Poached Quinces with Rose Water Syrup

A very delicious, very simple, and very easy to prepare dish that even has the advantages that you can prepare it in advance and then serve warm or cold, and that uses a nearly forgotten fruit - always good for a few bonus points in my idea. You didn't really taste the rose water, so if you like that taste you might want to consider adding some extra rose water. However, the dish really needs to accompany something - something like cream or vanilla ice cream.

We served this as a dessert to a main dish of Chicken Wings with Blood Oranges, Sautéed Spinach with Apple, Pine Nuts and Cream and couscous with sweet dried cranberries with spices, a very good menu overall!

Edited 30 December 2012: We served this together with Lychee and Rose Sorbet. Actually, we were expecting guests and just hadn't thought of a dessert, so we had to come up with something we could prepare quickly and with the supplies we had - and this worked like a charm. We omitted the rose water in this dish because the sorbet already contained rose water (and we even considered making this tried and tested recipe that doesn't contain rose water, but I'm glad that we went for the lychee and rose sorbet as it combined a lot better with the quinces. The only issue we had was that combined, it was a tad sweet and might have needed some extra crunch - perhaps some roasted (not sweetened!) nuts?

We served this as a dessert for Baked Vegetables with an Aubergine Sauce, and that worked really well, too.

Edited 15 October 2013: We were given a bag full of quinces and decided to give this dish a try again. We still happened to have some Orange and Szechuan Pepper Ice Cream, and to my surprise, this actually combined very well. Although, to be honest, I secretly hoped that the box would contain White Chocolate Ice Cream - that would have been a great combination, too!