Stoofperen

Quite a nice dish. You can eat these as a dessert, preferably with some vanilla ice cream on the side, or as a side dish for a main course - it goes particularly well with strong flavoured meat, braised beef, mutton or game, or something like that.

We used all the spices (lemon zest and cinnamon, as well as cloves and bay leaf - the latter two were optional); for a dessert you could indeed omit the cloves and bay leaf (though it's by no means necessary), but for a side dish I would definitely add them. The recipe also uses 250 ml red wine, and then requires you to add water until the pears are covered. As we're used to recipes that exclusively use red wine, we used 500 ml red wine which we filled up with water (another 250 ml).

One thing I would want to add to the recipe is that they are even nicer if you take them out the sauce after they have cooked, keep them warm, and reduce the sauce to a syrup, about 20 min. You can serve them either warm or cold.

Edited one day later: I upgraded this dessert to a crumble using this recipe - the idea was good, the execution wasn't. Still, something to keep in mind for the next time.

I also found that I liked how the pears had soaked in the red wine syrup over night; also, the syrup with all it's spices turned out to taste like mulled wine - not really surprisingly, if you think about it. We finished the pears but still have some red wine syrp left over - I wonder if that would still go with something else - chocolate mousse, perhaps?