Seasonal produce: the pear

"Seasonal produce" is a regular section from my newsletter, reconfigured here for your reading pleasure. I write it to ramp up my enthusiasm for eating seasonally—especially when I’m eating August swedes and dreaming of spring asparagus.

 

Autumn rolls around, and once again we are eating fresh, seasonal pears (i.e. not the disappointing coldstore ones available later in the year with the creepy brown centres).

I don’t love pears. As a rule I prefer a crisp, slightly tart apple.

In making that bold generalisation I add the caveat that I think pears taste pretty nice as a rule. My main issue is that they jump too quickly from rock hard and tasteless, to so ripe they’re almost impossible to eat without getting covered in juice. There is a pear-eating sweet spot that’s pretty hard to hit.*

Shannon, on the other hand, loves pears, so they feature pretty regularly in our fruit bowl—which gave me somewhere to start when we had some people over for dinner the other week (our oven is kaput so my normal go-tos like pies or cakes were out of the question). I ended up making maybe the most delicious emergency dessert ever. Simple! Light! Flavours! Pears!**

Poached pears with cinnamon sour cream gelato

The gelato is incredibly easy: I’d had the recipe in my clearfile for at least a year, and found it again recently. It’s a matter of just mixing a bunch of stuff together and throwing it in the freezer and is very, very good. The recipe is from Pear Nuallak (who writes a rather wonderful food blog).

My original plan was to serve the gelato with some fresh berries—I was growing raspberries in our Wellington veggie patch and am somewhat obsessed. However, we are kind of broke at the moment, we already had the pears, and I remember seeing Nigella poaching some peaches one time which seemed pretty easy.

Cinnamon sour cream gelato

Recipe from Pear Nuallak

• 1 can full-fat sweetened condensed milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• Couple of pinches of sea salt
• 300ml full-fat sour cream (I guesstimated this as in NZ we mostly have 250ml cartons of sour cream)

Whisk together the condensed milk, vanilla, cinnamon and salt. Add the sour cream and continue to mix until the whole melange is smooth and well-combined (I don’t think I did this terribly thoroughly as there were definitely parts of my gelato that were more “condensed milky” than others. Don’t be like me.).

Whack the whole lot in a container that can hold up to 1 litre, seal it, and put it in the freezer. Wait impatiently for 4ish hours until it’s frozen.

Poached cinnamon vanilla pears

Recipe adapted (slightly) from Taste.com.au

• 4 perfect brown pears (or, you know, whatever you’ve got)
• lemon juice 
• 1 cups sugar 
• 3 cups water
• vanilla bean, split, seeded
• cinnamon quill

Mix the sugar and water in a pan that will hold the fruit and liquid fairly snugly. Heat gently-ish until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile peel the pears, leaving the stalk on them if you can. Rub them all over with lemon juice (this helps to stop them going brown—but if you moved quickly you could probably leave this step out). Put the pears and whole spices into the sugar syrup, and gently cook the lot for 15-20 minutes, until the pears are tender. Make sure that the pears are cooked evenly by turning them in the liquid a couple of times.

Next step I missed out, but: take the pears out of the liquid, and continue to cook the syrup until it’s reduced by about a third.

Finally: serve the gelato and pears together with a little of the syrup. You could reheat the pears if you’d like, but I didn’t bother (too lazy). It was *dancing lady emoji*.

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*Yes! There are lots of different kinds of pears. We seem to always end up with brown pears like Beurre Bosc though. I had a good experience with some little green crisp pears once but haven’t seen them since.

**In the event there was a delicious misunderstanding and our guests brought a delicious butterscotch nut pie-flan thing that was crazy delicious. We ate the pears and gelato over the last week. Much excellent, very recommend.

Let me tell you about this Victorian Dinner I made in the weekend

Delicious desserts: lithograph from 'Beeton's Book of Household Management', 1879 Photo: THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

A couple of months ago I changed jobs. In the inbetween time, I immersed myself in geeky Victoriana – Lark Rise to Candleford, Victorian Kitchen, and Victorian Farm.

There were two immediate results: I became obsessed with knitting Victorian-style crossover shawls and I decided that I wanted to make better use of my copies of Mrs Beeton's Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book and Mrs Marshall's The Book of Ices. (These were gifts from members of my family who clearly know me pretty well to have anticipated this.)

AND SO IT WAS that in the weekend, after much planning and shopping and preparation, I had my almost Victorian dinner party with a hand selected bunch of fabulous people. It all went down pretty well! The reviews have been good, at any rate.

What was actually eaten

I aimed to make dishes that were representative, a bit weird for the modern palate, but basically pretty delicious.

I made four courses altogether :

• Julienne Soup 
• Beef a la mode with Potatoes a la Maitre d'Hotel and beetroot and onion salad
• Cucumber Ice Cream 
• Muscovite of Oranges 

And then Stilton and port to follow.

Dinner on the table, photo courtesy Katherine.

Also! Lashings of red wine

Shannon and I bought a couple of bottles of the ubiquitous Victorian claret which is evidently just a Bordeaux red, so, less exciting than previously imagined.

