No, Mrrzy, we don't want a cutting board with a built-in scale and knife-sharpener. At least not in this parish, where a good chopping board is one that can go in the dishwasher.

Today, in this parish, supper will include pears poached in wine. Because Friday.

The ingredients are: six firm, ripe pears that are not Bartletts (Bosc are best), plonk wine, the rind of a lemon, half a cup of sugar, and either a small piece of cinnamon bark or two or three whole cloves.

Find some completely undistinguished red wine, such as the kind that comes in a box or a Tetrapak. Depending on the size of your pot and your pears, you may need two bottles. If you have a bottle of crap white wine, you can use that for one bottle, but you will want red for the other.

Put the wine, the sugar and the spices in a steel or enamelled saucepan, bring it to a boil and simmer for five minutes.

While the wine is heating, peel the pears. If you are not a French cuisine purist, slice them in half and remove the core with a melon-baller. (If you are a French cuisine purist, leave the cores alone or remove them from the blossom end of the pear, which is fiddly and likely to waste too much pear. Either way, leave the stem on.)

If the pears are whole, stand them in the bottom of the pot and string the lemon rind around them. If the pears are halved, ensure that they are completely immersed and get the lemon rind in there any old how. Simmer very gently until the pears are just tender.

Put the pears in the wine into the fridge to chill, preferably overnight. In the morning, remove the pears from the wine with a slotted spoon; you will notice that they are now a robust shade of purple. Strain the wine back into the saucepan and boil it down into a light syrup; it should not quite coat a spoon. Cool the syrup and pour it back over the pears.

If you did this with whole pears, serve them standing upright in a pool of syrup; if the cores are still in, your diners will hold the stem with one hand and ply the spoon with the other. Halved and cored, these pears are ambrosial set on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream with the syrup ladled over.