Before Thanksgiving, in the lunch room at work, someone brought up the topic of mincemeat. Is there meat in mincemeat? I suspected the modern store-bought ready made would be meat-free and I brought home a jar from the grocery. Turns out the ingredients did list beef. This pie then, is not for vegetarians.
I made the pie last night, and there is not much left. The crumb crust is a repeat of the recent apple walnut pie. There is still half of the jar of mincemeat remaining. Repeat again?
We had a pre-Thanksgiving get together yesterday. It is not a feast unless we have pie, so making the pie occupied our afternoon. I made a crust while Jen and Josie worked on the filling. Jen brought the apples; the guest ingredient on hand was chopped walnuts. A quick Google found us this recipe from recipetips.com
Here is Jen using my apple machine, and Josie trying out her new clamp-on seat.
The filling and crust both received a pre-baking cooking. I screwed up with the pie weight beans, and had to toss the first attempt. After a trip to the supermarket for other dinner fixin's, I prepared another crust, laid on the topping and popped it in the oven.
The recipe has the temerity to suggest "Cool several hours before cutting." Well, we did wait a little while, but the pie was still warm and runny when we attacked. Yum! Today, the pie slices are much more Euclidean, and still delicious.
The jellied cranberry was added to the picture for a little color and interest, but did not go in to the pie.
This week we had a couple small, DIY-scale projects, one electrical, on plumbing. Of course the small designation is usually slapped down by the actual execution.
The electrical flavor was our new-ish GE Advantium microwave oven. It was beeping and displaying the F3 error code. Fortunately, it was on a circuit all its own, so a trip to the basement to trip the breaker solved the bleeping beeping problem. Google led us to some pages that explained we would need to replace the front panel.
There was DIY advice on the web explaining how to pull the unit from the wall (its a built-in) and access stuff from on top. My back had been bothering me so wrangling the unit was daunting. I decided to leave this repair to some pros. Two guys showed up on Thursday with the new part, but they had little clue how about this model. They poked and prodded a while. Once I supplied a printout of the web page instructions, they were able to get it in gear and make the repair.
The plumbing project was motivated by a leaking ledgeback facet in our bathroom sink. A plumber had previously told us that he could not get replacement parts (washers) for this old model. Maybe that was bull because we do have a good local resource in Watertown. But I went online again to Locke Plumbing and found a suitable replacement.
The challenge here turned out to be getting the old facet apart. There were some hard to access cotter pins holding the pop-up assembly together. I ended up disconnecting the water supply and drain pipes and removing the sink from the wall. The one-hour estimate from web DIY advice turned into maybe two-plus hours. I drew blood twice, once a nick on my forehead from dropping a tool on my face as I lay on my back looking up at the work site. Once again a typical knuckle scrape. It's not a real project unless you bleed a little.
The job did give me an excuse to buy one new tool: a basin wrench. If you need one, nothing else will do. This really helped on the reassembly. I also got to use an old tool I picked up a long time ago on speculation: a little double-ended right-angle screwdriver.
Everything seems to be in order, except the handle above the facet to the pop-up doesn't quite fit in the hole provided in the porcelain sink. It is quite hard, but not impossible to pop the pop-up up and down.
Jordi and Jen are following something called baby-led weaning. Josie has been subsisting solely on nursing so far, but the six month anniversary is when we first offer some solid food. You can see how the sweet potato fest went at the jenjordi blog. Summary: interesting, but too soon to be sure "food" is a good idea.
Jen has posted the companion photo to this pic. I'm just moving too slowly, and being a me too. Oh, and another thing, Jen made a pair of scrumptious sweet potato pies.
After sitting out the spring and summer BUDA hat leagues this year, I did sign up for the fall session. Even then, I missed a few games with a sore hamstring and a rainout and the final game of our BSSC softball league. But I did show up for the tournament last Sunday, and our team, Hot Wheels, made a good showing.
Some of the players that gave us an undefeated regular season were missing. We picked up a couple freelance players to give us a reasonable sub situation and went 3 and 0 in pool play. We won the semi-final game, but were beat in the final. Good folks and good fun.
My BUDA T-shirt page has a new entry.
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