Shannon made a Claret Cup which was actually pretty dull, partly due to the ambiguity of the recipe and partly because Claret Cup is basically red wine and fizzy water. I think it would be improved by having rather less soda water than claret, as oppose to Mrs B's half and half approach. Or perhaps by replacing the soda water with lemonade. At any rate, we live and learn.

Also also! Disasters

Things I would do differently include trying to achieve some kind of dinner party service zen - I get strangely panicky during service, and end up making silly decisions designed to save time but that rarely pay off.

On this occasion I made a series of terrible rush decisions that ended with my “Muscovite of Oranges” - a kind of orange jelly - collapsing spectacularly all over the bench. Unmoulding a jelly is hard and I if I was to meet, say, Mrs Patmore, I would be worshipping at the altar of her jelly-unmoulding skills. Because O-M-G.

Bonus recipe

The Cucumber Ice Cream was the star of the show. It's possible that it was made wrong - it's not entirely clear whether the cucumber should be pureed with it's cooking liquid or not...

From Mrs Marshall's The Book of Ices (1885)

Cucumber Ice Cream

Peel and remove the seeds from the cucumber and to 1 large-sized cucumber add 4 ounces of sugar and half a pint of water; cook until tender. Then pound and add to it a wine-glass of ginger brandy and a little green colouring and the juice of two lemons; pass through the tammy, and add this to 1 pint of sweetened cream or custard. Freeze and finish as usual.

My book has modern conversions written in for the ingredients and methods:
1 large cucumber
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups water
Pound: Puree in blender or food processor, or with finest grid of food mill
2 Tb ginger brandy (I actually steeped some fresh ground ginger in regular brandy and then strained it)
The juice of 2 lemons
2 1/2 cups of cream or custard*

*I used the 'Very Rich' custard base:
1 pint of cream, a quarter of a pound of castor sugar, and 8 yolks of eggs.
Put the cream in a pan over the fire and let it come to the boil, and then pour it on to the sugar and yolks in a basin and mix well. Return it to the pan and keep it stirred over the fire till it thickens and clings well to the spoon, but do not let it boil; then pass it through a tammy or hair sieve, or strainer. Let it cool; add vanilla or other flavour, and freeze. Mould if desired. When partly frozen, half a pint of whipped cream slightly sweetened may be added to each pint of custard.

Modern measurements:
2 1/2 cups of cream
1/2 cup sugar
After boiling, cool cream slightly
7 egg yolks
Optional: 1 1/4 whipped cream

The best no-knead bread you'll ever make

Have I told you about my favourite purchase on our Whitianga holiday? It’s this community cookbook I picked up at the local museum. Called The Health Factory Cook’s Book, it appears to have been put together by a group of locally-minded ageing hippies some ten years ago. It’s absolutely my kind of recipe book - more lentil recipes than you can shake a stick at, and advice on how to clean everything you own with baking soda.

There are five separate recipes for no-knead bread in this book. I hadn’t even heard of no-knead bread until last year when I read about it on the Budget Bytes website. However, the recipe given to me by the Whitianga hippies beats the Budget Bytes recipe hands down. Really, you have to try it. The crust is so good! And it’s very dense, fabulous with winter soups or toasted with Vegemite.

The original recipe is from Pamela Lagan of Cheviot.

No-Knead Bread, SCP styles 
Makes two large loaves
1.350 kg of flour - I usually use a combination of flours.
The most delicious combo has been:
350g white flour
200g quinoa flour
200g rye flour
200g buckwheat flour
400g wholemeal flour
Incidentally, if you can, you should use stoneground flour as the grinding method leaves the wheatgerm whole, meaning that the flour is more nutritious. I learnt this by reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

1tbsp salt
25g yeast (fresh or dried) - I usually use fresh compressed yeast
1tbsp raw sugar
900-1210ml warm water
I also sometimes add 3/4 cup of wheatbran to the mix.

Switch on the oven and leave it to heat up while you’re preparing the ingredients. Tuck the bread tins into the oven to heat up.

Mix flours and salt together in a large bowl. Mix the yeast and sugar in a small bowl with 150ml of warm water and leave in a warm place for about 10 minutes or until the mixture is frothy and you can see that your yeast is alive. Pour the yeasty liquid into the flour and gradually add the rest of the water. Mix well with a large solid spoon - in the past I have broken a wooden spoon in this mixture. It will be very sticky, not at all like a standard bread dough.

Turn off the oven.

Divide the dough into the two greased and warmed bread tins. Put the tins back in the oven and leave to rise for about 20 minutes or until the loaves have just reached the top of the pans. Slash the loaves down the middle with a very sharp knife or razor.

Bake at 200C for 35 to 40 minutes, allow to cool a bit and then tip out.

Remember: don’t cut your bread until it’s cooled a little! Warm bread rules but if you cut to early you risk a Gummy Crumb. And nobody likes a Gummy Crumb.

Let me know if you've tried it out and how it went for you!

I made these AMAZING chocolate puddings

And because I've adapted the recipe I feel totally entitled to share it with you.

