greaterthansparrows

I declared myself all done with pears, righteously satisfied, well done.  Not going to worry about any more of the things.  (See last post.) The guy who lives in his van on the vacant lot next door, as sort of security for this small cluster of properties, was going to mow that lot and saw me outside and asked if I wanted him to mow ours.  The immediate answer was yes, if you could.  It was way past needing it; a friend said that her grass was long enough to braid, and that's about how ours was too. It needed to be done before winter set in.  (The friend who has so kindly been helping on the yard has had some major family crises going on, and I haven't wanted to add any other form of pressure to his life.) Lo and behold, with the grass cut, you can see the ground.  And what did I see on the ground yesterday?  More pears,  very visible now, newly fallen from the tree.  Just a few, and easy to see whether they were good or damaged, so I str...

Hearing birds outside the back of the house...at least they're not starlings or crows.They're going after the pear tree. It was pretty cool to find that the tree whose branches dropped over the back corner of our fence was a pear tree.  In fact, there was another, smaller pear tree in the back yard of the still-empty house behind us.  Not only did the tree near the street-side corner turn out to be Hubby's very favorite variety of apples , but I had always wanted a pear tree, and we had permission to pick and use anything we wanted from any of the trees, since no one was yet living in this house behind us. I went online and, to the best of my ability, figured out that these were probably a variety known as Seckel pears--coarse skinned, small, but very sweet.  Knowing that you don't let pears ripen on the tree or they go mushy, we made a first picking when they seemed right and let them ripen.  We had a nice warm summer, lots of sun, and these pears ripened up and...

I haven't been here for a while, and I haven't put up a recipe for a while. We're trying to make more progress in unpacking, and I was in the throes of another project.  Last month a friend gave me a generous amount of rhubarb from her garden, and I went looking for recipes for rhubarb cake, because there was such a yummy one at the reception for Carole's department commencement. I found a long list, and tried to eyeball them and figure which ones would be best.  There was a potluck picnic coming up, and I decided to make two small cakes, cutting recipes in half, so I could try more than one.  The cream cake originally called for a cake mix, then the rhubarb and sugar, then cream, and I thought that sounded like too much total fat, and unhelpful to cut in half; it would also require buying a cake mix.  So I found a rhubarb pudding cake recipe in the list, a small cake, which called for pouring boiling water over all of it rather than whipping cream.  I amalg...