Spiced Wine Pears

Recently, my parents planted a pair of pear trees (hehe...pair o' pear). This year, they produced some fruit. They might not be the prettiest pears, but I knew I could turn them into something tasty. They were hard as rocks when they were first brought into the kitchen, but after a couple days they had ripened up a bit. I peeled them and sliced each one into about 8 slices. I put them in a saucepan with just enough red wine to cover all the slices. Then I added a generous amount of both white and brown sugar, some cinnamon sticks, some whole cloves and some nutmeg (yes, I put nutmeg in everything...what of it?)

I left the whole mess to simmer for roughly two hours. I stirred it regularly and enjoyed the rich and delicious smell that was filling the house. At the same time I was roasting a pan of vegetables so it had some weird competition.

The process was a little strange. I noticed it was getting a little thicker, but I really wanted it to get to a syrupy almost-pie-filling texture. And it made that jump in thickness surprisingly quickly at the end. I pulled out the cinnamon sticks and cloves (not wanting to make another mistake like I did with leaving bay leaves in the squash soup).

The pears ended up sitting in the fridge for a few days before we finally pulled them out to eat them. Since I had cooked them with pie filling in mind, I figured it would be best with some vanilla bean ice cream. I reheated the stewed pears and spooned it over the ice cream.

It was VERY rich and almost too sweet. I was thinking of spiced wine the whole time I was cooking it and that's what it ended up tasting like. The 'rentals also gave it a positive review. If I were to make it again, I would probably put less sugar in and/or add some lemon juice to cut the cloying sweetness.

Sea Tea Interview

So I realize I had the squash bread post up for a while. I have a few posts already ready to go, but they are all about cooking. I want to throw a little variety in, but I just started a new temp assignment and have been rather improv busy this week. So, I hope you will be happy watching this short interview about Sea Tea Improv with Dan and Julia (two of the original members). As a bonus, about halfway through their talk you can see me from the September show pretending to be a lot more badass than I really am.

Squash Bread

In probably the last harvest from the backyard garden, my mother had a few butternut squash, some of which needed some spot removal. They therefore needed to be used ASAP. I had already made squash soup (mmm...remember the squash soup?) so I wanted to do something different. That's when I found this recipe from my favorite recipe website, Eating Well.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, which is rather rare for me. When it comes to baking, I pretty much consider it a mystical science that really shouldn't be messed with unless you know what you are doing. In fact, the only thing I did different was add nutmeg and not add allspice (cuz I couldn't find any...). I baked the squash just like I did for the soup. I did do something probably a little funky. I used a blender to make the squash puree and then just added the eggs, oil, sugar and honey right into the blender. I figured it would save me from getting another kitchen appliance dirty and accomplish the same thing.

Here is where I would stick in a picture of the finished baked bread, but the only picture I took was crappy and blurry. It made the kitchen smell fantastic. I know I said in my post about my squash soup that I wanted it to smell like autumn and I hate to repeat myself, but this bread definitely smelled like autumn. All those lovely spices. Yum. I brought some of the loaf to my improv practice and it was eaten up pretty quickly.


I liked it for breakfast, all warmed up with a bit of butter and a nice mug of coffee. I loved it because it was moist and also sweet but without being overly so. You can taste the squash but it's nicely balanced with the spices and honey/sugar. This recipe would be absolutely perfect for delicious squash muffins. If/when I make it again, that's probably what I'll do.

It actually reminded me a lot of the delicious banana bread that my grandmother used to make. My mother said that it made her think of spice cake.

I think the best compliment, though, is the fact that there was only one tiny piece left from the double recipe I had cooked three days before.

Ahh the joys of hiding vegetables in baked goods.

Carving Pumpkins, Toasting Seeds

I really like Halloween. Although I don't get excited about it as I used to, I still really like a lot of stuff about it. I think part of the reasons I like Halloween is that (at least in my eyes) it is a very creative holiday. When I was a child, we NEVER bought my costume. I, and to a much larger extent my mother, would make my costume every year. We would also go overboard and turn the entire front yard into a graveyard including having Death (with scythe in hand) hanging from the attic window. Although those may not be things we really do anymore, this year we still carved jack o'lanterns.

I can't remember the last time I carved a pumpkin, but this time I wanted to choose a design that was geeky and would require some effort and patience. I went to the interwebs for inspiration and found some pretty interesting stuff. Without meaning to, I found a picture that inspired my mother to carve the pumpkin you see on the left here. Pretty awesome. That pumpkin just makes me smile when I look at it. The pumpkin on the right my dad carved...with a CHISEL. It's pretty hardcore and creepy. I think it's safe to say I have the coolest parents ever.


