“Remoted” – Day 209 (Sunday)

Apples! And pears.

Sunday cooking involved spaghetti sauce that seemed like a good idea to have with polenta. When the sauce was well underway, thoughts turned to the packaged pie crust in the refrigerator. It seemed like a good day to deal with the bowl of apples. After too long spent thinking about but not making an apple pie, the idea shifted to individual pies, and the recipe search was redirected to hand pies and mini pies. Pillsbury.com, the masters of refrigerated crusts and biscuits, has a recipe for mini pies baked in a muffin pan where all the ingredients already exist in the pantry. Thanks to having reorganized the baking cabinet this morning, the exact location of the nonstick and cast iron muffin pans is known. 

The recipe was found while searching on the phone, which is an extra difficult way to work from a recipe, and I decided to write it down on a card, which is my preferred way to refer to a recipe. Recipe cards don’t time out, don’t need scrolling, don't have ads, and are portable, eliminating the need to keep returning to the computer that is too large for any counter space in my immediate cooking environment. 

A trip to the kitchen junk drawer for a card led to the kitchen/office computer where the mini pies recipe was found again and written down. Comments and reviews on the site included “filling is dry,” which wasn’t thrilling, but modifications to be more like my apple fruit crisp filling, which isn’t dry, might work. By the time the research and transcribing was done, the interest in making mini pies with refrigerated dough cut with a large cookie cutter had already been exhausted. 

The Internet search continued for another 40 minutes, this time for numerals for the house. The delivery folks have seemed understandably confused lately. Since the front yard fence went up, the ugly plastic mailbox with its peeling adhesive numbers that is affixed to the front of the house  is not as visible from the street. The search for adhesive numerals has already gone on for several weeks too long. The desired numerals are Art Deco style and can be affixed to the corner vinyl fence post at the end of the driveway close to the road. A new mailbox is also on the list of replacement items, but the preliminary searches have been as overwhelming as the search for numerals.

The numeral parameters are the easy part. Sifting through the results is overwhelming. Even when specifying "three inches," the results include every size from microscopic to gigantic. Even when specifying vinyl adhesive, the results include metal numbers that attach with screws. There were some numerals I liked, but the reviews indicated they tore easily during the installation. There was also a solar powered illuminated sign that seemed promising for its utility but wasn’t especially pretty. Each modification of search terms resulted in dozens of pages of results. There are now three set of vinyl numerals and two solar powered signs in the Amazon shopping cart, no final decisions, and I had to walk away. Hunger had set in. 

The hunger led to cooking a box of rotini for supper, with extra for a pasta, sauce, and cheese baked dish. Once the rotini was merrily boiling away, the original polenta supper idea was remembered. Rotini was eaten, but all the extra pasta might now become macaroni and cheese. There is also no apple pie, full-sized, mini, hand held, or otherwise. We’ll see what ideas flit through the kitchen tomorrow.