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!

Fun times with Lloyd

Last week I had a visit from a dear friend, Lloyd, who I have known since the 4th grade. She and I have, as you might expect, many common interests. But it is our tradition to use our time together in order to create a delicious meal. This also, of course, gives us plenty of time to talk and catch up, since we don't see each other nearly enough. So this time, we made a three course meal: a soup, a salad, and main course-ish second soup related item. Nothing wrong with that!

We started with a nice corn and potato chowder,  getting a recipe from Food Network, which we somewhat modified.

Corn and Potato Chowder
1/2 pack of bacon (we used black pepper crusted bacon, which added a nice spicy taste!)
1 cup chopped onion
1 tbs minced garlic
2 cups frozen corn
butter
2 tbs flour

4 cups chopped potato (peeled first!)

4 cups chicken broth

1 cup half and half

thyme, salt, pepper to taste

Chop up and fry the bacon, then set aside on a paper towel to drain - leave a little bacon fat in the pan, but not all of it. Toss the onions into the fat, cook those up nice and soft, then put in the garlic as well.  Sprinkle the flour over it all so it blends in, adding some butter if necessary to make a roux, then add the potatoes and broth. Simmer 10-15 minutes until the potatoes are soft, stirring occasionally. Next, add corn and let simmer another 5 minutes. Finally, stir in the half and half and add seasonings.

This is the point where you taste to make sure everything is just right - we found that the soup was not thick enough here, and added some extra potatoes. Another option we considered (but rejected due to not wanting to wash more dishes) was be to blend some of the potatoes we'd cooked in a blender with some of the soup, so we could have  nice, thicker broth. Even adding the potatoes, we needed this to cook down a bit more than the original recipe suggested. It turned out quite tasty, and extra peppery due to our choice in bacon! (Bacon is a running theme in Lloyd and my cooking attempts, I shall have to describe some past efforts at a later date.)

Second, we had a lovely salad: Pear, Romaine lettuce, crumbled gorgonzola, and homemade roasted candied walnuts! The first 3 ingredients of this salad are pretty self explanatory (make sure items are in suitable sized chunks, or in the case of the pears, slices). The candied walnuts were a treat, though, and a lot easier then they sound!

Candied Walnuts (paired with a pear/romaine/gorgonzola salad)
1 cup chopped walnuts (or whole, either works!)
1.5 tbs butter
1.5 tbs maple syrup
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar

A note here: I am a purist when it comes to maple syrup. I DON'T eat maple flavored or maple inspired syrups. At all. No Aunt Jemima's for me. I just can't stand the taste - I was raised going to New Hampshire every other summer for family reunions and picking up delicious, grade A pure maple syrup in large gallon jugs, which was then used over the course of the next year or two until we returned. Dad would, occasionally, buy local maple syrup as well, which was also fine - honestly, I couldn't tell the difference between New Hampshire and Maryland syrup. But the point is: REAL SYRUP. /end{rant}

This recipe is super easy: Preheat oven to 400F. Put the butter and syrup in a bowl, heat it up so they are nice and warm and melty together - in the microwave works just fine. Take your walnuts, then put them in the bowl with the syrup mixture - stir thoroughly until everything is well coated. Mix salt and sugar in another bowl, then sprinkle some of this over the walnuts, mixing again. Lay out all the walnuts in a single layer on a piece of aluminum foil on a tray, and sprinkle the last of the salt/sugar mix over that. Bake for 7 minutes. Remove from oven, let sit and cool, then poof! Delicious walnuts, the better to be sprinkled over your salad with, my dear! So that was the salad - nice, tasty, easy. Pears, gorgonzola and walnuts of course go terrific together, with a bit of lettuce to fill things out!

But the dish that's was the most fun for me was a dish I'd made before, gotten from Benson: delicious homemade Wonton!

Wonton

Around 2 lbs ground meat (Pork works best, but chicken works fine, too)

Around 1 lb peeled, de-veined, raw shrimp –   chopped into chunks (optional)

Wonton wrappers

Baby Bok Choy – chopped finely, maybe a cup and a half, maybe a little more. 

Light Soy Sauce

Sesame oil

1 tbs Cornstarch

1/2 tsp Sugar

Salt

Scallions (optional)

MSG (optional)

Mix the ground meat, salt, soy sauce, MSG, cornstarch, salt, sugar thoroughly, and set aside. Wash and chop bok choy finely, mix into ground meat, add even more soy sauce and a bit of seseme oil. Its a good idea to cook up a little of your meat mix in a frying pan to make sure that the soy sauce/oil/salt levels are good. (Plus, if you have extra, you can fry up the remaining meat as a tasty snack!) Mix chopped up shrimp into mixture, adding more soy sauce and whatnot if you think it needs it. You don't actually need to add shrimp - for this batch we didn't - since it tastes just fine without. But shrimp does add some extra flavor and a bit more interesting variation!

Now the fun part: wrapping the wontons.Take a wrapper with the more floured sized face down, put a bit of meat mix into the center of the wrapper. Dampen the edges of the wrapper, fold over into a triangle (or rectangle if you don't want to be traditional). Seal the edges carefully - you should have a small bowl of water that you can dip your fingers into so you can wet the edges well. Take the far corners of the wonton (the ones where the meat is in a lump between them), dampen more, and fold them to meet each other, seal. As you do this, you can kind of fold the wonton slightly as well, so it's more rounded and less flat. The traditional wonton is apparently supposed to look like an ingot of gold, to bring luck! Boil beef or chicken broth, add some scallions and sesame seed oil, cook wontons in broth until they float, plus a little more time (like an extra couple minutes), until meat and shrimp have cooked. You'll want to cut one in half to make sure it's done! Then serve with the broth, and enjoy!

The whole meal turned out really well - we ended up with three bowls of food and no plates, mind, but that's not really a problem.