It took me a while to pick a design. I saw a ton of geektastic pumpkins out there, my favorite probably being a Deathstar jacko'lantern that was intense. If you search for "geeky pumpkins", it's one of the first things that comes up. Everything I found seemed to require way more carving talent than I had faith I have, or was overdone. For example, I love the idea of pumpkin pi, but it feels like everyone and their cousin has made a jack o'lantern with the pi symbol on it.

Anyway, this is what I ended up making. If you recognize it, I give you so many geekpoints. It is the white tree from Lord of the Rings, the crest of Gondor....or at least one interpretation of it. The hardcore Ringers out there will probably point out I did not include the seven stars, but to you I say....I ran out of room at the top. I really like how it came out.


After sticking a candle in mine and mom's, I put them on the front steps. (Dad's is even creepier when it is half lit from the porch light.)

Today I heard a weird noise out front and realized it was a kid getting dropped off by a bus. I happened to catch the kid staring at our front porch and grinning. I am going to assume it was because of the pumpkins. The big question now is, was he laughing because he is a LOTR dork, he is amused by a pumpkin cyclops, or because it's really just polite to smile at a jack o'lantern that is smiling that big at you?


One of the best parts about carving pumpkins, though, is nomming the seeds. From all those pumpkin guts, my mother patiently separated the seeds (while I was still carving). We left them out to dry last night. Today I tossed them with some oil and seasoning before baking them for about 20 minutes or so. Instead of just doing plain salt, I sprinkled them with an herb seasoning mix that is meant for popcorn. I figured if it's good enough for popcorn, it's good enough for pumpkin seeds. I think they came out pretty tasty.


And the picture above amuses me because when I first uploaded it, it was upside down and looked like a delicious pumpkin seed stalactite. Mmm...

Until next time.

Butternut Squash Soup

For a few days, there were two lovely butternut squash sitting on the table just begging to be turned into something delicious. Considering the fall weather, I figured a nice thick, creamy soup would be the best choice.

I started by cutting each one in half, generously rubbing some butter and dusting a bit of ground cloves on each piece. I covered each piece in tin foil and put them in a baking pan with a bit of water on the bottom. After about an hour in the oven at 350 degrees I had soft, falling apart squash that was nice and moist.


While that was cooling, I chopped a ton of vegetables. Two carrots, two onions, three or so stalks of celery, four red potatoes (although maybe only three would have been enough) and about a handful of garlic cloves (I really like garlic). I sauteed those up with some butter, salt and ground pepper in the cast iron pan until they started to soften. I wish I had had a bigger pan...that was a lot of vegetables! Cooking them took longer than it should have and making sure everything was evenly cooked without tossing veggie pieces all over the stovetop was annoying.

I ended up peeling the skin off of the squash and then chopping it up. It was so softened that when I tried to scope the meaty bits out of the skin it just kept falling apart.

All the sauteed veggies and the oven roasted squash went into a big pot with about 7 cups of chicken broth, just enough to cover everything. I also did some seasoning at this point. Just some bay leaves, more ground cloves, more pepper. Unfortunately, my nose was still very stuffed when I made this soup, so cooking was still difficult.


Considering how soft the squash was after being pre-cooked in the oven and how soft the vegetables were after their slow saute in the pan, I only had to simmer the whole shebang for about half an hour before I deemed it ready to be blended. I had to blend it in sections because their was so much. It took at least four full batches in the blender to go through all of it. (I may have overfilled twice as well, leading to the dogs getting a free snack). I added a little heavy cream each time to add to the creaminess.

After all of it was blended and back in the pot there was a preliminary taste test/smell. My mother was home but she found it difficult being my surrogate nose, probably because I asked questions that made sense in my head, like "Does it smell balanced?" that for some reason didn't make sense to her.


It was a bit bland at first, but after some fiddling, it turned out SUPER TASTY. I kind of just had at it with the spice cabinet so I can't be exact with what I added, but I know it involved garlic salt, cinnamon, oregano, nutmeg, ground pepper. In retrospect those sound weird to all be together, but I wanted it to taste like autumn and in the end it did.

My one stupid mistake? I forgot to take out the bay leaves before blenderizing. D'oh! Oh well, little bits of dried spice bits in an otherwise awesome soup are forgivable....right?

