What are you eating today ?

And now, for something different.
A neighbor gave me about 18 pretty poor looking pears that came off a tree my father planted several decades ago. Bartletts i believe, but they were tough and not sweet at all tho they had plenty of juice and not the kind you can easily eat, so I decided to try my hand at pear preserves.

Here's how I did them.
Washed them, peeled them (THAT, was a chore..tough skins) washed them quickly again, then sliced them pretty thin..about 3x the thickness of a tater chip or about the thickness of a flour tortilla.
I estimated that I ended up with about 4 qts uncooked pears. I used the same process I use for figs, but since the pears were not sweet, I increased the sugar.
I put them in a big plastic bowl, added 1/2 cup of water.
For every 3 cups of raw fruit, I used 1 cup of white cane sugar. Ended up with about 3 1/2 cups of sugar, which I just mixed in with the pears with my hands, making sure they all got a good coating. Covered loosely, on the end of my counter and left them about 20 hrs. (NOT in the refrigerator.) You do this, because you want the sugar to draw out all the juice from the slices so you can cook it and not have to a lot add tasteless water to the mix. After 20 hrs, the slices were a little brown, which is natural and there was a LOT of liquid in the bowl..pear slices nearly floating. Once you start cooking, and the sugar and liquid turns to a syrup, the slices will re-absorb the liquid syrup which is what makes preserves. 

For cooking for pears, you really need to use a non-reactive vessel..I used a big porcelain chili pot, but you can use stainless or any coated pot. Cast iron is non reactive, but all my cast iron has been seasoned with cooking a lot of meat, and I didn't want any of that residual taste or odor in the pears.

Bring the pears to a GOOD rolling boil, then reduce heat to med high and let them cook..about an hour and 1/2. Cover loosely with a lid (leave the lid off to one side a bit.) Stir occassionally to dissolve any sugar. You may have to add a little water if too much of the juice evaporates, but you don't want it too thin. The juice and sugar should combine to form a nice syrup, which the slices will then begin to reabsorb. After 1 1/2 hrs, I added 3 tablespoons of lemon juice. (some people just grind up a whole lemon and put peel and all in there..I didn't have one. The lemon takes some of the sweet away and makes the pears turn the dark color you expect from pear preserves...at this point, I also added about 1/3 cup of light brown sugar, disolve in a little water, as I like the smoky flavor brown sugar gives. Cook another 30 minutes on med high, and while that is being done, sterilize your jars and lids. At this point, I used the end of a steel spatula to cut the slices into smaller pieces, as I had left some the length of a pear. The stuff cooks down quite a bit so I figured I 'might get 4 pints, but tuned out only got 3.

Remove the pears from the burner and fill the jars while jars and mixture is still hot. I left about 3/4" head space at the top. With a clean wet paper towel, you need to clean off the jar threads and top edge..it can be a syrupy mess and makes it hard to seal or even get the rings unscrewed later. Screw the rings on snug but not real tight, then water bath process the jars for 15 minutes. The lids should pop down after just a few minutes. They turned out great, sweet and tender.
(older folks than me always say you really don't need to water bath them, but I always do anything that doesn't require pressure canning.)

Y'all must be Mexican. I prefer corn bread

😆
It doesn’t get much better than cornbread cooked in a cast iron but, 90% of my leftovers get rolled up in a tortilla the next day as lunch.

Youve done well too. Got some ideas based off your food posts

They probably never heard it called lite bread.

That's just un-american.

I like white boy food but I'll take good mexican food every chance I get. When you walk into a real mexican home you know two things right off the bat. You and your kids will be treated like family and you're going to eat good.