5 lbs plum

This is a delicious and relatively simple dessert from Jacques Pepin’s cookbook Fast Food My Way. He suggests that this is a perfect dessert after a heavy meal. We found that we had some leftover sauce after eating all of the pears, and this went very well over vanilla ice cream the next day.

Here is the recipe adapted from Fast Food My Way:

Ingredients:

• 2 very large Bosc pears (about 1 1/2 pounds total) (I ended up using 3 pears to reach 1 1/2 pounds)
• 1 cup sturdy, fruity red wine (Jacues Pepin suggests a Rhone Valley; I had some Beaujolais on hand)
• 1/4 cup grenadine syrup (good old Rose’s Grenadine Syrup from the back of the liquor cabinet)
• 1/3 cup honey (I used Champlain Valley Apiaries crystalized bee honey – this stuff is incredible)
• 1 pint vanilla ice cream

Directions:

1. Peel the pears, cut into quarters, and core (I used a melon baller to core the pears). Put the pear pieces in a saucepan, add the wine, grenadine, and honey, and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce the heat to low, and boil gently until the pears are tender when pierced with the point of a knife, about 15 minutes.
2. Remove pears from cooking liquid with slotted spoon and put in a bowl. Boil the liquid over high heat until it is reduced to 3/4 cups (about 10 minutes). Pour syrup over pears in the bowl and cool.
3. Serve 2 wedges of pear per person in a dessert dish with some syrup and a small scoop of the ice cream.