191: Poached pears with ice-cream and chocolate sauce, p337

Pudding for tonight's dinner party was an easy recipe to finish off the meal. Simple, quite nice but nothing particularly to write home about. The syrup was very thin and watery - not sure about using a whole litre of water to simmer the pears in, or not reducing it down considerably after the poaching, so it was more of a syrup. But it was quite nice to leave the pears quite plain and fresh, instead of using wine or cider. The chocolate sauce seemed wrong... to melt good chocolate by mixing in boiling water? Normally one tries to keep water/steam out of melting chocolate at all costs, or it seizes and goes grainy. This surprisingly worked as a thin (albeit watery...) chocolate sauce, but once it cooled down, the chocolate when grainy and the leftover sauce (of which there was lots, should have halved the chocolate/water combination) doesn't look/taste to be reusable. I used good fairtrade Divine chocolate, so a bit of a shame to waste so much of it. Ho hum. The Haagen Daz pralines and cream ice-cream was delicious (the only praline ice-cream I could find, it's a hard job, but someone's got to do it...).

Only two recipes to go!