Pears poached in red wine

• Pear: a couple
• Poaching: 2 cups red wine, 2 Tb lemon juice, 3/4 cup sugar, 0.5 tsp cinnamon.
• Serve with: Melted GOOD quality (70%>) chocolate, a very small quantity of red chili

Fridge empty, so I ordered food, I forget what. But I do remember craving dessert. Fridge still empty, so I had to try and make something of what was not in the fridge: one lonely piece of pear and about a kilo of chocolate... I was facing a rather bleak dessert until I realized what would happen if I added that half bottle of red wine, left from last night...

Separate pear meat from pear-everything-else, where the meat should look like two beautifully solid pear halves. Stir wine, sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon in a pot, until boiling. Give the pear a nice warm, almost simmering, wine bath for about 8 mins, until al dente. Remove pot from fire and leave pears chilling in wine for 20 mins. Drain em and serve em together with something suitable...

Julia Child, whose receipe I was sort of following, thought that "something suitable" would be: almond frangipane (=almond custard) and a sugar-crust shell painted with jelly glaze. Glaze made from a reduction of the wine, minus pears, mixed with red currant jelly... But, as mentioned above, I only had one kilo of chocolate. A piece of that melted with butter accompanied the pear on my dessert plate.

Red wine poached pears served with melted chocolate was okay, but I think it would have been much better had I mixed some chopped red chili with the chocolate. Spicy!

The red pear was beautiful though; That perfectly deep red surface nicely contrasted the white fruit meat, when knifed, left me wanting to color pears in black, orange and gray... After having thought about that for a while, I began thinking about why Julia Child's ancestors took the stupid name "Child". Why would anyone want to be known as "child"? Makes me think of this Chinese woman, my friend met, whose English name was "Big head", because - she explained - her head was really big...