Baked pears with pine nuts

Delicious, easy ... good enough for dinner, lovely for breakfast with yoghurt.

Baked pears with pine nuts

100g raisins
300ml Marsala
7-8 pears
lemon juice
40g soft dark brown sugar
the seeds of a vanilla pod
40g pine nuts

Heat the oven to 180C. Soak the raisins for half an hour in the warmed Marsala. Halve the pears and scrape out the cores. Put the raisins in the bottom of an ovenproof dish, lay the pears on top, cut side up. Squeeze out the juice of a lemon over the pears, sprinkle with sugar and vanilla seeds, then add the Marsala.

Bake in the oven for 45-50 minutes, adding the pine nuts after half an hour. They should be soft when you take them out of the oven ... serve at room temperature.

This is pretty similar to a recipe by Diana Henry published in the Times recently. If you don't know her book Crazy Water Pickled Lemons, have a look at it next time you're in a library or bookshop, it's full of unusual and good tastes - Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean-ish ... but not your run-of-the-mill Med-diet=tomatoes-and-olive-oil+pasta