In a Pearing Hurry!

My creation for AFAM-Pears looked like sludge, though a rather pinky, pretty version, and it held great literary possibilities for my blog. The dramatic sentence that was supposed to be the opening line of this post crumpled and withered under the pressures of the day, and I had reckoned without that great leveler and humbler – the Internet.

The Net seems to beat you to every smart, original thing you wanted to say or write or cook up. If Slush can be something edible, so can sludge, I told myself, thinking it was a sentence with great potential that would develop during the day. Sludge, I thought, was my creation, the name, at least, but Google ‘Sludge Recipe’, and voila, there’s a multitude leaping out at you.

This was intended to be a pear-apple-oats-and more smoothie for breakfast but I was too lazy to reach for the oats, so I cored a pear and an apple and whizzed them in the mixer with four tablespoons of curds/yoghurt and a spoon of honey.

Once I tasted it, I decided it needed more texture and added a few broken walnuts to it. (I didn't whiz it then - the broken walnuts stayed whole, if you know what I mean.)

Then I photographed it for a while.

Then I slurped it up with a spoon.

AFAM-Pear Curds/Yoghurt Honey Apple Walnut Sludge recipe Breakfast

Baked Apples

Here’s a simple recipe, the only thing time-consuming about it is coring the apple if you don’t have a corer. I adapted this recipe from Cook Right For Your Type by Dr Peter J. D’Adamo (with Catherine Whitney), published by Century, 2001. This can even be had for breakfast, the books suggests. The link will tell you a little about this diet but meanwhile, happy baking!
I substituted the maple syrup with 'lemon-honey'. I don’t know whether that’s allowed, but this recipe is given here solely for cooking/eating pleasure and the book acknowledged because I feel honour-bound to do so, certainly not to promote any diet nor take away from it with substitutions/additions/omissions.
Here’s how:

4 apples (Rome, Granny Smith, Fuji)
½ cup chopped walnuts
½ cup mixed dried figs and apricots – I softened dry apricots by soaking them in hot water for an hour but maybe it’s not necessary
juice of ½ lime (I used a full lime)
2 tbsps butter or margarine
1 cup (236 ml) boiling water
2 tbsps honey

Preheat oven to 180 C (350 F, Gas Mark 4). Core apples, make sure you don’t pierce the bottom. Mix walnuts, dried fruit and lemon juice. Pour enough honey over this mixture to moisten well. Fill apples without packing them too tightly. If the mixture mounds at the top, it’s alright. Put a bit of butter on the top and put apples in a baking dish. Pour boiling water into the dish around the apples. Bake 20-30 minutes till the apples are tender.
While they are baking, the book says, you can baste the apples with the pan juices. I’m wary about this so I didn’t do it. When apples are done, transfer to a serving dish, pour liquid in pan (and any fruit mixture left over) and reduce over medium heat until thickened. Pour sauce over apples before serving.
The end result was a not-very-sweet-until-you-came-to-the-filling apple, but it really seemed to work as a light dessert. Maybe you could try it with a bit of ice-cream, or you could scoop out more of the apple and put in more filling. If you try it, let me know!