Question- Red d'Anjou Pears

[Gourmet_Mom]

I need to vent! Sorry, this is a long one.

Okay, here's the deal. My school started a new initiative last year. Breakfast in the Classroom. This initiative also coincided with free breakfast and lunch for ALL children. It's a great initiative, but one with many frustrations. One is that the dietary restrictions are such that some of the meals/breakfasts are unappetizing. I've tried the breakfasts...some are lacking and many of the kids avoid these meals.

Anyway, an example of a typical breakfast today was a whole wheat sausage biscuit, milk, and a pear. Most often, like today, if a fresh fruit is offered, the kids refuse it. Sometimes the milk is denied, too. The kids are required to take all components of the meal, but they can place unwanted items on a share table. This way, a child that wants two servings of part of the breakfast, they can take it off of the share table.

Sounds good so far right? Now for my BIGGEST problem with this program. Anything left on the share table has to be THROWN AWAY! SERIOUSLY! TRASHED! I tearfully throw out up to 20-30 pints of milk and countless pounds of whole fresh fruit a week. It breaks my heart!

At one point, I saved the milk and fruit for snacks later in the day, and this was successful in salvaging a lot of the leftovers, but then we were told we could not do this! REALLY?!?!? I tried saving it up for my Food Pantry, but collecting and storing from week to week was impossible.

Finally, I now try to bring home the best of the fruit, which is the greatest loss, in my opinion. We try to eat up as much as we can. This finally brings me to my current problem. Today the kids were served beautiful Red d'Anjou Pears! They are so different from apples, oranges, and grapes the kids are used to, there were 18-20 pears left on the share table. So what would you do with them?

[foodfiend]

I absolutely hate to see food wasted, this would drive me insane!

Daphne, is there any group nearby that would send a rep to come over and claim the leftovers? A soup kitchen? Homeless shelter? Sometimes calling a church can result in being directed to an appropriate person. One in 8 people go to bed hungry in the country every night and perfectly good food is being tossed. There has to be some way...

Red Anjou pears are so pretty (they usually cost more than the green ones, too)... I buy them to eat fresh but have never cooked with them. What I would do with that amount is mix them with some nice green pears in a basket, top with a gold bow, and give them to someone! Personally I would add a thank you card and drop the basket off at the front staff area of my doctor's office, or the nursing station of the nursing home that DH's mother used to be in, or for the staff of the veternarian's office, or somewhere similar. I used to give gifts of sweets to those people for years until I discovered that they actually preferred getting fruit.

[cjs]

Oh Daphne, the tiger is loose - I have so many ideas for pears (we both love them) that you're going to be begging the kids for their pears!! Here are a few ideas.


Half and pit pears; put on baking sheet cut side up; sprinkle with S&P and drizzle with a little sesame oil. Roast at 350° 15-20 min until tender when pierced. These are so good as a side with Sesame Noodles or Thai dishes.

You might try them in the pineapple crisp that we all like so well

Toss in green salads

Thinly sliced and added to quesadilla – w/just a tad of cheese

Add with apples and make apple/pearsauce

Make a Chutney

I also have a Winter Fruit Compote that is wonderful (even over polenta)

“Meanwhile, cook bacon in Dutch oven until crisp. Add cabbage and onions. Cook and stir over medium heat 5 minutes. Add 1/2 cup water, vinegar and brown sugar; mix well. Cover; simmer 15 minutes. Add pears; bring to a boil. Serve pork chops on top of cabbage.”

Add to muffin batter

This is my favorite thing to do with pears –
1 750-ml bottle ruby Port
1/2 c sugar
5 whole cloves
3 whole allspice
2 cinnamon sticks, broken in half
2 firm but ripe Anjou pears, peeled


Bring Port, sugar, cloves, allspice and cinnamon to boil in heavy small saucepan, stirring till sugar dissolves.
Reduce heat to med. low. Add pears; cover & simmer till tender when pierced with knife, turning pears every 5 min., ~20 min.
Remove pan from heat. Let cool uncovered 20 min., turning pears once.
Refrigerate pan uncovered till pears are chilled, turning every 1/2 hour, about 1 1/2 hours.
(can be made 1 day ahead. Cover and keep refrigerated.)

Remove pears from the poaching liquid; reserve liquid. Cut pears lengthwise into halves and core.

