pear compote poached in vanilla bean and star anise
Oh mid-December with your mercurial weather! I cannot figure you out! Are you freezing cold with temperatures nearing zero or are you the kind of December that lingers in the forties, rainy and damp, like this morning? Do I put on a pot of soup and curl up with a book dressed head to toe in fleece, or do I just go into deep hibernation mode? Because either of these choices is making me want to stay indoors and make lovely things in the kitchen and then eat them, but there’s also deep desire to make good friends with my couch is just sooooo overwhelming. Not terribly ambitious, am I? You see, inside my head, I am cooking all kinds of things for the holidays: cookies and cupcakes and brittles and toffees. But in actuality, I can’t even bring myself to put the book down and wash my dirty pot from last night. I promise, I’ll do it as soon as I post this.
But, here’s what I really want to do. I don’t to tell you about poached pears. No. But, I do want to invite you over, sit you at my table and serve these pears to you still warm from the stove, in a deep, pretty bowl. With a soup spoon at your side. Because a dessert spoon just won’t do here. Instead of telling you about this pear compote, I want to eat it with you, share it with you, rather than wax poetic about how amazing the house smells when you cook it. You can read about the smell, but you can’t smell it in real time, right? Nor can you lick the screen of your monitor and really know what it tastes like, either. And I so hate being a tease.
What can I tell you about these pears? Well, for one, pears are one of the few fruits that truly look alluring at the market this time of year so you should, as they say, make hay while the sun shines. Perhaps because so much of the other fruit is so meh right now, I am finding pears impossible to resist. I like to think of them as a true winter fruit – they’ve got a flowery sweetness combined with a woodsy earthiness. And ever-so-versatile, pears lend themselves well to standing in as a snack, sneaking into a cake, or brightening a salad. Or just letting themselves be gently poached and served as they are, or as an accompaniment to a very wintry cake.
You might even forget the gray, rainy skies outside while you’re having it. It’s that good, that comforting and so easy to make that you might just find yourself returning to this recipe over and over again. I know I certainly will be. And while we can’t all sit at my dining room table eating these out of deep bowls with soup spoons, we can at least pretend that we can, bound together by this simple dessert, across stateliness, country borders and oceans. It’s the next best thing.
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