A satisfying oven-baked potato and pear recipe today. The oven can be your best friend when you feel a little lazy; lazy for cooking and for cleaning up after the meal. For this easy recipe, you only need to do some cutting and baking. In the end, it’s the oven which does all the hard work. Simply combine some potatoes, fruits and other veggies together on a sheet pan and let them bake while you relax.
Here are the ingredients for oven-baked potato and pear:
- 2 pears (Williams)
- 4 slices of bacon
- 5 potatoes (middle)
- 2 spring onions
- 4 garlic cloves
- olive oil
- 8-10 pimientos de padrón
- salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 200ºC and prepare a baking tray covered with a baking paper sheet. Wash the potatoes, pears, spring onion and padrón peppers. I used young potatoes because their skin is thin and it can be eaten easily. Therefore I didn’t peel them. On the other hand, the “old” potato should be peeled.
Once washed, cut the potato into eight pieces (first in half and then the half in quarters). Place them on the baking tray with the garlic cloves drizzled with some olive oil. Leave the garlic cloves with the skin on. As a result, they won’t get burned and once they are roasted, you will easily squeeze them out of the skin. Put the tray in the oven on the middle rack. Bake for 20 minutes or until the potato starts getting a golden colour.
In the meantime, cut the pears lengthwise in half, remove the stem and the core. The Williams pears have a very soft flesh. Therefore you can simply use a teaspoon to remove the core. Slice each half into three or four wedges. Furthermore, chop the spring onion crosswise into 1-2 cm pieces (discard the root ends) and slice the bacon into 1-2 cm strips.
Once you have everything chopped, sliced and prepared, take the tray out of the oven, flip the potatoes over and add all the remaining ingredients (pear wedges, chopped spring onion, bacon strips and pimientos de padrón) to the tray. There is no need to clean or cut the pimientos. They are great just like that. Put the tray back in the oven for 15 minutes.
When the bacon gets crispy and the padrón peppers get the brownish colour, the food is ready. Take the tray out of the oven and sprinkle over some salt and pepper. I like to add the salt at the end, especially the coarse salt. Due to its large grain, it gives that extra nice crunch.
Finally, serve the oven-baked potato and pear with some sour cream or Greek yoghurt dip mixed with some black or pink pepper.
Enjoy!
