Happy new year fruit salad

Every January 1 we eat a home-cooked brunch. This year we had lots of friends over and prepared all sorts of delights: pancakes, cheese grits, frittata, biscotti... It was fun and delicious-the perfect start to 2011. One of my personal favorite things that we made this year was a fruit salad that consisted of stewed dried fruits and pears. It was delicious-we ate it on top of our pancakes, but I imagine that it would be great on top of ice cream, alone with a bit of whipped cream, or even straight out of a jar.

This recipe is an adaptation/combination of the winter fruit salad on the smitten kitchen blog, a fruit compote that my mom makes, and poached pears. This time I used the spices that were suggested in the winter fruit salad recipe (star anise and vanilla bean) but I imagine that there are many others that would be delicious in addition to these or in combination with them (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg...)

Happy new year stewed fruit salad

Ingredients

8 cups of water
4 star anise
6-8 large pears, cut into quarters (I used a combination of Bartlett and Bosch)
1 vanilla bean, split down the center lengthwise
About 20 dried apricots, cut in half

About 10 figs cut in quarters
About 10 prunes cut in half
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 cups of granulated sugar


To make the salad

(best prepared the day or night before you intend to eat the salad so that the fruit have time to stew and then cool in the fridge)

1.) Combine the water, sugar, star anise, vanilla bean, and lemon juice in a sauce pan. Bring the mixture to a boil on the stove top, and allow all of the sugar to dissolve, stirring occasionally.

2.) Once the sugar is dissolved, turn the heat off and add the dried fruits and pears to the mixture and transfer to a slow cooker. Slow cook the fruits for 2-3 hours.

(If you don't have a slow cooker, you can simply slow cook the fruits/sugar water mixture at a very low temperature in a sauce pan on the stove top--put a lid on top of the pan).

3.) Once the pears are soft but not falling apart, transfer the mixture to a jar or bowl, and once cool enough, place in the refrigerator to cool. The next morning, enjoy your fruit salad on top of pancakes, ice cream, or on their own.

Note: The morning on which we ate our fruit salad we reduced some of the liquid from the fruit salad in a sauce pan on the stove top until it became a thick syrup. We used this as a delicious spicey syrup for our pancakes, in addition to the fruit. YUM!

Caramelized pear tart on a snow day

When I heard news of the impending snow storm I did what every respectable southerner does in the wake of such weather reports: I bee-lined it to the grocery store.

And I bought pears. Thank goodness we were already well stocked with milk because my grocery trip would have been pretty disappointing otherwise, given the lack thereof in the already ravaged dairy section.



I really needed those pears though, because there is no better day on which to bake a pie or tart than one on which you are snowed in and feeling cozy and longing for the smells of warm fruit and butter baking in the oven.


I'd been lusting after the recipe for this pear tart for some time--since I saw it on the fantastic pie devoted nothing-in-the-house blog. And let me tell you, this recipe did not disappoint. In fact, I have now declared this my favorite fruit pie/tart recipe of all time. It involves first caramelizing the pears in a cast-iron skillet on the stove top, followed by baking it upside down style, with the crust on top in the oven, and then flipping the whole thing to make the tart face right-side-up.



I really can't express how good this recipe is. The crust does not suffer from the soggy problem that plagues many other fruit pies, and much of the crust ends up with a caramel layer which is so delicious, I do not even have the words.



An added perk to all this is that the cooking process is very beautiful (or at least I found it so--this may be evidenced by the perhaps excessive number of pictures that I've included in this post). But really, starting with the pears themselves, which I think are a particularly nice looking fruit, even when they do have some bruising and spotting on them, and moving on to the process of watching the butter brown and mix with the sugar and then bubble around the pears as they caramelize...this is definitely a picture-worthy process!




CARAMELIZED UPSIDE-DOWN PEAR TART,

from the nothing-in-the house blog,
which she says she found in the Gourmet cookbook:

4 large firm yet ripe Bosc pears
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Recipe for one half of a pie crust (i.e. the bottom half)

Peel, halve, and core pears. Heat butter in a 9- to 10-inch cast-iron skillet over moderate heat until foam subsides, then stir in sugar (sugar will not be dissolved). Arrange pears, cut sides up, in skillet with wide parts facing out. Sprinkle pears with cinnamon and cook undisturbed, until sugar turns a deep golden caramel. (This can take 15- 25 minutes, depending on pears, skillets, and stove.) Cool pears completely in skillet.

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 425°F.

Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface with a floured rolling pin into a 12-inch round and trim to a 9 1/2- to 10 1/2-inch round. Arrange pastry over caramelized pears, tucking edge around pears inside rim of skillet. Bake tart until pastry is golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool 5 minutes.

Invert a rimmed serving plate (slightly larger than skillet) over skillet and, using pot holders to hold skillet and plate tightly together, invert tart onto plate. Serve tart warm with vanilla whipped cream.