The Roasted Pepper Pear Vinaigrette made by A Perfect Pear wasn’t quite what I expected — in a good way.

I expected it to be salad-dressing thin, but instead it was as thick as tomato sauce — maybe thicker. Thicker than what I’d put on a salad, but that makes it even more useful. I could see adding this to a vinegar and oil salad dressing to add flavor and body, or adding it to a creamy salad dressing to add flavor and a really interesting color.

But when I tasted it, I knew it had potential to be much more. Sure, you could use it to dress some greens, but why not dress up some chicken instead?

Years ago, I was quite fond of one of my chicken recipes that used yogurt as a coating for skinless chicken. You mixed the yogurt with a variety of spices and slathered the marinade on the chicken before baking it. The yogurt was thick enough that it clung to the chicken and kept it from drying out (unlike some of the runnier marinades for chicken) while the spices added flavor.

That recipe inspired this dish. But instead of a lot of different spices, I used the vinaigrette to provide all the flavor. It didn’t need anything else, and the color was glorious.

This dish doesn’t take a lot of time to prep, and the cooking is all hands-off — perfect for a day when you don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It would work just as well with any cut of chicken with or without skin or bones – you’d just need to adjust the cooking time. I used chicken breast halves including bone and skin.

Red Pepper-Pear Chicken Recipe

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1/4 cup Roasted Pepper Pear Vinaigrette
• 1/4 cup Greek-style yogurt

Put the vinaigrette and yogurt into a plastic bag and squish the bag to combine the two, then add the chicken. Massage the chicken coat it completely with the yogurt mixture. Refrigerate until you’re ready to cook the chicken. It’s best to let it marinate for a while — a least an hour or up to overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil for easy clean-up. You can use a rack for cooking as well, if you prefer. Place the chicken on the baking sheet. Squeeze the extra sauce out of the bag and spread it on top of the chicken.

Insert a thermometer into the thickest part of the breast, and bake it at 325 degrees until the internal temperature reaches 155 degrees — about 45 minutes for my chicken breasts. When the chicken reaches 155 degrees, remove it from the oven and let it rest 5-10 minutes before cutting into it. The temperature will continue rising during the resting time, and the moisture will redistribute. If you cut into the chicken too early, you’ll lose the moisture and the chicken will be dry.

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Donna Currie is a Colorado-based food writer who operates the blog Cookistry.

In the early 80s, Susan Knapp lived in Lake County, Calif., the “Pear Capital of the World” just above the Napa Valley. The fertile soil combined with Susan’s “city girl” gardening skills left her with an overabundance of zucchini plants. Fortunately, a neighbor at the base of the mountain had a surplus of pears, and the two gardeners began trading their harvests.

Susan “fell in love” with pears, enjoying everything from their taste to their health benefits. This love led Susan to many pear-centered cooking experiments. Before too long Susan had perfected what would become her first product, Cinnamon Pear Jelly.

Susan won prizes at local and state fairs with her Cinnamon Pear Jelly, and it became her signature holiday gift for co-workers and friends. One year, Susan’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at harvest time, and she skipped making the jelly. To her surprise, Susan’s friends took notice when she didn’t offer them any Cinnamon Pear Jelly that holiday season. They were sincerely disappointed—so much so that Susan decided to do some research while her mom was recovering.

That year, Susan went to the Fancy Foods Show to scope out the market competition. “I didn’t find a single product at that time made with pears,” Susan said in a phone interview. She moved quickly and created a company that used pears as the essential focus of every product.

By 2003, Susan’s business had gained enough popularity for her to give up her day job and commit full-time to A Perfect Pear, now based in the Napa Valley. In 2006, A Perfect Pear won the “Best Product Line” award from America’s Best Food Show.

When Susan talks about her favorite fruit and A Perfect Pear’s products, she uses words like beautiful, delicious, fabulous, delicate, and of course, perfect.

When asked about her favorite product, Susan answers with her signature Cinnamon Pear Jelly, quickly adding, “And it’s so beautiful. It’s got a cinnamon stick in the bottle!”

Although Susan’s products have won several prestigious awards, she doesn’t mention them in the interview. Instead she shares this nugget: Cinnamon Pear Jelly is the only jelly her nieces and nephews will take in their peanut butter sandwiches. “They call it a peanut butter and Aunt Sue’s,” she said.

Susan is also proud of the versatility of her products. “Pretty much everything we make, we like to be able to use lots of different ways so it’s not just a salad dressing, not just a jelly,” she said.

Here are a few ways Susan suggested using her Cinnamon Pear Jelly and Roasted Pepper Pear Vinaigrette.

Cinnamon Pear Jelly:

• On thumbprint cookies. Replace your normal filling with the jelly.
• With baked brie en croute. Smother a round of brie in the jelly, wrap in pastry dough, and bake.
• On lamb. “Forget the mint jelly. It’s absolutely fabulous.”

Roasted Pepper Pear Vinaigrette:

• Under your salad. Put the vinaigrette on the bottom of a plate and top with baby arugula, corn, olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, and a “nice big curl of some parmesan cheese.”
• With crab cakes
• As a sandwich spread

“Pears are kind of an underrated fruit,” Susan said. She believes the biggest challenge people have is knowing how to ripen pears and how to use them if they’ve gotten a little mushy.

Susan offered her expertise:

• Bartlett pears should be green when you buy them in the store.
• Let them ripen out on your counter, and keep them away from bananas, which can cause pears to ripen from the inside-out.
• When the pears start turning a bit yellow, plan to eat them within the next couple of days.
• If you let them get too mushy, Susan recommends that you purée them into a pear-applesauce.

Try A Perfect Pear’s unique pear preserves and start making your own desserts and delicacies today!