what’s sumner eating #9: spiced pears with cranberry sauce

The last couple of weeks have been pretty quiet around here for Sumner. We’ve only had our weekly physical therapy session and bi-monthly speech therapy session. Sumner continues to make excellent progress in building up his mobility skills. We’ve started working on crawling up the stairs and creating bigger obstacle courses with the floor pillows for him to navigate. The pillows only slow him down a little bit at this point.

At any rate, on to Sumner’s recipe for the week. I decided to make spiced pears with cranberry sauce for some of Sumner’s meals this week. Our CSA sent pears, oranges, and fresh cranberries. Now, I’ve never been a fan of cranberries. It’s probably due to the grossness of canned cranberry sauce. How can you call something that can be sliced a sauce? So, I decided to use half of the cranberries and the juice from the oranges for cranberry muffins. The other half of the cranberries and orange peels went into Sumner’s cranberry sauce.

With his three meals and two snacks per day, supplementing our Little Spoon delivery (see this post about why we switched services) with homemade food is helping us to keep our budget in check.

Ingredients

I was a little loose on the measuring for this recipe so all amounts are approximate.

• 2 peeled, halved, and cored pears
• 3 tablespoons Earth Balance
• Cinnamon
• Nutmeg
• 1/2 bag fresh cranberries
• Zest from 2 oranges
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 water

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Place pears and butter into an oven-safe dish and sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg.
3. Bake pears for 45 minutes or until fork tender.
4. While the pears are baking, begin to make the cranberry sauce. Combine cranberries, orange zest, sugar, and water into a sauce pan. Bring to a boil.
5. Cook the sauce for about 10 minutes or until the berries have all popped and the sauce has started to reduce. Once the sauce is done, allow to cool to room temperature.
6. Once the pears are done, allow to cool to room temperature.
7. Run pears through a food processor.
8. Evenly portion the pears three containers and refrigerate.
9. Run the cranberry sauce through the food processor.
10. Top the pears with the cranberry sauce and refrigerate.

Notes

• When we’re doing these jars for breakfast, I add a serving of probiotics.
• Each serving is approximately 130 calories.