Apparently, it all started in New York, in Jim Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery in Hell’s Kitchen (which I didn’t visit, by the way, as I only discovered this when I got back from my holiday). Then Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist, wrote about it in his NY Times blog, which caught the attention of another of my favourite food bloggers, Tony Tahhan.

And when I read Tony’s post, I knew I had to try it myself. It really is very easy, and the results are fantastic. Midway through the process, looking into that blob of sticky dough, a hint of a doubt may have started creeping up, but good things come to those who wait… And that fragrant loaf of bread coming out of the oven sure was a good thing!

No-Knead Bread, by Jim Lahey

3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
Cornmeal, wheat bran or plain flour to dust

Place the flour, yeast and salt on a large bown, and slowly stir in the water, until uniform.
Cover the bowl with cling film and forget about it for 12-18 hours, while if ferments and gets all bubbly.

Dust thoroughly the work surface and your hands with flour, and then take the extremely sticky dough out of the bowl and fold it a couple of times over it self. Wrap it in a flour coated cotton towel , and let it rise for two more hors.

Preheat your oven and a lidded pan or pot inside to 260ºC - 280ºC. The pan can be metal or ceramics, as long as it can stand the high temperature. When the oven is really hot, invert the dough into the preheated vessel and cook covered for 30 minutes, and then uncovered for another 15 minutes, until golden and beautiful.

Yummy as it may look and smell, don’t be too impatient and let it cool a bit before going for it, or you might burn your tongue and fingertips - don’t say i didn’t warn you!

To avoid losing a graphic connection to the author, I’ve created a small Markl Universe where small icons that relate to past work and episodes orbit around the header. Hardcore fans will identify all pieces of the puzzle, most readers won’t recognise all. Over time, a few of the icons may even change, being recycled as new objects come into play.

Thanks to everyone at Blogs do Sapo for taking care of all the coding.

And in fact, those two weeks were amazing. Fantastic, marvelous, awesome, superb, I’m-running-out-of-superlatives, spectacular… I enjoyed every second of walking up and down the big avenues, trigger-happy on my endless supply of camera gigabytes, never a bad moment to be experienced, never even being allowed to feel lonely. Just me and the city, what else did I need to make me happy?

I never suspected that parting would be so hard. Leaving New York broke my heart and left me sighing every time I glimpse that skyline on a film or tv show. I’m aching, I’m mourning, drowning in work and dull weather. And I’m not ready to go through all the photos and memories yet.

To make things worse, New York is everything but a faithful lover. So many return from there with this sickly heart disease, proclaiming their passion at any mention of the city, counting the days to go back for few more moments of adoration. So many return to write beautifully about it, and display photos of every skyscraper, every scene, from every angle.

What chance have I got to say something new? Being in love with New York is such a cliché, I might as well be wearing one of those two-dollar “I heart N Y” t-shirts, isn’t it?

Sure, I’ll get over it, and manage to write about it sooner or later. But hang on a bit. It may take a while before I kiss and tell.

I’ve been meaning to do my own pizza dough for ages, finally I’d have a chance to try it.And the challenge was very clear, we had to toss it in the air like a real professional. I was so excited I gathered some friends around and called it a pizza party.

The pizzas were declared a success, but in the end I was a bit sad… I didn’t manage to toss the dough as I should. Not that I was clumsy or anything like that. The dough was simply untossable. It was so soft it started stretching as soon as I held it, and looked like it was going to break apart and open holes if I didn’t place it at once on the baking sheet. I did everything by the book, so I wondered if they had just waited outside for too long.

I didn’t get any photos of the party pizzas either… with all the people waiting to be fed, it seemed a bit rude to whisk them away to be photographed first. So on the next day, I gave it another go. Sadly, the result was the same. Even the dough straight out of the fridge was too soft to toss. I had failed.

It was crispy and tasty all the same, and I did get some shots of my 4-in-one pizza, so it wasn’t a waste. But I’ll keep experimenting with pizza dough recipes and I’ll learn to toss them properly, I’m stubborn that way.

Having said that, here’s the link to the dough recipe, from Rosa’s Yummy Yums, who hosted this great challenge. And don’t forget to check all the other daring bakers!

