant, sauted red onion, carmelized yellow onion, crushed garlic, roast garlic, sauted spinach, pineapple, arugula, kalamata olives, Other: white mushrooms, baby portabello mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, wild-picked black trumpet mushrooms, spinach and cheese ravoli. After the first few standards of Plain Cheese, or Pepperoni, or Sausage and mushroom to satisfy the some of the kids, I started on the more unusual pizzas. Some notables successes are: Carnesaurus Maximus: Every meat but the shrimp. Philly Cheese Steak: Ground beef, red peppers, sauted onions, Moz and Cheddar Procuitto, Kalamata Olives, blue cheese, carmelized onion, arugula, Moz Eggplant parmesan: Eggplant, tomato, spinach, olives, mushroom, Moz The best one IMHO was the Quatro Fungi Pizza: White sauce, All four mushrooms, roast garlic, Moz After about 42 pizzas, we switched to different crusts and started making dessert pizzas, with sweetened Ricotta, Mascarpone, pineapples, berries, chocolate, reeses cups, crushed oreos, candied ginger, and/or marshmallows. Counting the desert pizzas we ended up at around 52 total pizzas, not quite up to previous years' records but substantial nonetheless. I'll be noting some of the combos Spacific listed above for future years.

Eh, it's getting to be way too much trouble to even bother making pizza, now that I've thought about it this much. I think Elery should just make pizza when he's at his place and I'll go to Pizza King for the grandkids. Voted "Best Pizza in Big Rapids" for about 11 or 12 years in a row now, and owned by a neighbor next door to the farm. Mike Mohnke, he also owns/runs the local funeral home. I'm not asking him what makes his pizza so popular, LOL. Annie

Excellent Jairo. Yellows are beautiful, enjoy. Once the buds grow to a point of being swollen and ready to open. Move it to a place or sit something in front of it to give filtered sunlight to it. Flowers will usually be a deeper shade and color will not fade as quickly. Rick

Larry, I'm glad you are enjoying your time with Madge. That is very special and sweet. Kim, I've never grown mushrooms, but it's a thing now for sure. Tom did a bit of research on the morels mushrooms and how to "grow" them. He even bought the stuff. Our neighbor is often invited on morels hunts. So....they were going to grow them. But didn't. We like mushrooms a lot. In fact the pizza I had last night at Empire is called The Fungus Among Us. It's a mushroom and spinach pizza. It's really quite good. I still enjoy the Elliott's YT channel. If the sponsors annoy me, then I'll skip ahead. Farmhouse on Boone is the same. Both of those focus a lot on cooking and baking, which I like. But, I wish the F on B would do more garden stuff. She's probably too busy to do a lot of the gardening with all of her kids and homeschooling and feeding everyone. That alone would be a huge task. I suspect her husband handles a lot of that outdoor stuff, as does Mr. Elliott. Both of those guys don't work outside of their homesteads. Maybe those sponsorships allow for that. I'm not sure how it works. Honestly, I miss R & R's older types of videos as well. I'm super excited for them and all the things they are doing....but it's less relatable to me. She's a lot younger though, and If I was still in my 30's, I would probably dream of doing all of that too. We had to put the chicken yard fence back together first thing this morning. Long, boring story of why it was taken down. We got the weekly shopping done too. I was able to finally get my fire cider made. I still have horseradish roots. I wonder if they'll be good to share with others this spring if I keep them in the fridge. I worked a little on my 3rd bedroom. Found some cute curtains for cheap so put those up. What I need is a vintage upholstered chair that has been in a little old lady's guest bedroom or formal living room. They're usually well-made and not sat on often. I need a good reading chair for that room. I sorted through my onions again (had to get them down for the fire cider). Most of them are at the verge of going bad. There's not too many left, though. They were pulled out in June and it's January...so not bad really. Especially considering they don't have a 50-degree storage spot.