February 23, 2011 · 11:41 am

And You Haven’t Checked Out the Local Sights Because . . . ?


Quick:  Name the people in New York mostly likely to have never visited the Empire State Building or take the Staten Island Ferry to the Statue of Liberty.  Without putting any thought into it, who in Seattle has probably never have ascended the elevators of the Space Needle or spent an afternoon at The Music Experience and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame?  Who do you think has been to San Francisco, yet has never set foot on Alcatraz Island?

Answer: Those would be respectively the residents of New York, Seattle, and San Francisco themselves.

We’re all guilty of it.  We all have a tendency to do it. We are, in fact, the least likely visitors to the attractions offered by our own communities . . . unless we’re trying to show off our cities or local areas to the occasional guest, and then only if we have the time to do so.  Think about it.  Do you go to your local art museum?  Do you visit the zoo?  Do you go downtown, camera in hand, and just photograph the glass and concrete edifices lining the canyon-like streets?  Do you search for that one great photo composition of the statue in your town square?  If you’re like most people, the answer is invariably, “Oh, I’ll get around to it one day.”  In actuality though, chances are you never will unless you take off the weekend, get out of the house, get behind the wheel of your car or take city transit, and make the effort.  It’s not so much that familiarity breeds contempt so much as the knowledge that you enjoy easy and quick access to those nearby sights.

I live in El Paso, Texas—one of the most beautiful and photogenic jewels in the American Desert Southwest located in an area rich with natural wonders and surrounded by quaint Western towns.  Yet I frequently hear the lament that El Paso offers nothing to do.

Are you kidding me?

Art: We have in our local art museum a substantial portion of the incredible Samuel Kress Collection, not to mention the works of Tom Lea, Eugene Thurston, and many others.  For more recent artists we have on display at various galleries the works of Krystyna Robbins, Mauricio Mora, Alberto Escamilla, Daniel Padilla, and many, many more.  And the great thing about these galleries?  Since they have works for sale, gallery owners just love to have you come in a browse for free hoping you’ll take advantage of the low prices and great artistry produced here locally.

Architecture: Hard to believe today, but El Paso was once known as the most progressive and modern city in the Desert Southwest.  Henry C. Trost left his mark here with numerous examples.  El Paso was the first city west of the Mississippi to have an indoor mall.  El Paso claims the first concrete-framed skyscraper ever built in the entire United States, the Mills Building of 1911.  Conrad Hilton built his very first Hilton Hotel here, the soon to be restored Plaza.  Samuel Kress’s downtown building still stands today as an incredible tribute to Moor-influenced Spanish architecture.  Just how innovative and modern were El Paso architecture and construction techniques?  Not located in El Paso, but built by the El Paso-based Robert E. McKee Construction was the iconic, Paul Williams-designed Theme Building on the grounds of Los Angeles International Airport.  For more historical sites El Paso offers the Mission Trail with the Ysleta Mission (established in 1682, rebuilt in 1851), Socorro Mission (built in 1682, currently under renovation), and San Elizario Chapel built in 1789.  Now be honest—you though all the neat, really historic stuff 17th Century stuff was all in New England, didn’t you.

Day trips are something many people just do not do out of their home bases. In El Paso’s case that is really unfortunate.  I’ve lost track of how many El Paso residents who’ve told me they’ve never visited the stark, blindingly white, surreal gypsum dunes at the White Sands National Monument.  People who’ve never descended into the magnificent, jaw-dropping, stalactite-decorated Carlsbad Caverns, or who in the summer months stayed at sunset to watch hundreds of thousands of bats spiral out of the cavern in a dense cloud of fluttering wings.  Fellow El Pasoans who have never made the drive to the tall pines surrounding the nearby mountain communities of Ruidoso and Cloudcroft in New Mexico.

Weekend trips get even more interesting. Historic Santa Fe to the north and Tombstone to the West have whole sections of town still frozen in the mid-19th Century or even earlier.  Native American Country in the Four-Corners Area (where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah all join at a central point) boasts the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and little further up the road Barringer Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, and the red rocks of Sedona.

And I’m sure the area in which you live is no different. Don’t be the guy who complains that there’s nothing locally to do, or the one who says, “Oh, I’ll get around to it one day.”  Make the effort now, before you find that “one day” never got here before time or physical ability deserted you.  Leave a legacy of doing rather than merely thinking about it.  It’s like the joke about the old air traffic controller who, at his annual flight physical, was ordered by the flight surgeon to give up half his sex life, and who later lamented he didn’t know if that meant whether he was supposed to give up thinking about it or talking about it.

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February 21, 2011 · 2:28 pm

To Quote Homer: “Pizza? DOH!”


This is simply the ultimate and easiest No-Need-to-Knead pizza dough recipe on the planet. You simply will not believe how easy this is to make.  The idea came to me as a logical offshoot from Alton Brown’s Knead Not Sourdough recipe (Good Eats, The Food Network).  Once you try this thin-crust pizza you’ll never again order out.  It’s just that easy and simple to make.