Now for the best part –
Put the poaching liquid in a saucepan and reduce it until syrupy and drizzle over EVERYTHING!! I like to do a fruit platter and drizzle it with this reduction and sprinkle with Parm or Asiago cheese

Just drizzle this over the pears and add to a green salad. Does William like Feta or goat cheese? A little sprinkled over greens and pears is wonderful – so many uses for this one.

This is a note I wrote for someone who wanted the method:
REDUCED PORT SAUCE: (This step added for JoAnne Hunt and Bettie Hunt)
Bring the remaining poaching liquid to a boil in a med. sized saucepan over med. heat. Let reduce by 1/2 or 1/3 - stay close, once the reduction starts, it goes quickly. When it has reduced to the amount you want, remove from heat and let cool. This sauce is wonderful drizzled over the above salad, ice cream, fruit or cheese platters, just experiment with it and be sure to let me know new ideas!!!

This sauce will thicken up as it cools, so it may take a couple times to get the correct hot consistency. Good Luck!

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I'll stop here, but let me know if you want more ideas.

[labradors]

Red d'Anjou are my favourite pears, but I've never cooked with them, only eaten them.

It's a shame you have to stand there and watch as the government attempts to take further control over our lives by imposing ill-conceived (regardless of how well-intentioned) requirements that create higher-than-normal waste which drives up retail prices, ultimately having the opposite of the intended effect since it makes more things unaffordable to the people who truly need them.

Just as many countries have compulsory military service, maybe we should make it compulsory for politicians of ALL levels (from local mayors, etc. all the way up to the President) to serve (in person) at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter at least once a month.

[DFen911]

Daphne I feel your pain. Derek, when working in the produce dept at the local grocery store, has been instructed to toss out massive amounts of produce. And I'm talking thousands of pounds. My heart just broke. Because I grow extra veggies to donate to our local food bank.

I contacted the company and it's reasonings were, way back in the day, when they did donate, someone got sick and sued. Ironically it could not be proved how the person got sick but to be "better safe than sorry" it's all pitched now

He had to toss out a couple of weeks ago 97lbs of acorn squash and the only thing wrong with them was they had a dime size dent in them.

[Mare749]

That's a tough problem that so many schools are facing today. The amount of wasted food is sickening. Our grandkid's school also uses the share table and always has l/os. I will ask Holly to find out what they do.

Just had a thought. I really liked Vicci's idea of making fruit baskets. Could you turn that into a community service project for after school detention?

20 pears to work with? After dinner one night, hand the family pairing knives and make a couple of crisps or pies.

[Trixxee]

That is a severely flawed and wasteful system, and guess what? It's here in CA too. I've heard it talked about many times on the radio. I don't understand why anyone is FORCED to take something they don't want and hence now it's garbage.

No real ideas on recipes - for some reason pears really bother my stomach. But lots of good sounding things listed above!

[Gourmet_Mom]

To be honest, I think we were told it HAD to go in the trash. I am probably breaking policy bringing home what I have. But hey....what are they going to do about it? Fire me? LOL! So the idea of collecting it all and having a local food pantry pick it up is probably out. Here's another example of why I don't think that would work. There were only two white milks left one morning. I sent the two little girls who wanted chocolate to the cafeteria to trade the white milks for chocolate. They told me they had to throw the white milks away. What is this teaching our children?!?!?

Anyway, thanks for the ideas. I may play with the pears this weekend. If I don't get a chance, I will take them and the 15 or so oranges I got today to church on Sunday to pass on to the head of our food pantry. They are all firm, so they should be okay until Wednesday when the food pantry is open.

[karyn]

I adore those pears and it makes me really sad that they go to waste.

One thing I did learn about fruit with my boys and their friends when they were in middle school, however, is that if the fruit/veggies are cut into pick-up-and-munch sized bites, they disappeared in an afternoon. Whole fruit was always ignored.

However, cutting up pears or apples creates another problem...browning...'cuz picky kiddos wont eat icky-looking fruit, either. Would it be possible for some students as a service project to cut up the fruit for snacks for sports teams or clubs? It might be more healthy than the snacks that are often provided.

I know that this idea creates more work, but there are a lot of good messages/lessons for the students, too.

[Mare749]

Holly's school district has to compost everything. I asked the principal at the grandkiddies school about that yesterday and was astonished when she told me that they only ever have a few pieces of fruit leftover each day and the staff takes those. But, the principal did tell me that local nursing homes are always happy to receive gifts of fruit.