Cleaning Sand Dollars

This week, one of the servers in the restaurant I work for was given some sand dollars by a customer (along with a tip). He knows that I love to make stuff, so passed them to me to see what I could do with them. If you have ever picked up sand dollars on the beach before, you know that they aren't clean by any standard. In fact, they aren't even slightly white. These were brown, and a little fuzzy for lack of a better term.

Filthy sand dollars before soaking.

To get that creamy white color they must be cleaned first by a fresh water soak. I soaked mine for over 24 hours. This is largely because it was already 6 pm and the sun was required to finish the task. In the end, this was a good thing because most of the debris fell off in the last 6 hours. I also was careful to change the water a few times... it can get smelly!

Just added to bleach. See how much cleaner they look already.

Follow the soak with a ten minute bleach bath followed by a good rinse.

Out of the bleach and into the sun.

The final step is a sun bleaching session. This should help with any yellowing. I did not have yellowing after the bleach, but a few grey and pink spots remained. The sun cleared these right up in two hours. Please keep in mind that the times I used here worked for these sand dollars. Dirtier ones may need more, and cleaner less. Use your best judgement.

Finished product.

In the end, I was left with 4 beautiful sand dollars ready for crafting for the price of a splash of bleach... total win.

Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza

My husband and I met in the Chicago suburbs. I had lived in the region for my entire life, and my husband is from a military family, so after years of moving around the world, they settled there when he was in high school. Needless to say, the local treats of the area were a regular part of our daily lives. So now that we have been away for about four years, we are experiencing withdrawal symptoms. It is basically impossible to find Chicago style deep dish pizza in the pan handle of Florida. Dominos is fine for a quick fix, but we needed the real deal. It was time to get to work.

The pan seemed like it was going to be the biggest hurdle. I believed incorrectly that I would need an overpriced specialty pan. Then as luck would have it, while searching through dough recipes, I found that spring form cake pans were perfect for the task. I was also pinched  for time, so while I made the dough from scratch, I let the bread machine do the hard part. The recipe I used is found here on Food.com. Once the bread machine had finished its work and the rising part had completed, we simply shaped it into the pan. I cheated and used a rolling pin to get the process started, but finished by gently pulling the dough to the correct shape as often recommended.

This done, we began layering in our ingredients. This included a pound of mozzarella, onions, green bell pepper, mushrooms, and mini pepperoni slices. Stop this we added our sauce. We like ours chunky and so added a can of red pepper spiced diced tomatoes to the store bought marinara. I finished this off with fresh basil from my window ledge garden. The final topping was a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.

After about 40 minutes we had ourselves a pretty good dinner. As this was an experiment, there are a few changes to be made next time. We may add ground beef. Also, I will perform the veggies a bit. I also really need to practice with dough. All in all though, this was good. Furthermore, it ended up not costing a lot since it easily made 6 individual meals. I'm definitely keeping this on our menu.

It got a little lopsided, but that's my lack of skill with dough showing.