Four pears: $1 My baking: Priceless

I really love food, I enjoy the process of making it just as much as eating it.

Friday was the end of a semi stressful week, which included our first lab competency test, our first test in Health Assessment, and our first test in Pharmacology. I say semi stressful because when looking at next month we have seven tests, more lab competency, and since clinicals start this Friday, every Friday for the next 15 months will probably be booked from 5am till 7pm. That will be a bit more stressful.

Friday evening arrived and I really didn’t feel like studying, so I baked. I had recently bought 4 pears for a dollar at a local store (there were about 12hrs from being rotten), I decided these would worked well in a baked good. Even if there was some nasty bacteria or mold in the mushy parts, cooking them in the oven at temps between 425 and 350 is well over the temperature at which surgical equipment is autoclaved at. (121 C for 20min)

I started by trimming off the really nasty parts of the pears, and then diced all four up into irregular shapes. I had quite the pile of pears, so much so that I figured that I could probably do two different things with them. I decided to bake both muffins as well as some loafs of bread.

Unfortunately I have yet to acquire proper baking tins, bowls, pans.. therefore the muffins were mixed in a stove pot, and then cooked in the only muffin tins I had. Tiny ones.They turned out really well despite their small stature. The muffins contained the typical ingredients of butter, eggs, sugar, flour, soda, powder, and milk, but what really made them tasty was cup of diced pear, 1/2 tsp of cinnamon, and ¼ tsp of nutmeg.

They were easy and fun to make. Since they were so small it only took 12min to bake them, and since they are so small I can eat ten of them in one sitting and not feel bad about it. It is like eating ice cream with a small spoon. Always better.

The second tasty treat was indeed tasty. Baking loafs is slightly more complicated than muffins, and I wanted to change things up a bit.

Again for want of a proper mixing bowl I mixed the dry ingredients in a stovetop pot. Once the typically dry ingredients had been mixed together I decided to add a few handfuls of dried cranberries, and followed that up with a few handfuls of chopped walnuts. I mixed in the wet ingredients and placed it all into the pans available to me, a loaf pan, and a cake pan.

The bread turned out great. I wish you could have some. The dried cranberries give it a sweet tang, which is only accented by the unmistakable flavor of walnuts all the while surrounded by the taste of almost overripe organic pears. Not too light, not too dense, one of my best works. It is delicious.