Diary of a *baking* woman

I think maybe my new destiny is to become one of those food bloggers. You know the ones with all the super pretty pictures, a really great story, and a recipe to boot? So yes, forgive me as I have my moment to show you something really delectable that I made today. It may be one of my proudest cooking tests... then again it's probably not the only one. Two words. Pear Butter.

Normally my off time consists of me either reading a book, staring at various food blogs, cleaning (something), spending quality time in the kitchen, staring at more food blogs, writing, and/or taking pictures. Since starting this blog more regularly, I see it as my partial food journal. A place to show all you readers all my passions in one place--writing, food, and pictures. I think I'm on to something. But I digress, that is another matter altogether. Today was a really good day in the kitchen, which resulted in a kitchen smelling like cinnamon, brown sugar and pears. Oh my dears!


For some time I had been wanting to try my hand at making pear butter. I had had apple butter, sweet potato butter, and probably peach butter, but pear butter just sounded gorgeous. I love pears. I could eat them until I got so tired of them that I never wanted to eat them again--well just for a really long time anyway. I set out to find the perfect recipe only to find more variations than I knew what to do with. Some had honey, others sugar, some suggested citrus juice, and one even had a teaspoon of actual butter. That being said, I decided to make my own variation, and man did it taste amazing.

The ingredients were as followed:

• 3 semi large pears peeled, cubed, and cored
• 1/2 c. water
• some sprinklings of ground nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and some Polish mixture of similar spices containing cardamon, vanilla flavoring etc. 
• brown sugar lightly sprinkled across the contents of the pot
• some lemon juice 
• and 1 tsp. of butter (just to see what would happen)

I simply put all this in a pot and let it boil away until the pears were soft. Then I took out my immersion blender and blended until it was silky smooth and let it boil again to thicken. It didn't thicken that much, but I remember some fruit butters are a bit on the 'wet' side, so I poured it into a canister to cool. It tasted pretty darn good. Now to see A&J taste it--they have never had or heard of pear butter before!

Homemade