One last thing. When I talked about blocking knitted squares, I shared a picture of my dear dog Ben cowering under the ironing board because it was windy out. Well, it was windy while I was chopping vegetables for this soup too, and Ben likes to be as close as possible to his humans when he is scared.

This picture may be a little hard to figure out, but this is Ben squeezed between the counter/oven and my legs. The angle is from my point of view looking down at him, while he looks up at me with his big puppy dog eyes.

Until next time!

8-Bit Improv

So far this blog has been entirely about cooking and crafting so it's probably time to talk improv. I've been doing improv since college and started actually getting paid to perform at bars and the like while I was in China for the last two years. Before I even got back to the US I was looking for improv groups back home so that I could keep it up. Luckily for me, Sea Tea Improv (get it?) held auditions almost immediately after I moved home and I got in. My first show at the Brew Ha Ha comedy club with them was last month, the next one is on Halloween. Spooky.

Today I wanted to mention a game we practiced on Tuesday because it was unlike pretty much any game I had played before. I am 98% sure that one of the Sea Tea peeps, Joe, actually invented this game. It's a bit hard to get your head around, but it's a really interesting concept if you think about it.

His idea is that you treat the stage as though it is the entire universe. And this universe, just like in an 8-bit video game, is forever repeating. So if I walk off the stage on the right, I should end up walking back on the stage on the left without any delay and having crossed no space in between.

Got it?

Now, of course there is no way for me to actually walk off the stage in one direction and instantaneously appear on the other side. That's why we work as a team. If I walk off one side, another actor walks comes on the other side and becomes my character. If I walk off in the middle of the sentence, they should come on and finish it. If I walked off backwards/sideways/with both hands in the air, they should be walking on with the same orientation. We even tried to more complex stuff last night, like reaching offstage so that your partner had to be your arms/head/whatever.

It was a bit of a challenge, but really fun and interesting. It's definitely a game where you need to have a bit of group mind going on so you can almost anticipate what your partner will do and react immediately.

If people want to check Sea Tea out, the next performance is at the Southington Apple Fest this Saturday, and the next Sea Tea show is at the Brew Ha Ha in Hartford on Halloweeeeeeeen.

Stirfry and a Stuffy Nose

I noticed broccoli on sale at the grocery store a while ago, so I bought two big heads with a whole dinner plan in mind. Grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and cheesy broccoli couscous. Unfortunately, while shopping my Dad called with a minor but urgent emergency (it's a boring story that pretty much just involves me driving all over CT) so I had to check out immediately. Aka, sans chicken.The broccoli sat in the fridge for a while, awaiting a new plan. I got some chicken the other day, but for some reason decided to make stirfry instead of my original meal idea.

The only problem is that when cooking this I had a bit of a cold. Now, I don't know how everyone else cooks, but I cook almost entirely dependent on my nose. My nose tells me when something is done cooking or whether it is seasoned right or missing something. So cooking with a stuffy nose for me is like cooking half blind with only one hand. I did the best I could, though. I whipped up a marinade/sauce incredibly impulsively with oil, soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, sesame oil and fish sauce in varying amounts. I then thrust it under my Dad's nose and asked him if it smelled ok. When he declared it's aroma "delicious", I decided it was probably the best I could do and tossed the chicken in it. (Side note, any picture I take of raw meat with the flash on looks GROSS).


Since we have no wok, I did the cooking in a cast iron pan. I would like to take a moment here to talk about cooking times. Different foods take different times to cook. It drives me crazy when I watch people cook with little regard for cooking times. Either they cooked the same food, but chopped different sizes (which can drastically effect how long it takes to be "done", especially with meats), or cooked many different things together for the same time. Either way you end up with some of the food being undercooked and some being incinerated. I am certainly far from an expert on getting cooking times right, but I do make an effort and I am learning the rhythm.


I started with the onions since I like the flavor of them, but I liked my onions super soft. Then some garlic. Then the chicken. Once the chicken was nearly done, I added the broccoli. I wanted it to be cooked but still crisp. I tossed everything around to make sure it was mixed well (which was hard considering the food to pan space ratio I had). The whole time I was cooking, my parents were very cruel and kept commenting on how good it smelled.

I served it all over some Asian noodles. No picture of that, sadly, because I was too busy eating it! I could vaguely taste it, and I think it was good.

Taking a second look, none of these food pictures taken with the flash look very appetizing. I'll have to work on getting more natural light when I try to photograph my cooking.