Sauces: Pears and Caramel

As I mentioned in my last (long) entry about the lobster, Benson and I additionally made dessert to go along with our meal. It's a dessert that we'd made before, and like quite a lot, as it is both simple and tasty. It also has the added benefit of looking much more impressive than it is. The only downside is that if you get pears which aren't yet ripe, it can take a while to bake. But if you are stuffed with lobster (or some other delicious food), you can just wait around while it sits in the oven long enough for things to get soft. Or get impatient (as I did) and eat the pears a little firmer than one might have ideally, since they will still be tasty. This is from another cookbook that Benson gave me (and another excellent one, I might add), James Pattersons "Sauces." It's actually almost more of a textbook than a cookbook - since for the most part its technique on making sauces and how to modify them and adapt them, rather than straight up recipes. It HAS recipes and instructions for the various sauces, of course, but presumably you want to serve the sauce WITH something, and that, for the most part, is left open. For example, we've also made a delicious chicken dish from this cookbook [name of chicken awesome-sauce here]. More precisely, however, we made a sauce which was supposed to be good with chicken, and just baked some plain chicken thighs and tossed the sauce over it to finish. But that works just fine, as it was an awesome sauce indeed. As for this dish, it's really really tasty, but after we made it the first time, we reduced the amount of sugar significantly as it was also a little too sweet for our taste. If you want to do the full sugared recipe, you just change the amount of sugar in the recipe below to 1/2 cup of sugar.

Roast Pears with a Pear-Butterscotch Sauce
3 pears, peeled and sliced in half
                (preferably, but not necessarily, ripe).
1/3 cup white granulated sugar
2.5 oz of butter (5 tbs, cut in small chunks)
1/2 cup heavy cream          
a quarter of a lemon

Peel your pears, cutting them in half lengthwise and coring them. Rub each one with the lemon (this keeps them from browning). Put the pears in a single layer in a heavy bottomed pan (which you will later be putting on the stove top, so keep that in mind!). Sprinkle the butter over the pears, and the sugar on top of that. Bake the pears at 375F, for, depending on how ripe the pears are, anywhere between 15 minutes (if they're ripe) to an hour (if they're not - mine usually have to cook a bit over an hour since I tend to get the firmer pears).

Once the pears are cooked, you can remove them from the pan, and place the pan on the stove top. At this point, the sugar will have caramelized a bit, and should be a nice brown color.  If you didn't have to cook your pears as long, this might not be the case, so cook the mixture on the top of the stove until everything is nicely browned. Once this is done, mix together the butter and sugar together and add the cream, whisking the mixture while scraping the bottom of the pot. You want to do this at low heat, so that the caramelized sugar dissolves into the sauce smoothly, and everything becomes nice, creamy, thick, and delicious.

Sauces also suggests adding 'Poire William' (a pear liquor) to your sauce at this point to flavor it, but I've never had it on hand, and frankly I don't think it needs it - it's pretty tasty as is! So once you have the sauce and the pears, you can just put them in a bowl and eat them. They're also really good with ice cream, as you can imagine. Every time we make this, we end up with more caramel sauce then you can eat with just the pears, but I'd definitely recommend the sauce for other desserts as well. Either with ice cream, or in a smoothie as a pear flavored sweetener, or simply poured over [insert your favorite fruit here]. Definitely a treat!

The finished dish!