Tag: fruit

Fig and Peach Jam

Spoon cradles delicious fig and peach jam
Small-batch fig and peach jam is the perfect way to make the best of sub-optimal end-of-season fruit

Summer is coming to a close, thank everything that is sacred, and I have learned a poignant lesson: Peach season is over before farmer’s market vendors say it’s over.

Sure, you might get a juicy, sweet peach at the end of August, but you’re more likely to bite into a mouthful of mealy fruit than not.

BUT FRET NOT. Raid your neighbor’s fig tree (or come down in the morning to a bin full of them on the front step, delivered by the neighbor himself), and get ready to make the most delicious, small-batch fig and peach jam. It’s fast and easy and brings out the succulent peachy goodness that’s hiding behind that mealy texture.

Fig and Peach Jam
This makes about four half-pints of jam, with a little leftover to eat immediately over ice cream or spread on toast with goat cheese.

Ingredients

2 cups of peaches, peeled, pitted, and chopped*

2 cups figs, chopped

2 cups sugar

2-4 tablespoons lemon juice

½ teaspoon salt

¼ to ½ teaspoon almond extract

Method

If you plan on water bath processing your jam, prepare your jars first. Wash jars and lids in warm, soapy water while you bring a stockpot of water to boil on the stove. Boil clean jars for two minutes, then move to a clean dish towel. Dip lids, ladles, and anything else you will use in the canning process into the boiling water and set aside.

Put a clean plate in the freezer to test the fig and peach jam for doneness. This will become clear soon.

Place figs, peaches, sugar, lemon juice, and salt in a large (at least 4-quart) pot. Leave lots of headspace for the jam to foam. Bring to a boil.

Play something nice on the radio or load up a podcast. Lower the heat to medium-low, and stir as the jam boils/simmers. Stir the foam down as it rises.

Boil for 15 minutes, then get out a masher or an immersion blender. Use either tool to mash some of the fruit or all of it if you like. I prefer some texture in my jam. Return the jam to a boil.

To see if your jam is ready, remove the frozen plate from the freezer and spoon some jam onto it. Let cool for a few minutes, then drag a finger through the jam. If it makes a path that does not get filled immediately by liquid-y jam, it’s ready. If the path fills in quickly, keep boiling and stirring. Wash the plate, dry it completely, and put it back in the freezer. Test after another ten minutes until the path your finger makes stays clear.

When it’s ready, remove the jam from the heat and stir in almond extract. You could skip this, but I would not recommend it. The almond adds a depth of flavor that really comes through in the final jam.

Ladle fig and peach jam into prepared jars, leaving ¼” headspace. If you are not planning on water bath processing, set aside and let cool at room temperature without moving overnight, then move to the ‘fridge or freezer.

To water bath can, heat a large stockpot of water to boiling. Carefully lower the jars of jam into the boiling water (make sure the water is at least an inch above the jars). Boil for five minutes, then remove to cool on the counter overnight. Listen for the lid to “pop,” indicating a seal. This might take a full 24 hours. If the lids don’t pop, you could either remove the lid, add a new one, and reprocess, or you can place it in the freezer or ‘fridge.

Unprocessed fig and peach jam is good in the fridge for a few weeks; canned jam with a proper seal lasts for years.

*Note: I used slightly more than two cups of peaches, and nearly exactly two cups of figs, as that is the fruit I had. You could change the ratio and add more figs than peaches if you like.

We Could All Use Some Sweetness: Vegan (Sugar-free) Mixed Berry Tart

Glossy, delicious, vegan, and sugar-free (with no artificial sugar, either). Truth.

Friends, if you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know that the above headline for this recipe is an anomaly here.

I am a HUGE FAN of sugar. I like it in all of its forms.

I like it in the form of a big piece of cake, balanced on my chest as I lie in the bed and watch TV.

I like it in the form of empty wrappers of Dove dark chocolates, the ones that I used to hand out at the end of my yin classes at Yoga Tree.

