Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Feeding Herself, Feeding Us

I took a change this evening with dinner and, while it tasted good, it didn't quite come out perfect. Rewinding a bit: On Sunday, Evelin and I sketched out some menus for the week, but we were missing a few ingredients, so Celeste and I ran out to Giant this afternoon to make some groceries.

In addition to the items on the list, we found red onions on sale, which reminded me of the upside down onion pie I saw on Nami-Nami last week. Evelin had said she wanted to try it, and I'd roughed out converting the measurements from metric to customary. However, I'd left that printout at work, so I googled around and found a version on Veronica Chambers's site. One change that tasted great: Instead of all-purpose flour, I used whole-grain pastry flour.

Celeste is pretty good at feeding herself, so I took a chance and started making the pie while she was eating dinner. I had to pause periodically to refill her peas (and to pick up the bits of Veggie Burger that she didn't want), but it worked reasonably well. However, when she moved on to her blackberries and ricotta, it got messier — both because she was using a spoon instead of just her fingers and because it was messier to begin with ... and she kept wanting more. As I was trying to get the scone dough together for the pie, she started complaining/worrying about how much food she'd smeared on to her overalls, and since I was trying to help her at the same time I messed up and tried spreading the dough on top of the onions by just plopping it into the pan. (The recipe clearly says to roll or form a circle on the worksurface and then to top the onions with that ...)

The biggest problem this created was that there was too much dough in some parts of the pie ... and, overall, it could have used more onions. Still it was pretty tasty, especially with the fresh baby spinach cooked in olive oil and lemon and a Tofurkey kiełbasa on the side ... and (for me) a big glass of Château Menaut sauvignon blanc (Appellation Pessac-Léognan Contrôlée) 2004.

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