Pear and Chocolate Crumble

Hi guys,

A colleague of mine, Sebastien, once made us all a delicious pear and chocolate crumble (which goes very well with vanilla ice cream). I have since made it a few times and it went down very well. As it happens I have ended up dispensing the recipe to three people in the last week, so I thought I might as well share it with the masses. It's really easy, and the ingredients all keep for a while so you can keep them in the cupboard for when you need to make a dessert. Anyway, without further ado:

250g flour
200g sugar
Approx. 100g butter (ideally salted, but doesn't matter, soften in the microwave)
3 x tin pears (I think they are 400g with the liquid)
1 1/2 bars plain chocolate

Mix the flour, butter and sugar to give a crumble like consistency (supposedly you get the consistency right by varying the butter, but both times I made it 100g of butter was exactly the right amount to produce this). Put the pears in the dish and break the chocolate so it is fairly evenly distributed. Sprinkle the crumble mix on top. Put it in the oven at about 180C for about 40 to 45 minutes. It's really that easy.

If you fancy playing around with the recipe, apparently it's good with any of pear, apple, and apricot. Also if you uParmesansan cheese instead of sugar, you can replace the fruit and chocolate with vegetables and make some sort of vegetable bake.

Enjoy! :)


Ali

A return to blog delinquency

I just got my weekly email from OUCS detailing the hits to my various pages over the last week. Each time I receive this bulletin and see people have been looking here and discovering that nothing must have happened to me since December 27th I feel a little bit guilty. So here’s a shot at filling in the gaps.

I think my last posting must have been just before I went to France with my parents after Christmas. That trip was somewhat rustic as we got totally and utterly snowed in to our house – which is on a small and very steep hill in rather remote countryside. In order to get to the house we ended up in a big skid, and were then stuck there for several days. As an indicator of how slippy it was, the kids up the hill were using the road outside our front door for tobogganing. It was an opportunity to take some cool pictures, and it was very rustic cooking food and boiling water on the fire when we lost electricity. Incidentally, there are some additional family Christmas photos here.

Just after the New Year I returned to Oxford so I could get some research done before all the fun and distractions of term time. Most of my work since then has been towards a paper for a medical, signal and information processing conference in July. Unfortunately the exotic location for this one is Glasgow, so no free holidays for me this year. There will, however, be a (not-so-free) break that should prove more exotic than Glasgow. Last week I bought some flights to Melbourne via Hong Kong so I can go and visit the Australian branch of the family. It will be the first time I’ve got to meet Thea, so I’m pretty excited about it all. Plus generally it will be a lot warmer and sunnier in Australia than it is in Oxford at the moment.

Somehow it is already seventh week which means there are only two weeks left this term, a rather scary thought. Although it does mean my days will no longer be taken up with teaching and Spanish and Mandarin lessons, so I will be able to get more research done. Next term I’m going to be MCR IT Officer – I did stand for President but I only managed to get 40% of the vote (which isn’t enough if the other guy gets 60%! ;) ). Still it’s probably for the best if I intend on finishing my DPhil at some stage in the near future – which is definitely something I want to do, not because I necessarily want to stop working on what I am, but because if just means I have more options open to me.

I would feel silly if I made yet another vacuous promise to be more attentive to my blog, although I hope that once I am on the road again I will use this as a travel diary like I used to.

Over and out,


Ali