The Parson's Pears

These aren't our pears. I mean, they didn't come off of our antique pear tree, which inexplicably produced only about a dozen pears this year, instead of the hundreds it popped out with last year. These are the pastor's pears which I picked from the pear tree in the parsonage (say thatten times fast.). She said to take as many pears as I wanted, so I did. The container they are in is a half-barrel, so you can see that's a lot of pears.

I realized at some point afterwards that I didn't actually want to process that many pears - pears have a short window, once off the tree they ripen quickly, and ten minutes after that they are nothing but fragrant mush. So I gave away about twenty-five or so, and have about forty left to process today or tomorrow, whenever they seem perfect.

I need to scour my cookbooks for pear recipes. I used to make a fantastic pear-ginger-sour cream cake with walnuts. Wonder if pecans and yogurt would work just as well? We'll find out. Then I remember from last year a delicious kind of pear pie with cheddar cheese that my Aunt Christie sent me a recipe for. I'll certainly make that again. Hope wants to dehydrate some. And I want to can some in syrup - which I've never done before. For some reason I'm candy impaired, I can't ever make anything that involves melting sugar come out correctly. And yes, I have a candy thermometer.

Ooh, candied dried pears!