So, Nat and Mark came over last night for a barbeque, and I decided to make individual squidgy chocolate puddings for dessert. When I was shopping for ingredients I had in mind three recipes: a Stonesoup Recipe, a Canelle and Vanille recipe, and a recipe that I had hidden away in my green clearfile. I have no idea where this one came from - I think it was stuck on the wall of the flat in Maarama Cres that I lived in something like three years ago. Anyways. I bought almond meal and *ahem* three blocks of Whittaker's Ghana Dark chocolate, came home and realised that I was going to have to bastardise something or other because I'd ended up with half the ingredients for all of the recipes, and I really wanted to use the almond meal.

This is my final product:

Amazing Chocolate Almond Puddings

200g dark choc (I used Whittaker's Ghana Dark which is a 72% choc)
50g butter
4 eggs
1/2 cup soft brown sugar
2 tsps vanilla extract
1/4 cup ground almonds
1 tbsp cocoa

• Melt butter and chocolate in the microwave and stir together until smooth.
• Beat sugar and eggs in cake mixer or with electric beater for about five minutes - until thick and pale. Add vanilla, ground almonds and cocoa, beat for another two minutes.
• Add melted chocolate and butter and beat for another five minutes.
• Spoon into muffin tray (I used a silicon tray that seems to have super small muffin cavities - thus I have enough for 12 small puddings).
• Bake for 10 minutes in a 180C oven. Puddings should be very soft and gooey to the touch.
• Serve while still warm on individual plates. I served these with plain yoghurt.

I didn't bake these right away, but put them in the fridge in the muffin tray until we were all ready for dessert... the recipe said I should add two minutes on to the cooking time, but to be honest our oven sucks so I just cooked them until I was done.

DUDES YOU SHOULD TOTES MAKE THIS.

That is all.

What I Have Eaten - the week in review

Bottom of the Fridge-tastic

Nothing like feeling hungry and also very, very apathetic. Can't be arsed walking all the way to Thorndon New World (it is a fair walk from mine, you know). And sometimes, it's not like the fridge is really empty, it's just - uninspiring. Full of limp-ish vegetables and the ends of salamis. Hence, the polenta this week - which would have been fab if my hand hadn't slipped while I was adding "just a dab" of chilli powder (no shaker on top of bottle, huge mound of chilli falls in saucepan). Tomato-saucy vege-meaty overly-chilli topping aside, the polenta itself turned out DELISH...

The recipe was in one of Andy's recipe books once. I can't remember how it was actually supposed to be made, but mine always turns out delicious. So...

Cheesy-Garlicky-Polenta Deliciousness

Crush ten or twelve cloves of garlic in a mortar or pestle.

Using directions for water-polenta ratio from polenta-packet, put the correct amount of water into a heavy-bottomed pan. Add crushed garlic and a good teaspoon of salt (or two). Bring the water to the boil, and then add polenta, stirring all the time until desired thickness is reached.

Add big handfuls of cheese - I'm not super rich, so I usually add half-n-half tasty cheese and parmesan. Add LOTS of butter. Stir in the dairy goodness.

Oil a shallow pan - I've been using Pyrex lasagne dishes. Press the polenta into the pan and allow to set. Cut into squares or triangles or whatever.

Just before serving, heat oil in a saucepan and fry the polenta so that it's delicious and crispy and brown on both sides.

Serve to flatmates - receive acclaim and many appreciative noises.

What I Have Eaten - the week in review

I like eating. Sometimes I eat classy, sometimes I eat retro.

Retro Food A-Go-Go

Highlights of this week included: Eating fish pie at the Boy's place, sharing food at the Great Cardboard Castle Construct and Pot Luck, a late night junk-food gorge, Savoury Muffins for Dinner, and a huge amount of cauliflower cheese and mashed potato on Friday night.

My recipe for Scone Dough Pizza Base

2 cups of flour (1 white, 1 wholemeal)
2 tsps of baking powder
1 tbsp of olive oil
1/4 salt
1 cup of milk

Mix and knead a little until the mixture comes together to form a dough, roll or press out (about a cm thick). Add ingredients - at the Pot Luck I used Bella's pizza sauce, free-range ham, chorizo, caramelised onions, yellow and orange peppers and deliciously expensive TASTY cheese. Bake at 230C for about 15/20 minutes.

Retro as fuck, I know... but I LIKE it retro... warm and filling during freezing cold winter. Hence the mash potato and cauliflower cheese.
Rather fancy some potatoes now in fact.

Soy milk reverts to beans

I lost an entire blog entry AGAIN. It began with a witty meditation upon the qualities of soy milk (strangest of all the milks, it must be said). Suffice to say: I can't be fucked repeating it.

RECIPE OF THE DAY (I just made some... you can too!)

Muesli

Place oil in a large roasting pan with a big spoonful of honey and put in oven until honey has melted. Cover the bottom of the pan with rolled oats, add desiccated coconut, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, linseed, nuts. Toast in oven until your house smells like baking and the muesli mix is brown. Take out of oven, allow to cool. Break up muesli and place in a bowl. Add raisins, sultanas, finely chopped dried fruit, a little bran flakes if you want. Combine well. Keep in airtight containers.