Every year my daughter sends me a box of Harry & David pears for my birthday. The sweetness and juiciness of this fruit defies description. I look forward to them every year because you just can’t get pears like this in Anchorage. This year’s delivery was a little different, because the pears were delivered…frozen.
Not because they sat all day on the temps-in-the-teens porch, either. The delivery guy put the box directly into my hands. But when I opened up the gift, I found a batch of pearsicles.
Somewhere along the way, the fruit had encountered too-low temperatures – and there’s plenty of those on the Last Frontier. That’s never happened before with a Harry & David’s delivery.
As any savvy consumer would do, I phoned the company. Listened to the apologies, accepted a new delivery date for a new box of fruit.
And as any good frugalist would do, I wondered if I could salvage the old box. So I sliced one open and took a tentative nibble: hard and not sweet at all. Not surprising, since pears are picked under-ripe and allowed to develop to their full potential when customers want them.
While putting the pear’s core into the boiling bag, I decided that the rest of the fruit would not follow. I invented a new dessert* instead.
I’d heard of pears poached in wine, but I’m a non-drinker. We generally have a jug of Langer’s pineapple-orange-guava juice in our fridge. So I applied the same hopeful criterion to saving pears as I do to any DIY** project: “I can’t break it more.” If it turned out badly, oh well.
(Narrator voice: It did not turn out badly at all. In fact, it tasted pretty great.)
The pears softened up after about 20 minutes at a low simmer. The three-juice mélange provided a lovely sweetness, and cooked down into a lovely syrup. DF and I made short work of that first pear, and the rest will be enjoyed over the next few days.
Not wasting food
For a frugalist, thinking outside the box is what my dad would call “a useful life skill.” Sure, we didn’t pay for the pears ourselves. But I still saw no reason to waste (im)perfectly good fruit.
Or anything that can be salvaged, really. Carrots sprouting little green tops in the crisper drawer? Cut them off and add them to the boiling bag. Friends brought over Chinese food but no one wanted the plain rice? It’ll make a fine pudding.
French bread grew stale faster than you expected? French toast to the rescue! If meat turns out tough, dice it into hash or a stir-fry. And so on and so on.
Heck, when DF and I boil down a turkey carcass, we spend a pleasant half-hour straining the last stubborn bits of meat from the stock and cutting them off the bones. We laugh at our own abstemiousness – and we end up with enough for at least one turkey pie.
Food costs too much to be thrown away without a fight. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. And if life hands you frozen pears? Simmer them in your liquid of choice.
Readers: Have you ever pulled off a similar save? How did it turn out?
*I’m calling the dish POG-poached pears, or PPP for short.
**My daughter has adopted that same mentality, often to good effect.
Related reading:
- Extreme frugality: Use all the bits
- Anatomy of a frugal meal
- Garbage in, supper out
- Good to the last drop: Getting full use of condiments
I was in the Safeway parking lot one December and found a bag of frozen apples someone had left on the bottom shelf of the cart. I took it home and made applesauce, cooking them frozen and then using a food mill to get out the seeds and skins. The chickens ate the skills but, sadly, I could not think of anything to do with the seeds.
Love it!
Three day power outage (many years ago); a (small) freezer full of mostly-thawed fruit (apples sliced for pie, cherries, blueberries, raspberries) = Best. Fruit. Jam. Ever!
I bet it was!
Sounds wonderful!
Belated happy birthday!
Why, thank you.
Cooked the 19 + lb Thanksgiving turkey a few days after. The timer popped up to show it was done. We ate 1/2 the breast over three meals for the two of us. Froze the second half for later in December.
When cutting the remainder up after cooking, saw the pinkness of the meat around the thigh of one side of the bird. Was not going to waste that thing, but I do not eat any pink meat. Cooked that whole remainder of the bird in a huge stock pot, covered with water, instant chicken broth, chopped celery and baby carrots and onions, salt and pepper. Then cleaned and cut that meat off that carcass and added it back into the stock pot, simmered for 20 more minutes.
Packaged it up into Rubbermaid bowls (4 extra large) and popped it into the fridge and freezer. It has so much gel that you must cook the rice or noodles separately, and then add it to make soup. The only items to make it to the trash were the already cooked skin, bones and gristle. The turkey was free to begin with, due to cashing in grocery points.
I love turkey soup made from the carcass. Along with the same veggies you use, I add barley. Great comfort food for winter!
One of my daughter’s favorite desserts is a pear ‘salad’. Here’s the recipe – it’s quite lovely:
From Food Editor, Roanoke Times & World-News, Roanoke, VA
One of my mother’s favorite salads for an extra-special family dinner consisted of a canned pear half stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese and chopped pecans and centered on a crisp lettuce leaf. It was good – and still is – and is easy to assemble. This is kind of the same idea, although it takes more time to prepare. Just between friends, it’s a lot more special and it is better than just good.
Makes 8 servings
1/2 cup firmly packed
brown sugar
1/2 cup orange juice
|tablespoon balsamic vinegar
14 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Dash ground cloves
4 ripe but firm Bartlett pears, cored and halved lengthwise (peel only if desired)
• 1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese
1/4 to 1/3 cup finely chopped pecans
Bibb or Boston lettuce leaves
In a 10-inch skillet or wide saucepan, combine brown sugar, orange juice, vinegar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat.
Add pear halves. Cover and simmer 5 to 6 minutes, or until pears are tender.
Remove from heat. Transfer pears carefully to storage dish and pour poaching liquid over them. Cover and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.
Just before serving, cut cream cheese into 8 pieces. Shape each piece into a ball, then roll balls in chopped pecans to coat.
To assemble salad, line 8 salad plates with lettuce; place a pear half on each. Spoon poaching liquid over pears. Place a cheese ball in center of each pear.
That sounds sooooo good!!
Happy belated birthday!! Donna, side note question here i’ve always wondered about your last name. Where did that name come from?
It was my married name. By the time I got divorced, I’d been writing under that name for so long that I decided to keep it. The very next year, a former freelance client tracked me down to do a project by Googling “Donna Freedman.” Expect that she also got some photos of Margot Robbie, but ultimately she found me.
Interesting, I always wondered if that name had something to do with slavery possibly in your lineage down the line somewhere. It’s a unique moniker for sure
Happy Birthday, Donna!
A few weeks ago I had a neighbor share a bushel of pears – the old, hard, green homestead-pear-tree type. They never really soften when ripe; not even much when cooked. I made a huge batch of pear butter and a few jars of pear sauce. It was brutal working it through the food mill. Not wanting to waste the rest, I got creative. The remainder I grated (yay thrift store Saladmaster manual food processor!) and bottled in recipe sized half-pints to use in quick breads, cakes, etc. “It did not turn out badly at all.”
My mom tried to make pear preserves one year from those old fashioned pears and accidentally candied them. I think she overcooked them trying to soften the pears. We kids loved a few slices on a hot buttered biscuit and were sad when we ate them all.
While living in Seattle I was gifted some pears from an acquaintance’s backyard tree. Used them and some plums that I picked from a neighbor’s tree (with permission!) to make pear-plum butter. It was the prettiest product I’ve ever made, and had a lovely, delicate flavor. Wish I could grow plums here.
Thanks for the birthday wishes. And kudos on making do with sub-par fruit.
My office gets harry and David pears. They were kind of banged up this year. But we make pear-sauce, like apple sauce, but pears.
Our trash company has a bio-digester that makes fuel for the trash trucks out of all green waste. All yard trimmings, food waste including meat and bones and any paper contaminated with food like pizza boxes-all of it goes in the green bin. I got rid of all my old, expired food when they started the program.
Your waste was their gain.