Ginger baked pears (Still Baking #14)

Today's my due date! Well, maybe. It's today or tomorrow. In any case, I'm still here, with fetus still baking away. I go back and forth between feeling very, very close and feeling like I am going to be pregnant forever. The first one is more likely, really, but... you know how it is.

Tonight I'm kind of phoning it in. I'm not really in the baking mood. To tell the truth, my stomach has been a bit iffy all day and I didn't even want to eat dinner. (I had some crackers instead.) We still have citrus galette left over from the other day, so no need for a new dessert either. We even already have leftover energy bars! So I can't make them (or a variant) again. Grumble grumble.

Instead I decided to do another take on one of the easier things I've done this month, baked apples. I bought a bag of pears at Trader Joe's for suuuuper cheap the other day, but much like the apples I bought there, they just weren't that good on their own. (When will I learn?!) So I'm baking them up tonight, with plans for eating them tomorrow morning. Maybe with... waffles?! Maybe that's a little ambitious, but we'll see where we're at.



In any case, they're still in the oven now. I'll pop a picture into this post tomorrowish, assuming they don't come out totally grotesque. (Picture above.) Same exact idea/execution as the baked apples from the other day, except I couldn't find the cardamom (where is the cardamom?! did I use it all? Usually I can locate it in the kitchen by scent, it smells so strongly. But my nose is giving me nothing and it's not in any of the normal places. Maybe I finished it!) so I subbed in ginger instead. Ginger and pears are good together, right? Well, we'll see how we like it vs the cardamom apples...

We took the Emperor out for a drive today and ended up at one of our favorite parks in the San Jose area, Baylands Park in Sunnyvale. It's been many months since we took him there last, and we discovered that since then, he has learned how to climb up a ladder. So now he can get up this very tall play structure which has essentially a balance beam at the top of it. It looks like it was engineered specifically to scare the crap out of parents. He LOVED it, naturally, and had a great time playing up there while I silently tried not to puke from terror and Josh stood nearby waiting to catch him.

Here's a picture of him on the balance beam-y part, with Josh's head in for reference as to the height of the structure: