Not all here today

Today I’m guest posting over at CougarMicrobes.com for the first, but hopefully not only time.

So there’s not much to see here, but I will share the recipe for the rhubarb pear crisp which went over so very well, rather than letting it languish in the comments on an older post. There should also be a new update of One More Morning later today.

Pear Rhubarb Crisp

(If anyone wants this in metric, let me know and I’ll do the conversions.)

Ingredients:
Fruit base:
4 cups chopped rhubarb
2 cups chopped pears (recommend Taylor or Bartlett for sweetness)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp orange extract

1 tbsp butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Crumbled topping:
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/3 cups oats

Butter the base and halfway up the sides of a 9″ by 13″ baking dish. Mix together the fruit base ingredients (if the pears are not juicy, you may wish to add a little bit of apple juice, but no more than 1/4 cup) and layer in the baking dish.

Mix the flour, oats, salt and baking soda in one bowl and the butter, sugar and vanilla in another, then combine and stir well. Layer this over the top of the fruit mixture.

Bake at 375°F for 40 minutes.

Serve hot with vanilla ice cream (recommend Edy’s Slow-Churned) or frozen yogurt (recommend Perry’s All-Natural).

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TMI Thursday: Double Whammy

The tradition of TMI Thursdays is the brainchild of LiLu at livitluvit.com. It is typically introduced as follows: ***Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, “how many readers can I estrange THIS week??” TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else’s!***

I am merciful enough to make this post relatively tame. I also don’t yet have enough readers that I can afford to estrange them. Be warned, though, that should you choose to explore other blog-artists’ TMI Thursday oeuvre, you may find much more than you bargained for.

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Pizza is awesome

I have noticed something about my posts to this blog: I haven’t dedicated nearly enough space to discussing how awesome pizza is.

Or indeed any.

This is a travesty, about to be rectified.

A couple of nights ago, while attempting to make something L would eat, I mentioned to D that we should offer thanks to the person who first squoze a tomato and thought “hey, that felt pretty gross but I bet it would be great on food.”

I definitely think this person should be admitted to the panoply of saints, possibly advancing to seraphim levels. I doubt you can go any hier up the archy than that if you’re made of meat.

Growing up in Italy, pizza was extremely important to me. I used to eat absolutely ludicrous quantities of it, often having a pizza made to fit the largest platter the restaurant had to offer. I have since calmed (and slimmed) down, but pizza is still very much a comfort food for me.

I am not, however, as much of a purist as one would expect from said upbringing. I have no objection to Philly cheesesteak or Buffalo chicken pizzas, and am extremely tempted by the pizzeria about 20 minutes from here whose menu features a Thai curry pizza.

Typically, though, when making pizza at home it’s a more classic tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni and olives kind of deal. And home-made dough, of course.

I won’t claim to have the culinary skills of Lemmonex, or of other food-bloggers I read, but my pizza is pretty darn good.

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Sea Kittens are the Yummiest Kittens

So it seems that PETA, in their infinite yet questionable wisdom, have another addition to their greatest hits. Above and beyond their suggestion of using human milk rather than cow’s milk for dairy products, and well ahead of most of their ‘shock-value’ advertising, comes this little gem:

Fish, due to previous bad PR, are now to be reinvented as Sea Kittens in order that people will consider them too cute to eat.

Sea Kittens.

And there’s even an insipid little game on their site where you can create a Sea Kitten image of your very own.

This is my Sea Kitten. His name is Lunch.

Hmm. I wonder what their position is on chicken, and turkey. Air Kittens may be even yummier.

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