Roasted Pears with Ginger and Mango

Last summer while at my friend Dave’s place on cape cod I invented the best dessert ever: pears marinated and roasted in mango juice, ginger, and brown sugar, and served over vanilla ice cream. They’re always a hit and relatively healthy compared to most desserts. This is really simple, and the best part is that it scales like crazy; you can easily plate beautiful dessert for 20 people if you want. I’ll portion this recipe for four.

Ingredients

four pears (I usually go for bartletts)
1 bottle of mango Naked juice (you can use some other mango juices, but a lot are thin and watery and should probably be reduced first, which is a pain).
1 large ginger root
1/4 c brown sugar
vanilla ice cream for four

Process

You can fit four pears into a regular 8×10 baking dish (or use whatever you want; I’m just telling you what fits). Halve the pears and carve out the seeds, but don’t fully core them (in fact, leave the stems on, they look great). Put them face down in your baking dish. peel and mince (or food-processorize) the ginger, and mix it, the naked juice, and the brown sugar together in a sauce pan over medium heat for roughly 10 minutes to get the flavors homogenized. Let cool for a few minutes, then pour onto the pears. Try to make sure the ginger is spread out well and that the juice gets to the bottom of the pears, which won’t happen if they are to flat to the bottom of your dish. Marinate for 4-8 hours. It doesn’t hurt to periodically spoon the juice around to make sure the pears are well covered.

Pre-heat your oven to 450 and roast the pears for roughly 40 minutes or until quite soft. More won’t hurt. Serve two scoops of ice cream in each bowl and put two pear halves on top, then drizzle the extra juice plus ginger on top of it all. Serve immediately.