Month: December 2006

Pie redux

I got a nice comment on my Chocolate Peppermint Pecan Pie recipe (well timed, since I was just starting to make it for dinner tomorrow), asking for other cooking ideas.

I wish I could respond with some, but this is really the only recipe I’ve ever created (and even then, it was just a variation on the well-known pecan pie recipe on the Karo Syrup bottle). I did make hamburgers with cumin once — but that was widely considered a mistake, not to be repeated.

So I guess the idea is to be willing to experiment — to start from a known base and make small changes. Sometimes they’ll work; sometimes, you get cumin hamburgers.

And home again

We decided to avoid the Grapevine again (though there was nothing on the traffic reports that really indicated a need to do so), and thereby found ourselves in Bakersfield for lunch. Our original plan had been to eat at the Apple Shed in Tehachapi, but they quoted us a 20-minute wait, and there wasn’t 20 minutes worth of browsing in the shop, so we continued.

We weren’t feeling very adventurous, so we waited until we started seeing recognizable signs — I was ready to give up and go to Baja Fresh, but when we pulled into their parking lot, there were a number of more interesting looking restaurants to try. We ended up at Flame and Skewers, which served “Mediterranean” food (in other words, shwarma and kebobs), which was a great choice, especially since we’d spent the previous 90 minutes listening to Israeli music on Radio Hanukkah. After looking at the business cards at the restaurant, I doubt that they were serving Israeli food, but it was quite tasty and certainly in the right spirit.

And then on to home. Total driving for the trip: 2104 miles, most of it spent listening to Radio Hanukkah, which now has 24 minutes left in this year’s edition. It’s definitely downhill from here!