I love drippy ice cream cones, cheesecake, caramel apples, scones, muffins, pies.

Watermelon and fresh peaches.

I. Love. Sugar. ALL OF IT.

So imagine my surprise as I find myself in week three of a seasonal Renewal with my good friend Martha at Full Moon Acupuncture with nary a fine grain of sugar anywhere.

THREE WEEKS. I have not had sugar for THREE WEEKS. I haven’t cheated (which I think is stupid language to begin with. “Cheat days” and “cheating” are, in general, ridiculous constructs when it comes to food, and I do not in any way, shape, or form condone the use of them. I use it here to indicate that I have, against all odds, stuck with the program and eliminated all processed foods, including sugars in all forms, for a period that will last four weeks-ish. But I digress.)

Thankfully, and speaking of Weeks, my particular friend KWeeks had a birthday October 1st, and it is traditional for the birthday people in my life to get the dinner and the dessert of their choice on their day. KWeeks has simple taste, so dinner was (for him) French lentils over cornbread and topped with a fried egg.

TRUST ME. This is rustic and delicious. But I couldn’t eat it. See referenced Renewal above. And it’s hard to not share a meal on the birthday of someone you love.

He doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I thought perhaps I could make something sweet that we could both eat.

Enter the vegan, sugar-free mixed berry tart.

Apple syrup made from 100% cold-pressed apple cider provides the sweet, and the gluten-free crust is six simple ingredients: walnuts, almonds, oats, salt, coconut oil, and apple syrup. Technically the oats are not allowed in the Renewal (no grains), but everything else is so damn good for you it doesn’t seem to matter.

It’s pretty, and it’s festive, and it gets real close to satisfying my (still) voracious appetite for sugar.

Vegan (Sugar-free) Mixed Berry Tart

KWeeks and I ate about half of this on his birthday and then shared the rest with his vegan co-workers at The Friends School of Baltimore. They have not been the beneficiaries of my baking, ever, and I am glad to finally be able to have something to share with them.

Ingredients

80 grams almonds (about 2/3 cup)

80 grams walnuts (about 2/3 cup)

70 grams oats (you guessed it: about 2/3 cup)

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons coconut oil

1/4 cup + 3 tablespoons apple syrup (divided)

1/2 cup lemon juice/water combo

1/2 teaspoon agar

3 cups chopped fruit of your choice (see Recipe Notes)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Preheat oven to 350. Use cooking spray to grease a 9″ tart pan with removable bottom (you can use butter if you don’t want to keep it vegan) and set aside.

Place almonds, walnuts, oats, and salt in a food processor, and pulse to chop fine.

Add coconut oil and 3 tablespoons of your apple syrup and pulse until the mixture begins to come together. Dump into your tart pan and press into an even layer along the bottom and the sides.

Bake until brown and the bottom is firm (between 15 and 20 minutes). If the edges of the crust begin to burn, pull the tart out of the oven and place aluminum foil strips over the edges, then replace and finish. Remove to a wire rack and cool completely while you make the filling (the ‘fridge is great for a quick chill).

To make the filling, place 1/4 cup apple syrup and the 1/2 cup of lemon juice/water combo in a saucepan with the agar. Whisk to combine, and bring just to a boil.

Add the fruit and stir. Warm the fruit (especially if it’s frozen), then add to the chilled tart crust. Place back in the ‘fridge and allow to chill for at least three hours.

Serve with vegan whipped cream, or ice cream, or plain for breakfast. Just as you like.

Recipe Notes

Apple syrup is a delicious way to add sweetness to desserts (or yogurt or granola or whatever) without adding sugar. Well, ok, technically it’s fruit sugar, which the body does still recognize as sugar, but it’s not processed to within an inch of its life. Essentially, you are taking pure apple cider (NOT juice) and boiling it down until it reduces by half. I make this in two-cup batches, so I start with four cups of apple cider. Bring to a medium boil (not a simmer, but not too rolling either). Boil until the cider is reduced by half. If you want it to be even sweeter, keep going and reduce it even more.

