Pear and Cheese Puffs - Random Recipes #26

This month's Random Recipes challenge is to pick at random a clipping from your collection - we all have one, don't we;  pages torn from magazines, scribbled notes after a meal at a friend's house, torn-off pack labels - and cook the recipe on it.

Now I'm organised.  Or at least I WAS. All my clipped out recipes have been carefully cut out and arranged in those photo albums that used to be popular, the ones with a whole peel-back plastic page. It's a great way of storing them, easy to see the recipes and with a wipe clean surface. When they started to get hard to find, I bulk bought a supply of them. However my collection seems to stop abruptly at a point about eight years ago - which coincides with me starting my own business and no longer having time to carefully arrange recipes in albums.  Now my "notes and clippings" are more likely to be bookmarks on my computer.

So anyway, my "pile of clippings" looked a lot like this:

I numbered them all - there were 10 - then got Mark to shout a number from the other room. That album was pulled from the pile and I opened it at random to this page

 

There didn't seem to be much point making the curry powder as it's the blend I always use when I want a pre-mixed powder and there's a freshly made jar of it in the cupboard. In fact it's probably the reason the album fell open at that page. The Stilton and Mascarpone spaghetti looked lovely but includes fresh asparagus. We need to wait a few weeks before there's any in the garden, so that was no good this time.

 

That left Pasta with Rosemary Braised Flaegeolet Beans  or Dovedale, Pear and Pecan Puffs. Both looked delicious (of course they did, that's why I kept the recipes innit?) so a coin was tossed and it came up Puffs. I've been meaning to make it for quite a long time - the corner of the page says March 1998 and the typeface makes me think it probably came out of a Good Housekeeping magazine.

 

The  problem was the Dovedale cheese. According to the oracle that is Google, it is still produced, but I couldn't find it when out shopping. But it's a soft blue cheese so I used  Dolcelatte instead. The cheese, chopped pecans and some fresh thyme are folded into a whisked egg white, with a little cream, and piled on the pastry base, then the pears are sliced and fried with butter and sugar (Sweet Freedom in my case) to caramelise slightly and arranged on top for baking.

 

The result was excellent - light, delicious and a lovely variety of textures.  It's taken me 15 years to get around to making these tarts - I won't be leaving it 15 years before I make them again!