Caramelized Pears

Dinner party dessert! This Southern Living cookbook is really amazing. They have everything divided by season in terms of what’s available (albeit in the south) but it means that when I choose a dessert from the winter section, it’s not gonna call for fresh strawberries. And it’s super produce based! So yes, caramelized pears. And this was doubly good because the pears could be all hard and wintery since we were cooking them!

– Core and slice the pears – they say into quarters, we did eighths, but I would suggest cutting them even thinner so these more surface area to caramelize!
– Sprinkle the pears with lemon juice
– Melt butter (or you could probably do coconut oil) in a pan and sauté the pears until they’re brown. They say this will take 2 minutes, but it took us closer to 10
– Add coconut sugar to the pears – we did ~1/4c for 3 pears, which is what they suggest (although they say brown sugar instead of coconut sugar, but the coconut sugar worked great in this recipe!)
– Also add more butter
– Sauté over lowered heat until they’re tender (which if you’re using unripe pears like we were it will be a little while. Another reason to cut them thin!)
– Remove from heat and add in vanilla. I used this super delicious vanilla that my aunt brought me back from Mexico (thanks Jan!!) because I figured since we weren’t really cooking the vanilla – like it wasn’t going to be some subtitle flavor in a baked good – that it was a good time to use something fancy!

– We served it with pistachio ice cream because that’s what I had in my freezer, and that worked pretty well! The melted ice cream mingled with the caramelized sugar sauce and was delicious. They also suggest creme fresh and we were actually thinking marscapone would be good too