Any fruit works here, fresh or frozen. I have used fresh and frozen blueberries, cherries, and nectarines in my tests, and they have all been delicious. You can also switch up the extracts if you like and use an almond extract, but use just 1/4 teaspoon if you do that.

Summertime In A Jar: Blackberry Jam

Blackberry jam. Pure goodness. A rare and precious thing.

One of the most poignant and bittersweet memories in my childhood is of steaming vats of water in an already-steamy, un-airconditioned rustic kitchen, used first to slip tomatoes of their paper-thin skins and then to boil Ball jars filled with said tomatoes, chopped, until the satisfying “pop” of a vacuum jar meant they were safe to store. These bright red jewels (and others, like blackberry jam, and strawberry, too) lined the shelves of the stone steps that led to a dirt basement under the kitchen and ensured a winter’s worth of sauce and a fresh burst of summer flavor on even the bleakest days.

I was a reluctant helper. It seems the sauce always popped when I passed by, burning my skin, or the tomatoes were stubborn in their skins. Mostly I passed through the kitchen as quickly as possible, fleeing to books or shady spots on our wooded property, ever-mindful of snakes.

These days I understand better the value of those jewel-toned jars.

They represent plenty, excess even, so much abundance that it must be stored away. They guard against want on short days with not much sun and preserve a summer’s effort so that you can slide into those lazy days when there is two feet of snow on the ground outside the window.

Blackberry jam is one of the first products of early summer, ready before tomatoes bent the shoulder-high tomato plants under their weight. Gathered carefully, ever mindful of snakes that enjoyed resting on their ample leaves, blackberries turned into sweet-tart blackberry jam are one of life’s best pleasures.

My lovely friend Martha of Full Moon Acupuncture has happy blackberry vines in her Baltimore backyard and is generous with them This blackberry jam is made with only three ingredients: blackberries, sugar, and lemon juice. Because blackberries are naturally high in pectin, it is not necessary in this recipe for low-sugar blackberry jam.

The formula for blackberry jam is simple if you want a stereotypical batch: weigh your blackberries and use an equal amount of sugar. For me, this results in sickly-sweet jam that tastes more of sugar than sunshine-y blackberries. For this recipe, I weighed my berries and used half that amount of sugar. You could use even less for a low- or no-sugar blackberry jam, but that would take longer on the stove.

Low-Sugar Blackberry Jam

(makes five half pints, plus a little leftover)

Weighing your blackberries is the best option here, as cup measurements are challenging. I use half as much sugar as blackberries – it’s a good formula for a juicy, blackberry-forward, low-sugar blackberry jam.

Ingredients

Just over six cups of blackberries, by weight (50 ounces)

Just under 3 cups of sugar, by weight (20 ounces)

Two tablespoons lemon juice

Method

If you are planning on water bath processing your jam, get your jars ready first. Wash jars and lids in warm, soapy water while you bring a stockpot of water to boil on the stove. Boil clean jars for two minutes, then move to a clean dish towel. Dip lids, ladles, and anything else you will use in the canning process into the boiling water and set aside.

Put a clean plate in the freezer to test the blackberry jam for doneness. This will become clear soon.

Place blackberries, sugar, and lemon juice in another large pot (leave lots of headspace for the jam to foam). Mash slightly and bring to a boil.

Play something nice on the radio, or load up a podcast. Lower heat to medium low, and stir as the jam boils/simmers. Stir the foam down as it rises.

Over time, your jam will stop foaming, become glossy, and thicken substantially. This could take between 20 to 30 minutes. Be patient. Be attentive. Take this as an opportunity to be mindful.

To see if your jam is ready, remove the frozen plate from the freezer and spoon a bit of jam onto it. Let cool for a couple minutes, then drag a finger through the jam. If it makes a path that does not get filled immediately by liquid-y jam, it’s ready to can.

