Pears. A great big bag of pears.
Several boxes of pears were donated to the Foodbank recently. We usually sort out perishables, putting the nice ones into small bags and tossing the bruised or wormy ones. I've often felt that throwing away perishables was such a waste because you end up with quite a lot of junk going to the dumpsite. Ever since I've started the compost heap, I've been taking home some of the waste material, e.g. we once had a lot of romaine leaves and another time, there was bok choy.
So on this day, I decided to take home some rotting pears, just to add some nutrients to the pile. Pears and basically fruits of the kind, tend to add some ethanol to the heap too. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing for the compost, but so far, I'm not complaining. The last time I stuck my nose in the compost heap, it smelt as though we had a winery.
The interesting thing about these pears is that there's some salvageable bits to it too. I mean, about a third of the pear is compost heap material, slimy and sludgy. And then there's the seeds, which I usually don't compost, because I don't want pear trees growing out of the soil. We usually end up with about a third to two-thirds of good bits left on the pear we bring back from the Foodbank.
I try not to make a habit of bringing back rotten pears though. The last time we did it, Ben and I, we ended up taking about four hours just cutting out the good parts and chopping the composty parts into smaller pieces. We ended up having dinner at about 10 p.m. Still, we ended up with maybe four freezer bags of chopped pears which we use for making smoothies.
This time around, I didn't want anymore pears in the freezer. So I thought, why not make something out of it immediately. I don't know what, maybe something with meat, or a jam or sauce or something. So I dutifully opened my Firefox browser, and typed "pear recipe" into the little toolbar at the corner, and bingo, tons of pear recipes.
Of course, the problem with internet recipes is that there's all kinds. And even now, I'm posting stuff for you to do, if you want to. I like things simple though, and I like to use whatever available. I admit it, I'm not a follower of recipes. I do the unthinkable, and, shock and horror, I modify stuff.
So, we found out that in order to make jam out of pears, you need some kind of pectin. I'm not sure if this applies to all kinds of pear jam, but for the first few that google showed us, we needed pectin. We did not have pectin, and we had no idea where we'd find pectin at that time in the evening. Sure, we could jolly well go do it another day, but I really wanted all the pears to disappear. I was tired of seeing pears. You would too, if you had to chop up all the rotted gooey bits, and then peel and core them.
So somehow, either through a recipe, or some agreement, we figured, hey, we could use agar-agar (from algae) instead of pectin to sort of tighten it up a little and make it into a fruit jelly/jam thing. Or alternatively, there's also gelatine or Jell-O (animal origins). I sent Ben out to the cornerstore to get some. Meanwhile, I chopped up more pears.
But because I had a migraine that day, Ben ended up making the jam when he came back. Or so he thought. By then, I was thinking of it as a fruit jelly. He boiled the pears, added some sugar and waited and waited for the pears to break down into a big goopy pile.
I should mention that both of us, being idiots in the kitchen, had no idea what fruit would look like if you cook it long enough. We thought it'll break down. I tried looking it up, on what jam would look like when ready, and well, they don't have everything on the internet! You'd have to find it in some old cookbook written by the Lady So and So written a few centuries ago, I'd imagine.
But, if you know this, can you tell me? Do pears break down after boiling it a lot? I guess not eh? Well ours didn't, at any rate. Eventually, we had this nice pile of stewed pear bits, in sugar, with some cinnamon in it, and maybe some lemon juice (I didn't ask if he really did put in some lemon).
By then, I roused myself out of bed, because I kept hearing Ben cursing loudly, wondering when the stuff was going to look like what we imagined it to be. So I guess we imagined wrong, in a big way. So there I was, thinking to myself, "Well, I guess pears don't do stuff the way we thought it would." So I figure, why not just add the darn Jell-O and gelatine (Ben got both) to the whole thing? Just make it harden up, like a pear jelly or fruit jelly or something. Note that Ben still wants a jam, and to him, a jam is fruity and pectiny.
So I added all the gelatinous stuff we had at hand (maybe a tad too much, because Ben is still complaining about his jam being too hard now), and poured the stuff into one big skillet, and three hot chocolate mugs. We put it into the fridge and decided, that for that moment, we forget about the entire thing.
The next day, I took out one of the mugs, and took a scoop out of our pear jelly thing. Delicious. Wonderful. Yummy. I never liked pears this way ever in my life. (Note that I don't really like eating fruit for two reasons: I'm allergic to some and I'm too lazy to peel fruit.)
Ben took a bite of the whole thing, and said, "I still think this jam is too hard."
Sigh.
Never let a guy stew over the pears. Really. I suspect, from observing Ben and other guys, when they go into a kitchen, they expect to have the same end-product as the recipe they see in the picture. It has to look like the manual.
For me, I'm just happy we ended up with something, and that's a nice pear jelly.
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