And so you don’t go away from this post empty handed, here’s my super douper recipe for pizza sauce:

Tomato Sauce for Pizzas:

and my secret ingredient:
2 streaky rashers of bacon

Place the olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat.

Chop the garlic and the onion very thinly and add it to the oil.

When the onion starts to soften, add the bacon rashers and let it cook for a few more minutes.

Finally, add the tomato puree, the sugar, salt, pepper and oregano.

Cook for about five minutes over high heat, and then reduce to low, cover, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Taste it and correct the seasoning if needed.

Discard the bacon rashers and let it cool for a bit before spreading on the pizza dough. Remember, a little goes a long way…

Regarding the toppings, below are some of the combinations I used:

- Bacon and onions
- Fresh mushrooms and corn
- Ham and fresh mushrooms
- Pineapple and parma ham
- Tomatoes, mozzarella di buffala and basil

I meant to post a bit more than I did when I was in New York, but can you blame me for not wasting any time writing while Manhattan was out there, calling me out to play? Still, it’s very nice to know there were lots of people following my Twitter updates as if it was an exciting soap opera.

So, this is what’s happening. Instead of a live diary, I’ll be posting my daily adventures in the next few weeks. Slowly, as I process all the photos - my trigger happy finger went nuts in such an brilliant scenery, as expected. All the video snippets will be gathered into a music-video-style piece as soon as I manage to have some time.

Also, I will select and edit the best photos to create a manageable holiday slideshow for friends and family. I’ll probably add them to Flickr as well, maybe even print them in a booklet.

The homepage in now back to normal, but you can still see all the photos I had on there, the“Holiday Photostream”, taken with my adorably low-fi iPhone camera. As for the posts I wrote while on the go, I will add some photos to them as well.

Monday is knocking on my door, and the new week will bring tons of new work, lots of phone calls to make, e-mails to respond to, people to see. Things on this site will start to move again, but at a slow and relaxed pace, so please don’t be impatient! I’m glad to be back, please stick around too!

I’d seen it in enough movies to know that Coney Island should actually be renamed to Corny Island. The charm of that small strip of old fashioned beach resort is precisely that there isn’t a sliver of sophistication in miles.

Long gone the hot Summer days, I wasn’t able to see Coney Island in all it’s glory. Autumn left the place sad and abandoned, and even the famous Cyclone rollercoaster was closed - such disappointment! Despite the cold weather, the rest of the Astroland amusement park was open, with most of the small rides pumping their conflicting tunes, but not moving due to a lack of customers.

I bought a ticket for the Wonder Wheel, wondering, indeed, if Manhattan could be seen from the top. It could, on a clear day, according to the middle aged man controlling the access to the carts. He’d seen the Twin Towers burn from up there.

Coney Island had seen better days, when he was a young boy, he explained, shaking his head in dismay “It was the world’s playground! Now, it’s reduced to three major attractions!” But in the Summer it’s still so crowded you can hardly move, he assured me: “It’s just too cold to be out here, right now”

Many of the boardwalk bars and restaurants were open, with only a couple of tables out for the locals. They’re wooden boxlike shacks, overly decorated with colourful handpainted type and illustration, little cartoonish statuettes and, of course, plenty of American flags. The long glass counters display all sorts of greasy to very greasy food. Apart from the pizza slices and hot dogs, everything is deep fried.

They even have a novelty delicacy strangely called a “Mozzarepa”: It’s some sort of fried corn stuff with cheese inside. It’s sheer genius: corny and cheesy at the same time. Coney Island at it’s best!

I wanted to try something more traditional, though, and I found something that always made me curious, when I saw it in the movies: a corn dog. As it turns out, it’s just a sausage on a stick, covered in -you’ve guessed it - deep fried cornmeal.

From the sea facing bench where I was munching away on my first (and last) corn dog, I could see the wood pier streching into the bay, more crowded than I thought it would be. It wasn’t full of tourists, or idle families in weekend leisure trips, however. Upon closer inspection, I realised people were fishing, with their long rods and buckets of bait.

