Small Bits

If your in the Huntsville Alabama area my church, Valley Fellowship, is having a picnic this Sunday and everyone is welcome! Service starts at 10am and the picnic is immediately afterword. 3616 Holmes Avenue NW, 35816. It's like potluck but we make sure enough meat is available: pulled pork, burgers, hotdogs...

I received my second 99 score from the health department! They just can't give me that last point! LOL! So far we have stayed 95 and above. I am NOT complaining!

Here's a picture of the small kids (preschool) lunch below. It's an Italian flat-bread sandwich with salami, pepperoni, ham, herb infuse extra virgin olive oil, and I bake the bread myself...But really it's probably the chips and cookie that sells it! We put it in a small to-go container because they feed them in the class room instead of trying to get them all in the cafeteria. Smart thinking. 

Pizza, Aluminum Foil, and Parchment Paper

📌 Originally posted August 2013 · Updated & expanded 2026 — This post still gets a ton of traffic, so I figured it was time to give it the full treatment it deserves.

Pizza, Aluminum Foil, and Parchment Paper

What I've Learned After All These Years

Let me set the scene. It's a Saturday night, I'm ready to make pizza, I go to grab the parchment paper — and it's gone. Not a single sheet left in the house.

Now at this point I've got dough rested, sauce made, toppings ready to go. I'm not stopping. So I did what any committed home pizza cook does: I improvised. I grabbed the aluminum foil and figured we'd see what happened.

That one Saturday night turned into one of the most-visited posts on this entire blog, which honestly still surprises me. But I get it — because the parchment vs. foil question comes up every time someone starts getting serious about homemade pizza. So let me give you the full picture, not just the original experiment.

Saturday night pizza — the experiment that started it all

Oven Potatoes or Hash Browns?

Really the 'hash browns' I am talking about are the kind you get at chick-fil-a. Round and flatter than a tator-tot these hash browns complete a breakfast plate we offer for lunch at VFCA. The picture is an elementary grade plate of scrambled eggs, hash browns, biscuit, and sausage gravy!

Today I decided to use real potatoes to do some oven 'fried' potatoes to go with breakfast for lunch. I have some tough critics! They wanted the processed hash browns more than the potatoes! I said, 'Look, these are REAL potatoes!'. Unfortunately they were not impressed...Sigh.

It reminds me of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution where the kids could not identify a real potato but they knew a crinkle cut fry was a 'potato'.