Upside-Down Pear

I’ve been busy. A week after my new kitchen was finished, so was the baby I’d been baking. He’s six months old now, and although I’ve had time to write posts, I haven’t had the energy!

To try to get myself back into the groove, I am going to tweet the dinners I cook. If you’d like to see them, you can follow udp_dinner on Twitter!

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.

It’s Carnival. I’m 7 months pregnant. And Monday, demolition starts on our old kitchen, to make way for the new one. Our new water heater gets installed Monday, as well.

The dumpster will fit in the driveway. I’m frantically clearing the basement and the dining room to make way for the things that will need to go there or move for the kitchen. I’m also trying to do the Alumni Thing.

Good luck to us!

I’ve queued up a few posts for the Time Of No Kitchen. Let’s hope everything comes out intact on the other side.

Nat has written an excellent post on pastrami sandwiches. Go, and be enlightened.

So, I have a corkboard in my pantry, and in addition to things like “petsitter’s business card” and “calendar”, it had a zillion and a half recipes tacked up to it. Some of them I’d clipped, some of them were handwritten versions of things I have in my recipe database, some were inherited from my mother. They’re all things I want to make fairly often and/or don’t want to lose, ever.

I had so many that I had run out of pushpins and board space, and the recipes were stacked 3 deep, which meant I could never find anything. Today, as I tried to find a place to tack up the sourdough pancake recipe, I remembered that I’d bought some expanding notebook jobbies for another project and had one left over.

The notebook is sort of a cross between a Trapper Keeper and a scrapbook, and so I glued the recipes onto backing (if they were on small paper) or slipped them into plastic casings (if they were on large paper), stuck ‘em in the notebook, and wrote “Recipes” on the front in silver Sharpie.

Now my board is empty and my recipes are safe. It’s not clear to me why this didn’t occur to me before. Perhaps I am about as sharp as a marble. Still, if you have a corkboard full of recipes that you need to hand, or just want your most common recipes always to hand, it’s worth a try…

I’ve spent the past two weeks at my in-laws’ place. My mother-in-law is a wonderful cook and generally great fun; we had a grand old time in the kitchen (in addition to a grand old time hiking, biking, swimming, and driving a beat-up Jeep along the beach).

Some food highlights: oysters, all local, including oysters my MIL could identify by sight (”Those are West Tisbury oysters; they always have those weird shells.”); meltingly-ripe heirloom tomatoes with balsamic vinegar; perfect just-picked sweet corn; puff pastry shells filled with lemon curd and pistachios; cannelloni and osso bucco; fresh sweet hardshell lobster (this one attacked me post-mortem, leaving a half-inch cut on my hand, but it was tasty all the same); crabcakes; crisp roasted fingerling potatoes.

The two weeks was topped off with a fabulous dinner at the Sweet Life Cafe – more heirloom tomatoes, delicately flavored duck breast, cool, delicious potato salad.

If it weren’t for my cats, I might never have come home.

I’ve been meaning to start a food-specific blog for a long time. My current food writing is scattered over various Livejournals, a few Diaryland entries, some mailing lists, and in disorganized files on my hard drive, and I wanted to make it all available in one convenient location. Some of you who have been following my journal may see some repeats as I get organized, and I apologize. I hope there will be enough new material to keep you interested.

There is a Livejournal syndicated feed available: http://www.livejournal.com/users/upsidedownpear/

Welcome to Upside-Down Pear!