If the path fills in with blackberry jam, keep boiling and stirring. Wash the plate, dry completely, and put it back in the freezer. Test after another ten minutes until the path your finger makes stays clear.

Ladle blackberry jam into prepared jars, leaving ¼” headspace. If you are not planning on water bath processing, set aside and let cool at room temperature without moving overnight, then move to the ‘fridge or freezer.

To water bath can, heat a large stockpot of water to boiling. Carefully lower the jars of blackberry jam into the boiling water (make sure the water is at least an inch above the jars). Boil for five minutes, then remove to cool on the counter overnight. Listen for the lid to “pop,” indicating a seal. This might take a full 24 hours. If the lids don’t pop, you could either remove the lid, add a new one, and reprocess, or you can place in the freezer or ‘fridge.

Blackberry jam is good in the ‘fridge for a couple weeks (maybe more, depending on how much sugar you used), and correctly processed for years.

Recipe Notes

You could make a sugar-free blackberry jam with sweet berries and lots of time, too. Keep the lemon juice to brighten up your berry flavor.

For a blackberry jam recipe with pectin, follow the directions on the pectin package for best results.

If you prefer a seedless jam, strain the jam after it thickens and before pouring into jars. This is a bit of an arduous task but results in a silky-smooth jam.

Go even further and add a tablespoon of fresh lavender to the jam and let it cool slightly before straining again and processing as desired.

Cold Candied Oranges

Glazed orange with strips of peel removed sits in a shallow crystal bowl on a blue background
Sunshine in the rain, friends. Sunshine in the rain.

Yesterday was SHITTY.

It doesn’t really matter which day “yesterday” actually was because, let’s face it, no one really knows what day it is, and if they say they do they are a bald-faced liar.

But yesterday. Woke up with another headache, many weeks straight, anxiety, overall fogginess in my whole body and brain. I was glutened accidentally a couple of days ago, and this accounts for some of it, but I think the general medical term for what I am experiencing is malaise.

I, and many all around the globe, are suffering from malaise: a general feeling of unwellness or discomfort whose cause is not possible to identify.

Yesterday seemed to be the culmination of a long-building malaise. The simplest of tasks were challenging, like swimming through pudding.

I have no solutions. I have no quick fixes. I did the long walk, I taught the yoga class, I hydrated like a motherfucker. I ate well. I took meds – prescription and CBD and allergy meds.

Today?

Today I feel a little better.

I am not going to say that these oranges were the thing that helped, but they certainly did not hurt. Long-time readers of this blog will recall my uneasy truce with citrus (my grandmother is now 101), but I actually went out and bought oranges on purpose for this use.

Correction: I bought them online, and Octavius from Giant on 41st, as wonderful a person as ever walked the earth, put them in my car.

This is not my recipe, these cold, candied oranges. This recipe belongs to The New York Times. Because they sometimes have an annoying paywall, I am going to go ahead and write things out here (copy/paste, actually). I cut the recipe in half because I cannot eat six of these, and even still I will give two away.

But my goodness. The orange, encased in a festively striped peel with the stained glass orange flesh peeking through, becomes plasma inside – not liquid, not solid. The peel keeps a satisfying chew, but the orange itself becomes Something Other, rising above its pedestrian squirty self. The flavor stays true to the orange, and once you’re done eating the orange itself, you’re left with a delicious orange simple syrup for the best old-fashioned you may ever drink.

Get at it. Can’t hurt.