You’ll need:

17 ½ dry ozs. of unbleached flour, either general purpose or bread (that’s one pound plus 1 ½ ounces in weight, not to be confused with fluid ounces)

Note: If you don’t have a good kitchen scale, do yourself a favor and get one.  If you’re serious about baking good yeast-based breads an accurate scale in vital, as it’s much more precise than attempting to measure flour by volume.  Breads using other leavening agents such as baking powder are not nearly as critical, so you can usually get by with volume measurements in those cases.

⅓ cup cornmeal

1 tbs. Kosher salt (if using table salt instead, halve the amount of salt; Kosher salt is has a much coarser grain, and thus takes up twice the volume as an equivalent amout of table salt)

¼ tsp. active-dry yeast (an unbelievably small amount but trust me, it works)

12 fluid ozs. cool water (tap, filtered, bottled . . . it all works)

More flour for rolling the crust

Step 1. The night before you want to make your pizza, mix well the weighed flour, cornmeal, salt, and yeast.  It’s imperative to mix this very well, as the yeast will die if it comes into contact with straight salt after the water is added.  Stir in the water and work it in until the dry ingredients are fully incorporated.  There’s no need to go wild here; you’re only looking to get the dry mixture wet enough to stick together.

Step 2. Place the dough into a large covered pan (I use a Dutch oven with a heavy lid), or into a large bowl covered with plastic wrap.  Let the yeast do its thing.  The natural fermentation process will do all the “kneading” for you.  The only time you’ll need to touch the dough is to give it a quick couple of punch-downs and turns just before you go to bed and once again when you get up in the morning.  After each punch-down/turn session, make sure you once again cover the dough or it will dry out.

Step 3. Approximately 19 hours into the fermentation process, divide the dough into four equal portions and form each portion into a tight ball.  Cover the balls you are not yet ready to roll out to prevent drying.  Take one ball of dough at a time and, using copious amounts of flour, roll it out into a 12- to 14-inch circle.  You must use a lot of flour to prevent stickiness and to get a truly thin, thin crust.  At this point you can go one of two ways:

Step 4a (method 1). Place your rolled-out pizza dough into a rimmed pizza pan with holes in the bottom and prebake the crust at 450° for two to three minute, until it just starts to puff.  Remove the crust and let it cool while you roll out and bake the subsequent crusts.  When you’re done, you will have four crusts either ready for the freezer or onto which you can place your toppings and bake for dinner later that evening.  To freeze, wrap each crust separately in heavy-duty aluminum foil.  To bake, load the crust with your favorite toppings and place the pizza straight onto a rack in the lower third of a preheated 450° oven for 13 to 15 minutes.  The crust edges should get a rustic, dark brown, the bottom evenly browned, and the cheese nice and bubbly.  Pull the pizza out of the oven and let set for a few minutes before cutting into slices.

Step 4b (method 2). The other way you can go with this, for that truly authentic feel, is to preheat a pizza stone at 450° for at least forty-five minutes.  Roll out the crust as above (one at a time of course, and don’t forget to cover the ones you’re not working), place the unbaked, well-floured crust on a peel sprinkled with either cornmeal or course semolina flour (the cornmeal or semolina will act as mini ball bearings to help ease sliding the crust off the peel), top the pizza with your chosen ingredients and slide it from the peel onto the pizza stone using a series of quick, short jerking motions so the toppings don’t fall off the crust as it slides onto the stone.  Bake at 450° for at least 15 minutes or until the edges are a dark, rustic brown and, when carefully lifted with a spatula, when the underside appears evenly browned beneath.

If you did everything correctly and didn’t put the more soggy ingredients directly onto the crust, it will have a crispy, almost cracker-like crunch and rustic French bread-like flavor that is indescribable.

Additional Tips: If you use a pizza sauce, go sparingly to preclude getting a soggy crust.  If it’s a homemade sauce, make sure it’s thick enough not to get watery.  Another interesting sauce to try is my jalapeño pesto recipe, but go lightly because it can be spicy.  If you use tomato slices rather than sauce (Margherita-style pizza), place the slices above a protective layer of cheese.  You might want to consider seeding the tomatoes first for some added assurance against sogginess.  Pepperoni slices should first be defatted by sandwiching them between paper towels and briefly microwaving beforehand (but don’t overdo this or the pepperoni will be overdone by the time the pizza comes out of the oven).  This also gives the pepperoni a nice crunchiness when the pizza is finished and keeps excessive fat from depositing onto the pizza.  Place fresh, sliced mushrooms above the cheese and below the pepperoni or other meats.  The fat from the meat will help cook the mushrooms, and the cheese will keep the moisture from the mushrooms from reaching the crust.

Wine Pairings: Wine pairings for pizza are pretty much dependent upon the toppings and even the choice of cheeses.  Heavy, tomato sauce-based pizzas loaded with meat go well with Chiantis, California Sangioveses, and even Super Tuscans.  Lighter Margherita-style, vegetarian, and other white-type pizzas (meaning they lack a tomato sauce base) need a lighter red such as a Pinot Noir or a heavier white such as Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, or Pinot Grigio.  A spicy pizza using my jalapeño sauce or perhaps a barbecue chicken topping will pair well with anything from a peppery Shiraz to a slightly sweet white Riesling or perhaps even a Gewurztraminer in the case of something particularly hot.

