white apples . a blog

Pearfection or Brown Butter, why are you so delicious?

This Winter, Juni fell in love with pears, which is odd given her clear preference for face-squishingly sour fruits, such as pomegranate and kiwi and pineapple. Therefore, our fruit bowl has been well stocked with Bosc pears for the past several months. I also love pears. Fresh pears are so juicy and sugary and pleasantly gritty. And they have the most fetching shape of all the fruits. But I have never met a pear in a dessert that I liked. They always seem to melt away into the other flavors, losing any identifiable pear-ness. A few months back, I baked a particularly disappointing Pear Butterscotch Pie from Gourmet Magazine (RIP). Not that it didn't taste good. It was pie. It tasted good. But it did not taste at all like pear OR butterscotch. It tasted like pie spices. It could have very well been an apple pie made with mediocre, out-of-season apples. So pears seem to always fail me in baking. Their flavor and texture are too delicate. They require a light touch. Or, as it turns out, brown butter.

a light exists in spring

Spring is definitely springing here in North Carolina. Days are warm and rainy. Trees are budding. Bulbs are blooming. Birds are nesting. Oh, Spring. Spring has never been my favorite season. It's too beautiful and tenuous. A riot of color and then it's gone. Spring is a heartbreaker. Give me rusty, blustery Fall or even the long, slow heat of Summer. Fickle Spring is not for me. However, this perfectly lovely weather means our days can spill outside once more after many long months spent cooped up inside.