Aventuras en la cocina con Chris y Miguel

Since I'm working on Spanish and using the (long-ago appointed) nickname Miguel, a full Spanish title seem appropriate (someone can let me know if the syntax is wrong) ...



So, dinner last night certainly was an adventure. We were trying out some new recipes, which in and of itself is not the adventure since it is fairly common-place around here. However, the behavior of the kitchen devices certainly was. I was working on sweet potato-rosemary soup (the recipe called for way too much stock in my opinion; I should have listened to my intincts and left out 4 cups of it ... who ever heard of putting 12 C of stock for 8 C of sweet potatoes?), blending the cooked sweet potatoes with a hand blender. I heard an unusual noise, pulled the blender out of the pot only to see that the blade had falled out of the blender. We rapidly pulled the blade out of the soup, hoping that it was only a single piece that fell out, and that there wasn't a long spring floating around in the soup. The soup still needed some more pureeing, but now that the hand-blender was defunct, we had to resort to the "old-fashioned" method of taking some aliquots of soup out at a time and placing them in the blender. The blender was turned on to work on 2 C of soup, immediately 1/4 of that ended up spraying on the wall and counter. still not quite sure what happened, if it was a combination of the soup being hot and the lid not being held down firmly? Anyhow, I moved Miguel out of the way to try and fix the problem, when the same thing happened to me. Maybe the seal was broken the soup went flying the first time around. We felt like we should be on some cooking show, with Maybel and Earl at home watching some nincompoops at home unable to puree soup ... We had some good laughs. Dinner actually turned out quite well, including this cake:



Ginger Pear Upside-Down Cake

Ginger Cake

1.5 C flour (3/4 C can be whole wheat pastry flour)

2 tsp ground ginger

1.5 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 egg (or substitue equal to one egg)

1/3 C sugar

1/3 C molasses

1/3 C applesauce

1/4 C canola oil

1/3 C yogurt (soy or dairy)

Pear Topping

1/4 C brown sugar

1/4 C walnuts, chopped (if desired)

2-3 pears cored and chopped thinly

1. Oil 8x8 baking pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix dry ingredients together (besides sugar).
3. Mix together sugar, wet ingredients besidies yogurt.
4. Add wet to dry, then stir in yogurt.
5. Spread brown sugar on bottom of pan, then place walnuts (if using), and then pears.
6. Pour cake over pear topping layer.
7. Bake for about 35 minutes, or until knife comes out clean.
8. Immediately turn cake over onto serving plate.
9. Enjoy!