Pear poached in mulled wine with brandy sauce
Experimenting with food is what feasts like Christmas are made for. The beauty of feasts is that you are encouraged to indulge yourself. You don’t have to worry about going hungry or thirsty if you experiment with something new because if you don’t like it, then there is always something else to eat or drink that you do like.
So, it is a great time to take risks with food to expand your culinary range and add variety to your diet.
With that in mind, several Christmases ago, I realised I had never tried Mulled wine. I’m not generally a wine person, but I wanted to see if mulled wine is any different in case I am missing out.
Benefits
- Lets you indulge in Christmas spirit
- Adds to your Fruit intake increasing natural vitamins and minerals
- Finding new foods Increases variety in your diet
- Helps with sweet cravings
- Helps reduce overeating
- Uses leftovers
Yields:
1 Serving
Prep time:
0 hours 5 mins
Total time:
40 mins
Ingredients
- 1 pear
- Mulled wine
- Sugar
- Brandy sauce
- Spice (Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Five Spice) Whatever you have available
- Crunchy oat cereal
Directions
It’s super simple, but a guide always helps. To do this properly, find a recipe book that explains poaching. Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, and many others have good examples. I get all my inspiration from others anyway. They inspire and teach, I learn and eat. Over time, I get better as I gain experience.
This simple guide should get you started. I had a quick Google and found Poached mulled wine pears over at Delicious. I think I just left the pears slowly poaching while I watched some TV.
- Pour the wine into a saucepan on a medium heat
- Peel and core the pear
- Add the sugar and pear
- Leave for around 30 minutes
- Remove the pear and continue cooking until the wine has reduced to a sauce
The logic
It turns out I’m not a mulled wine fan because Mulled wine is quite dry, like most wines. What is fun about food and wine is that they are an excuse to cook, and to me, cooking is about personalising your food to your needs and desires.
Experiment one
So I thought about it and found some inspiration. I changed the wine by adding a little sugar to make it more palatable to me. Then, I considered whether I could use it in a dessert. Very soon, I was poaching a pear in sweetened mulled wine and then reducing the wine to make a sauce. I spiced the brandy sauce, and my plan came together.
Avoiding snacking
The idea behind experimenting with my breakfast in this way is that it is an attempt to stop overindulging during Christmas by adapting my regular meals instead of adding snacks to my day and increasing my calorie intake.
What I would normally do is eat breakfast and then snack on this dessert later in the day while having all my normal meals. So, I end up having a lot of extra food and calories.
This then becomes a bad habit over the holiday that my body gets used to, and I crave food when I try to return to normal. In this way, I end up eating the equivalent of one or two meals extra per day, and you can then see how quickly I would start to put on weight.
An added problem is that your body naturally adapts to this change, so when I try to return to normal, I experience hunger pains, sometimes very extreme hunger pains if I have been really indulgent.
If you don’t know that this is normal and that you are eating far more than you normally do, then you may feel that you should be eating this much because your hunger pains are telling you that.
I have often been in this situation. Wondering if I should trust my mind that is telling me that I am eating too much, or my hunger pains that are signalling I’m hungry.
This adaptation to the season helps me handle my cravings for sweet desserts and comfort food. I am surrounded by wonderful food at Christmas and other feasts, so it is very hard not to add something extra to my plate or an extra snack.
Experiment two
A couple of mornings later, I was inspired to experiment further. I find it equally fascinating and frustrating that most people seem almost offended if you have anything but apparently breakfast-worthy foods for your morning meal.
However, I don’t think our ancestors really worried too much about what their first meal of the day was. Whatever they could find would more likely be what they ate. The sauce is indulgent, but it comes with the feast, I could just as easily have a different sauce or no sauce at all. This, for me, is about having an excuse for a pear in the morning to start the day with fresh fruit.
These days, I find it particularly strange because the nutritional content of most people’s breakfast is shockingly bad, so I don’t see why they feel they have a right to object to what I choose.
For example, a fried breakfast is generally too many calories and contains very little fruit and vegetables. If you go with cereal, then most people choose the high-sugar kind and, again, no fruits or veg. Essentially, the cereals most people have for breakfast are nothing more than desserts with practically no nutritional value except that added by law.
Yes, I’m ranting a little because I had a poached pear for breakfast, so I am starting the day with fruit, which is healthier than high-sugar cereal. It just sounds bad to many people, but if you think about it, then as a once-off, it’s a fun way of adding some variety to my morning meal while also starting the day with fruit and adding 1 to the five a day I need to get. The calorie content will also be surprisingly similar to the cereal or other breakfast that I would have had.
To mix it up even further, I decided to add some crunchy oat cereal, partly for extra crunch and partly to make it more breakfasty. Boy, that did add some interest. It was only half a poached pear left over from the previous dessert, but it’s still a real pear and part of my five a day. The oats contain sultanas, coconut, and other nutrients, adding to the five-a-day fruits and fibre content. I like that crunchy oats can be a nice way of adding fibre with relatively unprocessed ingredients.
Summary
In summary, It certainly makes breakfast interesting to experiment once in a while, and I cannot wait to do that again.
I have found that replacing my normal breakfast with indulgent variations like this occasionally and more often during feasts lets me enjoy the feast while keeping;
- my normal habits,
- my normal balance
and prevents excessive cravings
Learn to ACT
This was an example of using an activity as an opportunity to invest in yourself. For best results, match the activity with a relevant course and teacher. See How it works for more.
