A partridge in a pear tree...

I am so excited to start my "12 Days of Christmas" holiday themed blog posts with you!  I am back up on my feet (mostly!) and getting things done around here.

I thought long and hard over ALL 12 days of posts I would share with you and this was by far the easiest one. As you probably know a partridge is a bird... like a grouse or maybe a pheasant that people eat... but I am not into that so I thought that maybe it would be fun to do something with pears and partridge berries!




Via Wikipedia

Do you know what partridge berries are? Most people don't, but it's a berry found growing wild in places like Newfoundland... or Sweden. I bet you have likely seen something called lingonberry jam at Ikea. They have it with their meatballs? It's partridge berry jam! 

Via Ikea

But.... partridge berries are also hard to come by where I live, so I went for the next best thing and got some fresh cranberries. It's the same tart taste, but they are quite a bit bigger than a partridge berry.
I got a recipe for my first go from the maven of making stuff.... Martha Stewart.  Her Cranberry-Pear Crisp is super yummy, the cranberries sing "happy holidays" right into your heart... via your mouth.

Then I think I did it one better, I omitted 2 pears and subbed in two empire apples... Plus I forgot the lemon... oops... but really I think it's just to keep the fruit from browning.

So this is the point where you make the crumbly but crisp topping.... but don't forget to add that little bit of sugar over top of the fruit before you add the topping. Like I did.  Or you will find your self carefully moving the topping aside and adding sugar bit by bit.... like I did. Nothings perfect people.

Weird! I took it out of the oven and the dish was square! No. OK. So what happened was, after looking at the top dish we all decided that the crumb topping would never ever fit on top... so it got transferred. Cooking at my parents house is a democratic event, folks. I bet this is when I forgot the sugar! Anyhow, doesn't it look amazing?

What's that on top? Oh... that is a post for another day... trust me, it's worth waiting for!