Dealing with those pears

I'd bought 3 pears at the Funky Pumpkin. These were not on my list, but I bought them because they were very cheap. Of course, in the usual manner of specials at the Funky Pumpkin, they were cheap because they were in pretty poor shape. I figured I could cook them up and use them in a pudding.

It would have been best if I'd chopped them up and stewed them as soon as I got them home, but I didn't get around to dealing with them until last night. The bruises they'd had on them when I bought them were now big brown patches. Once I'd cut these bits out, I only had about half as much fruit as I started with. Oh well.


I chopped up the remaining fruit and put it in a pan with some brown sugar and a good shake of cinnamon. Then I left it to cook down while I ate my reheated fish pie. When I'd eaten, I came back to the the stove and found the pear pieces softened and slightly caramelised from the sugar. Yum.

Lacking ingredients to make anything more complicated, I opted for a simple crumble. I still have several versions of fruit crumble to get through - this time I decided to go for wholemeal crumble (p209) This variation has wholemeal flour instead of plain flour. I thought it sounded quite interesting. I've always considered rolled oats a vital ingredient in a crumble, but (apart form the wholegrain oat crumble variation, which I haven't tried yet) the Edmonds recipe doesn't have any in it. I was interested to see how it would come out.


Like most crumble recipes, it only took a few minutes to throw together. Flour, sugar, baking powder and butter in a bowl; rub together and sprinkle over fruit. Done.

I put the dish into my benchtop oven and set the timer for 10 minutes. The recipe says 30 minutes, but since I was only making a 1/4 recipe and since things cook more quickly in the little oven, I figured 10 minutes would do it. When the timer went off, however, it didn't look cooked at all. I shrugged and put it in for another 10.


That was probably a bit too long. The crumble came out a bit overdone. I should have kept an eye on it really. Of course, the good thing about crumble is that you can pick bits off - I picked off the worst of the dark bits and it looked a lot better.

It tasted just fine too (with a little frozen yoghurt from the freezer). I wouldn't say it's the best crumble I've ever had - I'm still advocating those rolled oats - but it was tasty, warm and filling. And what more do you want from a winter pudding?