Please feel free to drop by and list some of your own favorite toppings. I’m sure other readers of this recipe would love to get some new and creative ideas.

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February 18, 2011 · 12:23 am

Playing “What if . . . ?” With History


People just love to ask writers where they get their ideas for the novels they write.  In my case it’s simple.  I get my ideas from the ultimate idea factory—history.  There’s a lot of truth to that old saying, “There is nothing new under the Sun.”  In fact, just to point out how true that is, that saying itself originates from the Old Testament—Ecclesiastes 1:9 to be precise:

“That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” (The Bible—American Standard Version)

So, you see, even this modern expression owes its origins to a past history that stretches back to somewhere between the second and fourth centuries B.C.

I’ve now written four complete novels, I’m currently working on another, and I previously started two others that are currently shelved but may be resurrected in the future.  Every one of those books started with an idea with some historical precedent which was then ran through a course of, “What if…?”  “What if…?” is a game all authors of fiction play, whether it’s for books, television, movies, or plays.  Indeed even William Shakespeare took past histories and played, “What if…?”  The following are three examples of books I wrote in the 1990s and plan on releasing over the course of this year:

* * *

The History: The inspiration was John Godson’s incredible exposé The Rise and Fall of the DC-10 (©1975) and several accidents and incidents involving the McDonnell Douglas DC-10: American Airlines Flight 96, Detroit, Michigan, June 12, 1972; Turkish Airlines Flight 981, Ermenonville Forest, France, March 3, 1974; United Airlines Flight 232, Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989; and to a lesser extent American Airlines Flight 191, Chicago, Illinois, May 25, 1979.  Because of several design flaws, the DC-10 racked up a pretty unimpressive safety record over the years.  One such flaw, discovered very early after it went into service, was a problem with the rear cargo door blowing out at altitude, thus causing a collapse of the passenger floor and subsequent loss of control to the tail surfaces.

So…what if someone sabotaged a DC-10 by making it only look as if the cargo door had failed?

The Resulting Book:  An On-Time Departure (Book 1 in the Ian Drake Series)—A DC-10 experiences explosive decompression and resulting loss of rudder and elevator control.  The aircraft crashes into the Swiss Alps with the loss of all lives on board.  Aircraft sabotage investigator Ian Drake initially believes the mishap was an accident . . . until he discovers every move he makes in the investigation is being watched.

* * *

The History: Following the infamous Cerritos midair collision between Aeroméxico Flight 498 and a Piper Archer, the FAA began a crash program to develop and deploy the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS).  Problem was that the program was rushed before the software was truly ready, and the early TCAS units actually precipitated several near-miss situations rather than preventing them.  Software and hardware bugs still crop up in TCAS systems to this day.

So…what if someone found a way to sabotage the aircraft’s altitude information hoping to cause a crash short of the runway during instrument weather conditions, but before such a crash could occur the TCAS received the erroneous altitude information and a midair collision ensued instead?

The Resulting Book:  And The Games Begin (Book 2 in the Ian Drake Series)—A Gulfstream IV business jet has a midair collision with a passenger-carrying Boeing 747 near Sydney, Australia.  The 747 crashes into downtown Sydney killing everyone aboard the aircraft and hundreds more on the ground.  The Gulfstream limps back to Kingsford Smith Airport where American pilot Marla Stinson, Ian Drake’s former lover, is being charged with negligence in causing the accident.  Ian Drake takes a leave of absence and travels to Sydney to help clear her.

* * *

The History: January 17, 1966 in the skies above Spain, a B-52 bomber carrying four MK28 thermonuclear bombs collided with a KC-135 during aerial refueling operations.  The B-52 broke apart, casting into the void all four bombs.  Three bombs, slowed in their descent by large parachutes, fell onto the small fishing village of Palomares, two of which exploded conventionally contaminating large areas with highly toxic plutonium.  The fourth plunged into the Mediterranean Sea, setting off a massive search and recovery operation that lasted three months before the bomb was successfully recovered.

So…what if it weren’t an accident and what if the MK28 that went into the Mediterranean weren’t really a bomb?

The Resulting Book:  Grand Slam (Book 3 in the Ian Drake Series)—A C-141 carrying four thermonuclear devices from the United Kingdom back to the United States is badly damaged when the KC-135 preparing to refuel it explodes over the North Atlantic.  The C-141 limps back toward the U.K. but is forced to ditch off the coast of Northern Ireland.  U.S. Navy divers discover that one of the nuclear bombs has been replaced by a disguised dummy bomb unit.  Aircraft sabotage investigator Ian Drake is sent undercover to learn how the sabotage was done, who stole the real weapon, and to locate the device before it falls into the wrong hands.

* * *

“What if…?” is a truly fun game for any author. And if it’s done well, the reader gets the true benefit.  My current novel for sale, Decisions, was also the result of a “What if,” scenario, and it has been very well received by readers, reviewers, and even Publishers Weekly.  I hope my three previous efforts are as equally well received after they come out later this year.

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