In an attempt to get ahead of the fruit-we-are-not-good-at-eating issue, I decided to end a wonderful week with my very first attempt at poached pears. To make things even more interesting, I noticed a margin recipe for this simple pear puff tart and thought (quite rightly as it turned out!) that it might make the boys more excited about eating a pear for dessert.
Getting my pears to stand up in the sugar syrup was a challenge, and given that I halved the recipe I also found the syrup not quite deep enough to cover the pears. I decided that if I added other things to the water the level would rise sufficiently, and so in went three empty egg coddlers. The water level was nicely raised and even better, the coddlers provided a cosy little resting place for my pears which were now standing up nicely.
I would have liked to share the details of how long my pears took to poach, but I fear I forgot to look at the clock. I am fairly sure it was about one hour and the pears were perfect; not too soft, not too hard.
The fruit was supposed to cool in the syrup and of course being a Sunday night I was impatient for this to occur naturally! Half filling the sink with cold water, and standing the saucepan in it, sped the process up nicely. Turning the sweet, sweet pears into tarts was as simple as cutting some pastry to size and baking for ten minutes. In the short time the tarts took to cook, I made a simple custard in my thermomix. Honestly seven minute custard from scratch, how impressive is that?
To my delight the family adored this simple dessert and for the first time in ages we cleared our fruit bowl of pears within days of them arriving. I had to giggle as last night I mourned the lack of a crisp pear while finishing off a particularly lovely Danish Blue. Oh the irony!
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