Apart from the Jewish holidays, that would still atract a small crowd of visitors, the locals had the beach for them again. The day was as clear as could be, and I did see Manhattan from the top of the creaking Wonder Wheel. It seemed so very far away.

What’s the rush, I keep asking myself, why the eagerness, why the impatience? I don’t know, it’s stronger than me. New York is out there, it’s spectacularly huge, and although I’m here for two weeks, the clock is ticking loudly in my head and doesn’t allow me to waste time. Walk, walk, walk!

Greenwich Village and SoHo are adorable and quirky. Much more relaxed than the big avenues, as people seem to slow down and enjoy life in a different way. It’s so interesting to see the different moods of this city.

The system of fast and slow trains on the subway seems confusing, but it’s not that hard to get used to it. New Yorkers don’t drive much. And as the cabs and limos get stuck in the gridlocked traffic, the subway really is the fastest way to move around. That’s why you find every kind of people down there, even the high powered suited executives.

Everything needs to be fast around here. Including the food, of course. But that’s a whole other story!

New York city is beautiful, as expected, but I’m also loving the New Yorkers I keep meeting and the way the city keeps changing from block to block. If you go down Broadway, from the Upper West Side to Times Square, you have the feeling you’re shrinking as the buildings get taller and taller, and the crowd gets bigger, and the lights get sronger.

Central Park is a cliche on it’s own. There are incredible numbers of joggers, some left at the entry of the park by their limo drivers, dark skinned nannies prancing around the rich blond babies they look after, professional dog walkers, with a cloud of different dogs on leashes - how I wonder how they keep war from starting with such a crowd!

I still haven’t been south of 34th Street - except for the ferry ride to Staten Island - and I feel like I have walked more in these 2 days than I have in the rest of the year! I’ve been wandering around with no purpose, just going where I feel like at a given moment, and it’s a worderful thing to bump unexpectedly into landmarks: hey, look, it’s the Rockefeller building!

I still have plenty of time to explore, I know. Still, I feel like I can’t lose a second, like New York will slip right through my fingers if I don’t grasp it all. So, off I go, lower Manhattan is waiting!

Algumas ruas até se podem arrogar a sonhar com o seu nome nesse tipo de letra moderno, grande e legível como poucos. Parece-me, no entanto, que a Rua do Crucifixo nunca sonhou com tal glória. É uma rua discreta e pacata, que muitos atravessam mas poucos percorrem.

Podia dizer-se que sofre de um complexo de inferioridade em relação às outras ruas da baixa, maiores e mais elegantes, tão cheias de comércio e de gente. Mas na verdade, pressente-se um certo orgulho em não pertencer ao circuito turístico: ali não se passeia. Quem lá vai tem uma intenção. Uns ali trabalham, outros vão comprar meias às riscas e piercings na loja dos góticos, encadernar trabalhos na Fernandes, outros ainda almoçar o que em tempos foi o famoso bife do Palmeira.

Mesmo à boca do metro há uma pastelaria daquelas em que o balcão repleto de bolos e salgadinhos ocupa mais espaço do que as mesas. Um dos empregados mete sempre conversa com os clientes. Tenta ser engraçado e faz questão de nos relembrar que ali, os bolos ainda têm um preço decente, longe dos abusos da Rua Augusta e do Rossio.

Não, a Rua do Crucifixo não é cá para turistas. Por isso deve ter estranhado tanto quando viu o nosso grupo alongar-se por ali, nariz no ar, bloco na mão. Coisa nunca vista por aquelas bandas, uma excursão! E se, na verdade, a rua não tem olhos, pelo menos o cão fechado na pequena mercearia não deixou de ladrar a sua surpresa.

Não caíu o Carmo e a Trindade, nesse início de noite, porque não éramos de facto turistas. Apenas aprendizes, em visita de estudo. E até nós, visto o que havia para ver, rapidamente nos retiramos para as paragens mais pitorescas da Rua Nova do Almada, com o seu pátio cheio de histórias e personagens do tribunal, com a sua limonada da merendinha, com a sua livraria à parisiense.

Se o pudesse fazer, a Rua do Crucifixo teria certamente encolhido os ombros ao ver-nos partir. E teria soltado um breve suspiro, quem sabe de tristeza, quem sabe de alívio.