Upside-Down Pear

Before…and after. The comparison shots aren’t quite fair, because very little was back into the kitchen when I took the “after” photo — but keep in mind that in the “before” photo, everything is put away, except for the contents of the dish drainer! That is what the kitchen looked like scrubbed clean and put together!

By the way, if you are in the Pittsburgh area, the work was done by James Gyre & a crew he put together — if you want his contact info, drop me a line.

I’ve just spent my first real time cooking since April. I’ve got shepherd’s pie, braised pork ragu, roast fingerling potatoes, and a rhubarb dessert I made up on the fly all cooling in the kitchen. Later, some of the ragu will go over a dish of manicotti & spinach.

The new dishwasher’s running, but I have to concentrate to hear it. The dining room is still a disaster area.

First recipe out of the new kitchen — as usual for me, with only vague measurements:

Rhubarb Cobbler with Tapioca

• enough rhubarb to fill a large pie plate (maybe 3 cups?), chopped into 1″ chunks
• 2 eggs
• some milk
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• some cinnamon, maybe 2 tsp or so
• some small tapioca pearls, maybe 1/2 cup or so
• 2 tbsp butter, melted
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking powder
• salt & black pepper

Preheat oven to 350F.

Put chopped rhubarb into pie plate with brown sugar, eggs, half the cinnamon, some salt & pepper, the tapioca pearls, and some milk. Mix well and spread evenly.

Stir together flour, white sugar, the rest of the cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and baking powder. Add melted butter, vanilla, and enough milk to make a batter slightly more liquid than a drop biscuit batter.

Spread batter over rhubarb mixture. Bake at 350F for 1 hour. Let cool on counter.

One of the first things we bought when we bought our house was a Weber kettle grill; we had visions of steaks and burgers and skewers of vegetables on hot summer evenings, with cool beer to wash everything down.

After a while, we got more ambitious: let’s grill a leg of lamb! Let’s make the entire meal, including dessert, on the grill! (Note: that last turns out to be a bad idea, in general.)

And then: let’s make a whole chicken on the grill! For Nat’s birthday!

Of course, none of our cookbooks had a grilled chicken recipe in them, and the ones I found on the web made me frown. So off I went to the closest bookstore to my old workplace: Caliban.

It’s a used bookstore; I’m fond of it because it tends to have a lot of old newspapers and magazines as well as interesting books. It also has the usual used-bookstore cruft, of course, but I almost always find a gem wandering through its shelves. Luck was with me, because there on the shelf, in like-new condition, was a slim glossy volume: Chicken on the Grill. Inside the cover, in soft pencil, was written $6-. I flipped through it; it contained a lot of advice about the best way to grill various types of poultry, tips & tricks, and shiny recipes with shiny pictures.

It came home with me, and that weekend, we made Nat his birthday chicken. Since that weekend, years ago now, we’ve made a number of recipes from the book, and never once, not once, had them go wrong. It’s become one of my very favorite cookbooks; if you enjoy grilled chicken (or turkey or duck or Cornish hens), you could do worse than snap up a copy.