Stormy Weather

Here in the Heartland we are having scattered thunderstorms and slightly cooler weather. I guess the first day of September should be the start of the end of summer. I did notice that about 8 PM last night it was pretty dark outside. The days get shorter as we head to the Winter solstice.

The paper this morning was filled with cooking ideas for apples and pork. I think I will try to do something with the Asian pears and pork chops. For some reason they recommend heavy cream as it is less likely to curdle or break when cooking. I may substitute a thickened (Corn Starch) gravy for the cream based sauce to cut the calories. They used Couscous as the grain and I think I am currently out of it. I do have some Quinoa that is a grain and while the texture is different, the taste is similar. We have a glut of Asian pears right now and I think people here in the midwest don't realize how well they produce. As a bonus, they have a heavy skin and almost nothing tried to put their larvae in them. We spray our apples and regular pears and have to be careful to cut out the bad parts of those fruits. Oh well, the deer will eat well shortly.

Dang I hate to read about food in the morning paper. I'll be hungry all day and just want to snack away. I even got out my master Foods Volunteer training book and looked up Couscous and Quinoa to make sure I spelled it right. the spell checker I use doesn't pick up many of the foreign foods and offered some really strange spellings most of which I didn't recognize. The program here on blogger doesn't allow for adding things so forever it will continue to not recognize stuff. At least my spell checker on Word will.

Barb has one of those old fashioned apple peelers. It first scrapes off the peeling and then spiral cuts the flesh and cores the seeds out. It is kind of fun to make strips of peels and then have the core pushed out of the middle of the strange cut fruit. The good thing is that it all tastes fresh and is good. The bad news is that out freezer died ugly this week and we have only about half as much storage space. That will be something I'll take care of after we get back from our trip. One year we had a storm hit while we were gone and the freezer clicked off the GFI switch on the wall and we had a freezer of stuff that died ugly and stayed that way for almost two weeks. The smell would have gagged a maggot.

See you all later on....

MUD