Despite her often busy schedule, restaurateur and best‐selling cookbook author Lidia Bastianich still loves cooking at home for her loved ones, and she always make sure they have room for dessert!
This time of year, Bastianich’s dessert menu features one of her personal favorites: Roasted Pears and Grapes. It’s a simple, light and easy-to-make dessert – especially when you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. It looks great at dinner parties, and it works very well as a tasty, healthy dessert for a casual family dinner.
“You can just slip this recipe into the oven and have a grand dessert, especially if you serve it with vanilla ice cream,” notes Bastianich. The combination of pears and grapes are a delightful marriage of flavors, depending on the season.
Lidia sometimes likes to use alternative fruits – like baked quince and cranberries, for example. She suggests cutting the peeled and cored quince into quarters, since they take longer than the pears to bake. Then add the cranberries in place of the grapes.
Roasted Pears and Grapes by Lidia Bastianich
(Serves 6)
Ingredients:
2 cups red grapes (seedless)
1 cup sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
2 cups of Moscato wine
½ vanilla bean pod, split lengthwise
2 tablespoons apricot jam
3 firm yet ripe Bosc pears
Method:
Preheat oven to 375°F. Place the grapes in a baking dish. Combine the sugar, lemon juice,
Moscato, vanilla beans (scraped from the pod), and apricot jam in a bowl, stirring until combined. Use this sauce to cover the grapes. Then cut each pear in half through the core; remove the cores and seeds. Nestle the pear halves into the grapes, sliced side up.
Bake until the pears are tender and the liquid around the grapes is thick and syrupy, about 50 minutes. Remove the pears from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes. Serve with some of the grapes and a few spoonfuls of their sweet sauce.
(ph credit Jennifer May)