A Culinary Weekend
After five hours of peeling pears, my hands and fingers and arms are killing me. I cut myself twice and lost 50% of my fingernails. It didn't help that I took an hour break to give Bingley a bath, another hand-intensive task. When compounded with the scant five hours of sleep I got, and the three hours I spent this morning waiting in line with Bingley to get his yearly vaccinations, I'm exhausted.
I started with about 100 small to medium asian pears and ended up using about 60% of them. Some things I learned:
1. The bumpy pears were unusable due to the fact that all of the bumps were these little, hard, untasty knots. Boo.
2. The tiniest of the pears were also unusable due to the fact that they were 90% core.
I could feel my perfectionism and OCD-ness getting stronger as the time elapsed and my mental fatigue grew. I kept wanting to harvest every last gram of usable pear, and found myself starting to peel the bumpy ones in the hopes that I could scavenge some flesh here and there. I felt so bad tossing out the unusable pears -- that's a lot of wasted food!
After dinner I'll actually start the preservation process. Mmmm, boiling in sugar.
Tomorrow I'm making Steelers cupcakes (again). This time it's going to be dark chocolate cake with an Andes mint baked in the center topped with mint buttercream. I can't decide whether or not I should dye the frosting yellow (so that the cupcakes are black and gold). On the one hand, the colors would be right, but on the other hand, I personally find the idea of yellow mint frosting a bit disconcerting and unappetizing.
Poll Yellow Mint Frosting?
I started with about 100 small to medium asian pears and ended up using about 60% of them. Some things I learned:
1. The bumpy pears were unusable due to the fact that all of the bumps were these little, hard, untasty knots. Boo.
2. The tiniest of the pears were also unusable due to the fact that they were 90% core.
I could feel my perfectionism and OCD-ness getting stronger as the time elapsed and my mental fatigue grew. I kept wanting to harvest every last gram of usable pear, and found myself starting to peel the bumpy ones in the hopes that I could scavenge some flesh here and there. I felt so bad tossing out the unusable pears -- that's a lot of wasted food!
After dinner I'll actually start the preservation process. Mmmm, boiling in sugar.
Tomorrow I'm making Steelers cupcakes (again). This time it's going to be dark chocolate cake with an Andes mint baked in the center topped with mint buttercream. I can't decide whether or not I should dye the frosting yellow (so that the cupcakes are black and gold). On the one hand, the colors would be right, but on the other hand, I personally find the idea of yellow mint frosting a bit disconcerting and unappetizing.
Poll Yellow Mint Frosting?