cooking and such

I cleaned my oven today. Also scrubbed the kitchen floor on my damn hands and knees. (There's an apartment inspection tomorrow. They'll only be going into random apartments, and I know that it's to make sure you're not living in filthy squalor, not to see if you qualify for the Clean Freak of the Year award, but I get paranoid. And on a practical level I try to use these things as motivation to do the cleaning I needed to do anyway. Yesterday I washed the windows!)

I also did a bit of cooking. I have some Khorasan wheat aka kamut that I picked up a while back because it was on clearance very cheap. There aren't a lot of recipes around for it, so I improvised what was meant to be a sort of jambalaya-ish thing only with Middle Eastern flavors. I added a little too much water so it was more like a stew, but it was still quite tasty. ( inexact recipe under the cut )

I also roasted some pears and made a caramel sauce. This is based on a recipe from one of James Peterson's books, but I don't have the book anymore and reconstructed from memory. ( What I did under the cut )

Both dishes felt very autumnal and wholesome. I've been eating a lot of junk food lately because I've been working more hours than usual and I feel awfully tired when I get home, so it was nice to have something home-cooked and full of grains and beans and veggies and fruit.