With the pantry low on stock, I can’t say no to a basket of pears. A basket of pears showed up on my table, so I took them home to dry. I forgot them under my shelf for a week, so I set out to “quickly” chop them up.

It’s not working at all. I am trying to chop some pears for granola and dog food, and it’s just, everything’s failing. I have an apple peeler, but I left the pears for too long, so they are too soft now, and I can’t use it.

So either I’m peeling manually or I’m not peeling them. But if I’m not peeling them, it doesn’t work well in granola. I don’t know. Maybe I need to make some pear butter. A basket of pears is a lot of pears.

The pears were getting really soft, many had wounds from getting pecked by curious chickens, so there was no time to waste. A natural deadline, so to say.

A huge part of the issue is that I’ve got zero knife skills. Because normal people just take the apple, and cut toward themselves. But that scares me a lot. So it is very, very, very slow when I do it. Because I’ve got very fragile skin, so if I even touch my skin with the blade, I’ve got to deal with that, and that’s not fun.

Just getting out all the cores takes forever and, yes, I am aware this is an apple, and I could have peeled and chopped this with the peeler. But I already cleaned the peeler, so….

If I sound frustrated, this isn’t the pears’ fault. I am frustrated because winter came quicker than feared, and I’ve got my first cold sore.

Repetitive tasks used to bother me, but now I enjoy them. Shutting off the head is a great balance to business.

All the peels go to the dog. I dry those as well, and then they become part of dog food. None of this gets thrown away. Instead, I’ve got this tray of stuff that I don’t want in my own granola but that’s good and edible.

I really didn’t like coring these fruit. I tried a lot of things. In the end, I figured something out. But there were a lot of slow, frustrated attempts. I don’t like tasks that make me feel in danger of cuts. I’m gonna chop up the rest of these, but let’s just quickly have a look what’s left.

They are pears that I didn’t even harvest myself. I’d planned to go to that tree, well, those trees. There are at least two different kinds of pears and one kind of apple. I’d planned to go there for harvesting, when I got back to the garden, there was a ginormous amount of pears standing on my table.

And then, the next day, there was the big storm, so she went back to the trees and got me more pears. Now I’ve got to deal with all of these, but I’m hoping that if I can get all of these dried, in little granola-sized pieces, they might last us through the winter without me having to buy out-of-season fruit.

I could not finish it all that same day, because even my large dehydrator wasn’t large enough. Honestly, I was glad for the excuse to stop.

I filled up all the trays, cleaned up, and left the kitchen for the night. My father gave me a dehydrator a few birthdays ago, and it’s been serving us more than well.

The next morning, I made quick work of the rest left in the basket. I took out what was dry. Some things were left for another round. The first few peels went straight into the dog food. I filled a large jar with the first batch.

There is almost as much in the second batch. This time, I batched it up: I peeled all the pears in one go, and chopped around all of the cores. This was a lot easier, though it does produce a bit more compost. I even had time left to finish some more bread rolls.

So long, and thanks for being here!