Edible Decor

Ever since I started buying a Bountiful Basket, drinking Green Smoothies, and just buying more produce in general, one thing that I've enjoyed beyond the obvious benefits of such a life style is the fact that; because my kitchen  theme has always been fruit, with fun, graphic decor in bright colors. This makes is not only logical but very enjoyable and ascetically pleasing to have fresh fruit in the kitchen because I can use it as decor. Plus, having the fruit out in plain site makes it easier to remember to eat it before it goes bad. That is, if you can bring yourself to ruin the lovely display. Lol!
Of course my husband has no problem with the latter issue so it turns out to be a good system for eating our fresh fruit regularly. 

I have a fruit bowl, but often it fills up so quickly that it becomes necessary to use other places for displaying fruit. 

My favorite is the ledge under the window in the kitchen. Here are just a few of the arrangements that have resided there until they were eaten.

Pears . . .

 Golden Delicious Apples

Asian Pears and Apples

Maybe this will inspire some of you to find fun ways to display fruit in your own kitchen, and thereby encourage your family to eat it more often.

What I Ate: 09-04-12

Pear Pudding

We have been abundantly blessed with lots of fruits and veggies from friends and family lately. Especially pears. I simply adore pears! Lucky for me, my mother-in-law isn't a huge fan, but her mother-in-law who happens to live next door, has a pear tree so the two huge buckets of pears that ended up in my in-law's garage ultimately ended up in my tummy, for the most part. :}

Of the last installment that we acquired from them, a few of them were really, really ripe, so I knew I'd need to use these ones immediately rather then eat them at my leisure, so I started searching around on Pinterest on Tuesday for a nice, doable pear recipe.
My first thought was pear butter, but in the end, I didn't really have everything I needed for that so I kept looking and managed to find this simple Pear Pudding recipe on Foodnetwork.com.  They didn't have a picture so after pinning the recipe I determined that if it turned out at all that I would post a picture here to add to my pin.

First time I ever made a recipe that called for a water bath. Oo la la! Fancy!

I changed the recipe a tad by substituting the sugar for raw honey. Also,1 teaspoon of cinnamon seemed like a lot. I wanted it to taste more like pear than cinnamon so I only added a dash or two. I also didn't have a lemon, but I did have a fresh lime so I substituted lime zest for lemon. I did use organic butter on the pan, though mine was salted instead of unsalted. I honestly never buy unsalted, and I've never had a problem with stuff turning out too salty. The last change I made was that I didn't have any breadcrumbs (sounded kinda gross to me anyway) so I crushed up the last of the health food store graham crackers that I'd purchased for our camping trip last weekend (for healthy-ish s'mores.)

 Anyway, it seems like it turned out okay. It never really set up to be very thick. Perhaps I should have baked it longer than recommended. It was quite golden around the edges though. It would have been nice if the recipe had mentioned whether or not I should test it with a knife or something. It said 'serve cool or chilled' so I chilled it for almost an hour thinking maybe that would help it thicken. Of course, the whole reason it was still a bit runny could have been due to the fact that I used honey instead of sugar. 
At any rate. It was deee-licious!

Sweet and kinda rich but sort of light at the same time. The taste was just so perfectly balanced, it's hard to describe. I loved the pear flavor and I do not regret cutting back on the cinnamon at all. Not that I have anything against cinnamon, and maybe if I do this again I'll try the full amount, but I just wasn't in the mood for a cinnamon dessert. I wanted a fresher, fruitier flavored dessert. And that's exactly what I got. Yay!