A small explosion

This is generally what my kitchen looks like on Saturday afternoons . . .

For some reason cleaning up isn't nearly as fun as the creating

 Yes, I realize that it looks like a small explosion took place, but it is generally all for a good reason. I was cooking. Cooking, for me, is a wonderful form of entertainment. That doesn't mean that I'm good at it, it just means I have a laugh doing it. The result of this chaos and mayhem was the following:

• A double batch of vegetarian chilli (Saturday's supper and to freeze for future meals)
• An Angle Food Cake (To use up some eggs and have something to put my Plum Sauce on)
• A batch of made-from-scratch-without-a-machine spaghetti (An experiment, I'll let you know if it's worth repeating when I cook it up latter this week)
• Green Plum Sauce (Another experiment, and food waste reduction method!)

The green plum sauce is an original idea that came to me a number of weeks ago as I saw all the green plums that were being wasted when they fell from the tree before ripening. Not wanting to waste my bounty I started looking for recipes. All I could find though were exotic recipes generally involving meat that, of course, are not much use to a vegetarian. So I decided to see what I could invent and decided to make a sauce. 

It's a work of art this sauce - I swear

I diced up the plums, threw them in a pot with water and a bunch of sugar, then heated. I didn't even measure the ingredients. The results - heavenly. 

My night time snack, Angel Food cake with
 Green Plum sauce, and a cold glass of milk!

I tried to get rhubarb for my garden in the spring but couldn't find any. It was a tad disappointing because I love rhubarb and strawberry cobbler, and rhubarb sauce. Well folks it turns out that green plum sauce is remarkably similar to the rhubarb sauce my mom use to make for us as kids. Great on ice cream, cake, and straight off the spoon. Mmm. Next season I'm really going to have to see if I can use them as a replacement in cobbler. 

When I started experimenting in the kitchen in University I succeeded with maybe one third of what I tried. Now only one third of what I try is a one off thing. The one thing that 

doesn't change though is this: If you haven't gotten dirty while baking - you're not doing it passionately enough. 

** Oh and by the way after writing this at 9pm I got a tad board so wandered into the kitchen to try my hand at making oat cakes, which I've only ever read about never eaten. Even though I had to translate the recipe from weight to volumes, which I did rather loosely, and then added too much water, they turned out pretty good. I'm thinking that their next incarnation will have berries and honey to make a nice breakfasty oat cake.