Quickie bonus recipe: Cranberry pears

Yesterday morning, Brian and I went out to visit some of the local stores we like to hit whenever we're in Indianapolis. When we returned around lunchtime, his folks weren't home, but his mom had left us a sticky note on the kitchen table reading, "Eat pears!" Apparently she'd bought a bunch of them, and she was concerned that they wouldn't remain in eatable condition much longer.

The easiest way to obey this instruction, of course, would have been simply to take a pear, cut it up, and eat it. I'd had one of them already, and I knew it would taste fine by itself. But as it happened, she had made baked apples for dessert just a couple of nights before, and I'd mused about how this dish would work with pears instead of apples. And the previous night, we'd had a sort of pasta-spinach salad for dinner, accompanied by cranberry sauce, and there was still some of it left over in the fridge.

So, putting those two facts together in my mind, I decided to try experimenting a bit. I cut one of the pears in half, cored it, spooned cranberry sauce into the middle, and microwaved it for one minute on high. I realized this wouldn't really be the same thing as baking it in a slow oven that would give the flavors of the filling time to soak into the pear-flesh, but I figured it would be good enough for a proof of concept.

As you can see, this dish is a little difficult to eat neatly, but it tasted pretty good. A minute in the microwave was enough to heat the pear through and soften it up to the point that it could easily be eaten with a spoon, peel and all. And as I suspected, the flavors of the pear and the cranberry sauce complemented each other pretty well. They'd probably be still better if the pears were cooked slowly with the cranberries, so the flavors could combine more thoroughly. (In fact, it looks like Martha Stewart had much the same idea.) But for a dish I came up with on the spur of the minute using leftovers, it was a striking success. I think there's still some cranberry sauce left in the fridge, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to tinker with it a little more and see if I can improve on it any while still keeping the preparation fairly simple.