Past Time for Pie Time in the Kitchen

 

It's past time for pear pie season to start, for sure, but with most of my energies focused on my new goat and donkey friends, I haven't dedicated much time to kitchen projects lately.  With my parents here for a visit though, we managed to pick some pears right off the tree, slice them up with the handy apply corer machine, and bake them into buttery crusts.  

I made these crusts with that delicious Kelly Gold butter, and they were some of my best so far.  We made a pear and cinnamon pie with a crumble topping, and a pear and vanilla custard pie, and took them both to a family Oktoberfest party.  I didn't get a picture of the final pies before we decimated them, but these pies were so good they were inspiration for more pie.

Sometimes our kitchen is such a disaster I have a desire to take it's picture and show you (is that Grimace in the window?). By the end of every day, after cooking breakfast and packing lunches (three cheers for cutting back on eating out!), and all the other things we're doing, every surface in our kitchen is cluttered.  I like that our kitchen is a work place, and it's small enough that I can get it back in good enough shape to fix a simple meal pretty quick, but we can clutter it up even faster.  How do two people who are gone most of the day make such a mess? Brandon and I once gave each other New Years resolutions.  I resolved that he should throw garbage in the garbage can instead of leaving it on the counter, and he resolved that I would close the drawers and cabinet doors after I open them.  I was never that good at resolutions.

The kitchen isn't exactly finished either.  There still aren't handles on the cabinet doors, and there aren't even doors on all the cabinets! Despite the kitchen's small size, our storage is better here than at our old house, but there are shelves that we planned for that haven't been built yet.

Whew, I can breath a little easier once I get the kitchen picked up and wiped down, and ready for the next mess to be made.  

One of the messes I've been making this week is to boil rice in too much water to make rice water for Wendigo to drink.  Wendigo had an upset stomach for a couple of days, and I read that one way to help is to do a rice water fast for twenty-four hours.  

Wendigo has a big appetite to match her ever growing giant puppy body, so denying her food for a whole day was a little like torture for her, and us.  Also, she does not like Pepto Bismol, so in my struggles to squirt it in her mouth, we would both be splashed with bright pink spots.  But, she's all better now without a trip to the vet or any medicines, so hopefully it was worth it.  The chickens enjoyed all that mushy rice.