The whole house smells of Christmas and mulled wine – sweet, spicy and aromatic. We’re trying to make each of our quinces count as we harvested ten and after sending a couple to a friend, we were left with two for stewing with our apples and six for poaching. There will be none for jelly as we made tonnes of crab apple jelly in October and still have one pot of quince jelly left over from last year. I’ve also been trying to avoid using excess sugar, so I’ve created the syrup in this recipe with just a tablespoon of honey.

Can’t beat local honey for flavour and low food miles

In its first year in the side garden, the quince (Meeches Prolific) was covered in delicate pink blossom. I’m a soft touch with fruit – rather than removing all the fruitlets as probably would have been advisable, I left eleven on the tree. So I’m expecting to have no fruit next year and I’m stocking up on quincely pleasures while I can.

Quinces and apples from the garden

Ingredients

3 quinces

1 cup of water

1 tbsp honey

1 cinnamon stick

1 clove

1 tbsp lemon juice

Quinces ready for poaching

Method

Peel, core and quarter the quinces (take care as the flesh is hard to cut). Place the quinces in the casserole dish with all the other ingredients.

Put the lid on the casserole dish and place in the oven at 160c for 1.5 hours until the quinces are soft.

Serve topped with yoghurt and a drizzle of runny honey.

The yellow flesh turns the most beautiful light pink – we served the quinces with our homemade natural yoghurt and local Hertfordshire honey