In the Kitchen at Bungalow Beauty

As promised for my good friend Marco who lives in New York City; here is a quick dessert that you can make in a tiny Manhattan kitchen.


To start we'll need 6 good sized ripe Bosch pears; unfortunately I didn't have 6 pears, I had 4. And I didn't have Bosch pears I just had Bartlett pears. But you work with what you got and make the best of it. Begin by peeling the pears, slicing them lengthwise, and then coring them. I never thought I would ever use our melon baller but tonight I finally had a chance to use it.Set them off to the side and prep our poaching liquid.


In a medium sized, non-reactive sauce pan, over medium-high heat, combine the following:


1/3 cup lime juice
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup grenadine
1 cup Marsella
1/2 cup port
1 cup water

Seems like an odd choice of ingredients huh? Well the grenadine is from the batch we made last week, and as for the port and the Marsella wine. Well I had about a half cup of port sitting around for awhile and wanted to get rid of it. Next, stir the liquid until the sugar dissolves and then add your pears.

Bring the pears to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium-low and let them simmer for about 30 minutes until tender.

Remove the pears from the poaching liquid and place in the refrigerator to cool completely. Reduce the remaining poaching liquid by half until it is a nice syrup. Remove the syrup from the heat and cool completely as well.Reserve the syrup for plating.

You can simply serve the pears by themselves with a hefty splash of the reduced poaching liquid as I have done so here. Or you can add a scoop of really good vanilla ice cream, the pears and then cover it all with the syrup. Start to finish you’re looking at about maybe 2 hours with the majority of that time being spent in the chiller. Anyway you serve it up, people are going to love it- and you don’t need a very big kitchen or fancy gadgets to do it!


That is all.