Pear, Basil and Pecorino Toscano Salad

Fall is here (or almost here)!  And with fall - apples, pears and the very beginning of squash season.  This is my favorite time of year at the farmers' market because you still have a lot of the great summer produce (although fresh corn and basil will be disappearing shortly), but honeycrisp apples and acorn squash are making their debut.  It is so exciting.  To celebrate I decided to make this pear salad for breakfast along with some hoe cakes.  There is a story that goes with the hoe cakes, but you are going to wait until we post them to hear that particular story.  Anyway, I thought this salad was really interesting - the juxtaposition of sweet pears and basil with salty, nutty cheese totally worked for me.  It made a really nice breakfast/brunch dish.  We made the pears with hoe cakes, blending an Italian salad with a very traditional Southern dish, but I think it totally worked!

P.S.  Alex pointed out that you can see the reflection of the building across the street on the plate in our picture.  Living in an NYC apartment means that we don't exactly have a lot of options for taking pictures of our dishes, particularly not when we want natural light.  Our choices are basically the windowsill (like this picture) or the coffee table.  But I think this is the first time that we caught a reflection like that!

Recipe after the jump!

Semi-Old-Fashioned Asian Pear Star Anise Cake

I looked in the fridge the other day and realized that I have a ridiculous number of apples and pears in there - far more than Alex and I could or would eat in the next few weeks.  So the obvious solution was to try to make with some of them.  The honeycrisp apples I will eat on their own, so there was no need to bake those.  Aside from them I had red Anjou pears, green Bartlett pears, Asian pears, and Granny Smith apples.  The obvious choice was to make an apple pie or apple crisp, but for some reason Alex doesn't like either of those.  Plus I have a ton more pears than apples, so why not use pears instead.  I started looking around and stumbled upon Ming Tsai's Cranberry-Asian Pear Star Anise Cake, which looked  really interesting, but far too complicated.  Then I saw Cele's Old-Fashioned Pear Cake recipe on 101 Cookbooks, which looked very simple but perhaps wasn't as interesting.  So I decided to come up with something that used similar flavors as Ming Tsai's recipe, but Cele's batter.  Sounds easy enough, right?  I am going to call my creation my Semi-Old-Fashioned Asian Pear Star Anise Cake as a nod to the two recipes where I found my inspiration.

There is something glorious about the smell of baked goods with unusual spices like star anise, cardamom and five spice in the batter.  While the aroma of baked goods is always wonderful, there is something spicier and more luscious about the smell of cakes in the oven with a healthy dose of star anise in them.  It kind of reminds me of the smell of apple cider versus mulled wine simmering on the stove.  Both smell wonderful but the extra kick of the allspice and other mulling spices in the wine just take it up a notch.

One of my favorite things about this cake is the light and clean flavor of the Asian pears, combined with the flavor of the star anise.  Also, the cake is wonderfully light and crumbly.  I do love a moist cake, but the texture of this cake is almost scone like - lighter and fluffier than your average cake.  It makes for a nice departure from some of the heavier cakes I have tried recently, particularly when served with some Haagen Dazs Five Ginger Ice Cream.  Also, since this cake is only lightly sweetened and the texture is scone-like, it would make a delicious breakfast with a nice steaming mug of tea.  Yes tea, not coffee.  I might be one of the few people left on Earth who don't drink coffee.  But I suppose the cake would make an equally lovely breakfast with a cup of coffee, if I were so inclined.

Speaking of ice cream, I discovered that making quenelles is WAY harder than the people on Top Chef make it look.  Alex and I were shooting ice cream all over the kitchen.  So pardon our lame presentation - we tried! 

Recipe after the jump!