Pear Crostata-Part Duex

Last weekend around this time, Loran and I were munching on the leftover pear crostata makings from the week before (see "moving to the country post"). If you checked that post out, you will remember me mentioning all the almond filling I had left after filling the crostata... and also griping about how labor intensive the freakin' thing was. Well, after taking some steps out of the recipe, I have since changed my mind. The biggest problem was roasting the pears in a butter/ginger/sugar jacuzzi for 45 minutes. I wasn't impressed with the results and there was really no big taste payoff for doing that.
In the next try, armed with leftover almond filling and 1/2 pie dough, I skipped the roasting pear part. Instead, I chopped up 2 pears, mixed in 2 tsp. sugar and about 1/2 tsp. ground ginger and just used that on top of the almond filling. Once cooked, this left a nice semi-firm pear in the crostata that packed a lot of taste. Much better.
Next, just to be different, I rolled out the dough and cut it into 6 squares and made mini-crostatas. I followed the directions from there, putting almond cream down, then pears and folding them all up. When you first fold them up, don't worry because they will look ugly and uneven. After you bake them, they will smooth out and if any almond cream spilled out, you can trim back the brown edges. Yum.