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National Pears Hélène Day 2025
If you thought chocolate and peanut butter go well together, count on the French to come up with something truly sublime. 🍐🍨🍫 National Pears Hélène Day celebrates this ingenious dessert.
Fruit Can Be Cooked
Don’t forget that fruit can be cooked – think of baked apples, poached pears and grilled pineapple. But if you like drinking fruit, blending will preserve more nutrition and fibre than juicing. ~Michael Greger
You don’t typically think of cooking fruit, but it’s actually all around us.
Straight off the bat, tomatoes are technically a fruit so every dish of spaghetti, ravioli, gnocci or tortellini in red sauce is cooked fruit.
Naturally, every apple, cherry, blueberry or peach pie is cooked fruit. Apple fritters, apple or cherry turnovers, apple dumplings? Cooked fruit.
There are so many examples of cooked fruit that we take entirely for granted, such as Hawaiian Pizza (the pineapple and the tomato sauce in the pizza, both cooked fruit).
So, why should we be surprised that some ingenious French chef thought of poaching pears in vanilla, adding a dollop of ice cream and covering with chocolate sauce?
I wouldn’t have thought of it, but now that I’ve heard of it, I can’t really think of anything else.
Luckily, it’s Saturday, so I’ve actually got some spare time to get creative in the kitchen.
🍐 Belle 🍨 Hélène 🍫
Poached Pear “Belle Helene” – Vanilla-Poached Pears with Chocolate Sauce
I’ve got some sugar-free vanilla ice cream. I may have some canned pears. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any chocolate syrup, so I might not get to this delicacy today.
On the other hand, I do have a few cans of pumpkin. Hmm, it’s not 🍂Autumn🍂 anymore, so having 🎃 sitting around feels a bit incongruous.
What else would I do but ask my virtual assistant what to do about this situation? What else would 🤖 do but give me a lovely idea?
Sugar-Free Pumpkin Rice Pudding (Doubled Recipe)
Servings: 8-10
Time: 30-40 minutes
Ingredients:
2 cups cooked rice (brown for fiber, white for creaminess)
3 cups unsweetened almond milk (or any milk of choice)
1 (15-ounce) can of pumpkin purée
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
½ tsp ginger
½ tsp cloves (optional)
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 tbsp monk fruit sweetener (or preferred sugar substitute, adjust to taste)
Pinch of salt
2 eggs (optional, for extra creaminess)
2 tbsp butter or coconut oil (optional, for richness)
Instructions:
Prepare the Rice (if needed):
If you don’t have cooked rice, cook 1 cup dry rice with 2 cups water until soft.
Combine Ingredients:
In a large saucepan over medium heat, mix the almond milk, pumpkin, sweetener, and spices. Stir well.
Add the Rice:
Stir in the cooked rice and reduce heat to low.
Let it simmer for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until it thickens.
Optional Egg Addition (for extra richness):
In a bowl, beat 2 eggs.
Slowly stir in a few spoonfuls of the hot pudding to temper the eggs.
Pour the egg mixture back into the pudding, stirring constantly. Cook for another 2-3 minutes until creamy.
Finish & Serve:
Stir in vanilla extract and butter (if using).
Serve warm or chilled, with an extra sprinkle of cinnamon or chopped nuts on top.
Serving Ideas & Variations:
Dairy-Free? Use coconut milk or oat milk instead.
Extra Protein? Add a scoop of vanilla protein powder.
Lower Carb? Swap rice for cauliflower rice or chia seeds.
Toppings? Try whipped cream, toasted pecans, or sugar-free caramel drizzle.
Comedy And Drama 🎭
I have been fortunate to be able to have a career playing comedy and drama. And it’s awfully hard – it’s like apples and pears to compare the two. ~Jack Lemmon
Movies, being an hour and a half or two hours, tend to be one or the other.
Even in a comedy movie, you can’t have end to end hilarity.
You need to give the audience a chance to breathe.
Typically, any story will have some give and take between light and dark tones.
Certainly, mine have that. There are light-hearted moments and mishaps, but there are also dark schemes and calamities.
You want that. It’s a sort of emotional wave pool. You want to toss a little curveball in to keep interest and build tension to keep the reader hooked.
Given the genre of my current series, it’s a given that you’ll have a satisfying mix of smiles and tears.
On the surface, comic books are about vigilantes in garish costumes duking it out with their various nemeses.
That was certainly the norm in early comics, but even in the frenzied publishing of the Golden Age, the writers, editors and publishers realized you couldn’t only have random dust-ups.
You needed story.
You needed Batman to be the World’s Greatest Detective, not the World’s Greatest Boxer.
You couldn’t just have Superman throwing cars around all the time. He needed to dig in and find those corrupt politicians or find the evidence to keep a guy from being executed in error.
You needed story.
The more episodes they printed and sold, the more they needed to build lore, motivation and recurring characters.
The same is still true today. No matter how trivial or formulaic, you still need story to keep people reading.
On the other hand, you need a reasonably well-stocked pantry to keep people eating. Both are important.
That’s all for today. See you back on Wednesday when everything tastes like 🦃🦆🐔