is today, June 17th and she is in Milwaukee taking care of her granddaughter. Clara, her granddaughter, is usually at my house on Sunday nights with her parents. This weekend however, her parents are in New York and my sister Mary K and her husband Peter have bravely stepped up to the plate to babysit for the weekend. Which is to say coming to Milwaukee from Madison and staying in their son’s house with their granddaughter.
There are so many frightening issues in this concept. I mean, really, (remind me to discuss particles some time. Particles of speech, not particles in solution or some such thing. The word “really” here is a particle I discovered this week) anyway, to me, taking care of someone else’s 9 month old baby, even if it is your own grandchild, in not-your-own-house sounds almost unbearably daunting. And so I am taking dinner to them. A birthday dinner complete with Florence’s orange cake.
I’m making a savory tomato pie (among other things). It is a recipe from Fine Cooking. You can seethe recipe here. I realize am not good with recipes. Particularly complicated ones, I mean, I like a good culinary challenge, but not ones I have to read a lot of steps and procedures, and comprehend them. But this really sounded good; cheese, roasted tomatoes, caramelized onions, mustard in a pie configuration, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
At this point the pie has been completed and my kitchen is cleaned (horrified face emoji) but before that here was making, chilling (twice) and rolling out the pie crust, roasting the tomatoes, caramelizing the onions, making the cheese/cream filler stuff. And the recipe doesn’t really address the issue of liquid. You roast tomatoes, you get liquid. A lot of it. The recipe just says put the crap in. I’m no baker but I think that’s gonna make a really wet filling. And when I say wet I mean it could have its own gravitational tide. And then there is the issue of the tomato skins. Roma tomatoes have thick skins and just plopping them into the pie without removing the skins puts me in mind of those tough things in the center of apples that I hate so much (they are called endocarps but I doubt anyone would know what I meant if I wrote that). And once the tomatoes are cooked it’s easy to slip the skins off, so I did.
The tomatoes are layered with cheese and some sort of cream, parmesan cheese and mayonnaise slop, and baked in a two step process.
I can say that on the whole I’d rather babysit a 9 month old for a weekend than make that again.
