Peaches Poached in Red Wine

If you have leftover red wine that's too good to throw away, but too bad to drink, the rule is to keep it.

You can always trust the French to find a happy solution to their excess, undrinkable wine. They come up with this home device called a vinaigrier, a big clay pot where they pour their unwanted wine from the top and drains good wine vinegar through a tap at the bottom. I would imagine it takes more than the blink of an eye to ferment wine into vinegar, but the idea is there.

Anyway, I do not possess a vinaigrier, but I do always keep a bottle of red and a bottle of white for cooking. Cheap one that is.

And yesterday, being the first day of Chinese New Year, I was determined to have a nice dinner, after sorely missing the festive tradition of feasting the night before. To digress more than a bit, we had wanted to fish for abalone and sea urchin on Sunday but luck wasn't with us. Ended up buying a pack of fresh sea urchins at the supermarket. It tasted wonderful with just bread and butter, but come on, it's New Year's eve which called for a better feast beyond bread and butter. So we followed a random recipe found on internet, cooked pasta with white wine sauce and sea urchins. It totally ruined the strong, delectable taste of the sea urchin and left me extremely unsatisfied.

So I was determined to have a good dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just some French style 'garlicy' roast lamb from Camille and Jamie's rosemary crispy baked potatoes, which made me happy to want to try again and post the recipe next time. And there must be a nice conclusion to the dinner.

Camille came to the rescue once again. Strangely, this cookbook in French was a present for Rémi, but I seem to be using it more than ever. Frequent enough to understand enough of the ingredients list before I tediously type the steps of suitable recipes on google translate.

This recipe is a must try, because it's easy and amazingly wonderful. A scoop of vanilla ice-cream may bring you to the moon, but as we didn't have any last night, we're still on earth today.

Peaches Poached in Red Wine (Soupe de Péches au Vin Rouge)
Serves two

2 ripe peaches (Idea is 1 big peach per person, so it's straight forward to adjust the quantity)
2 tablespoons sugar (you may like to reduce your sugarly sins here)

120ml red wine
Another 4 teaspoons of sugar (or 4 sugar cubes)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon powder or 1/4 cinnamon stick

Peel the skin off the peaches and remove the pits. Cut into halves or quarters. Coat the peaches with the big spoons of sugar. Leave in a cool place for an hour.

After an hour or so, you would see a sweet syrup forming around the peach slices. This peachy syrup is crucial in enhancing the taste of the red wine syrup, so make sure you don't skip the first step.

Then, boil the red wine and the 4 teaspoons of sugar and cinnamon for 10 minutes over low heat. Add the peach slices and the sweet peachy syrup into the wine syrup. Continue poaching for about 15 minutes. The wine syrup should have reduced by about half.

When it's done, leave to cool in fridge before serving. Wonderful.

It should be possible to replace peach with pear.