Cold Candied Oranges

Ingredients

6 firm, juicy, seedless oranges with thin skins (Cara Cara oranges), no bigger than a baseball
6 cups granulated sugar

Preparation

  1. Bring a stainless-steel pot of water to a boil. (It should be large enough to hold the oranges submerged.)
  2. Wash and dry the oranges, and channel from stem to navel at 1/2-inch intervals, removing strips of peel while leaving the pith intact, until the oranges resemble those onion domes on Russian churches. (Suzannah’s note: I had no idea what a channeler was, but I actually had one in the drawer in my kitchen. I don’t know that you could substitute any other tool, but I suppose you could try).
  3. Place the oranges and their long, fat threads of channeled peel into the boiling water, and reduce to a simmer. Cover the oranges with a lid one size too small for the pot, to keep them submerged. Let them blanch for about 25 minutes to remove the harshest edge of their bitter nature. They should swell and soften but not collapse or split. (Suzannah’s note: SIMMER. Not rolling boil. They will split)
  4. Remove the oranges and zest from the simmering water with a slotted spoon, and set aside. Dump out the blanching water, and return the dry pot to the stove.
  5. In that same pot, combine the sugar with 6 cups water; bring the sugar water to a boil over medium-high, stirring until the sugar has dissolved, then allow to gently boil, and reduce for 10 minutes, uncovered. You want some water to evaporate and for the syrup to take on a little body.
  6. Carefully place blanched oranges and zest into the sugar syrup, and reduce heat to a very slow, lethargic simmer. Cover oranges with a parchment circle cut slightly larger than the circumference of the pot (by 1 inch is enough), then place the too-small lid on top of the parchment on top of the oranges, to keep them fully submerged (and sealed under the parchment) in the sluggishly simmering syrup.
  7. Cook the oranges in the syrup for about 45 minutes, checking on them frequently to keep the temperature quite slow and stable, until they take on a high gloss and appear vaguely translucent and jewel-like. (We have several induction burners that come with features that can hold a temperature, and I leave the oranges at around 170 degrees for most of the candying, sometimes with a little bump up to 180. But without a thermometer or an induction burner, just a visual slow, slow, slow bubble is a good cue.)(Suzannah’s note: I clipped a candy thermometer to the edge of the pot and watched the temp)
  8. Cool oranges and peels in their syrup for a full 24 hours before serving. This kind of “cures” them. They get even better after 48 hours. First, you’ll want to let them cool at room temperature until no longer warm to the touch, at least 4 hours, then refrigerate them until thoroughly chilled. The oranges last refrigerated for 1 month as long as they are submerged in that syrup.
  9. Serve very cold. Eat the whole thing, skin and all, with a knife and fork. It’s like a half glacéed fruit and half fresh fruit — refreshing, tonic, digestive and so great after dinner.

What helps your malaise?

The Choices We Make: Coconut Cherry Ice Cream With Toasted Almonds

Three dark red cherries top pink ice cream in a clear glass bowl sitting on a wooden board.
Couldn’t let summer pass without an ice cream recipe.

I was going to write this big long post on home, but what I really want to share with you this month is an easy, delicious ice cream recipe and a video from Willie Nelson’s newest album that makes me cry when I see it.

First, the video.

You are a cold soul if this doesn’t smack you in the feels.

My darling child took me to see Willie Nelson at Merriweather Post Pavilion in June as a Mother’s Day present, and good lord did I ever love it. He is slowing down, and he didn’t play as much or sing quite as well, but his is the voice of my childhood, a soft and gravelly and sweet recollection of moments of peace. I like that he is such a lover of horses and actually has a rescued wild herd of his own in Texas.

He opened his set with this video, and it immediately filled me up and made me want to move out west to watch the wild horses run and then maybe buy a little cheap land of my own and rescue all of them myself. And later when I came home and finally calmed down I started to think about how the choices we make in our lives are as much about letting something go as they are about choosing something. So when we decide we are going to be a firefighter we don’t get to be an astronaut.

We have to decide between two things we might most want to do because we are only all of us just humans and not able to split in two.

So I don’t get to go out west and buy land to rescue horses because I have chosen to buy some raw land in Canada and build a camping platform, then a shed, then maybe a little house with a deck that looks out into the thunderous waters of the Bay of Fundy.

Still, and even though I am in love with our little patch of grass, with its baby forest and population of bark-munching porcupines, I feel a deep tug in my heart towards horses, a connection that I have felt since I have known breath. I think it’s their wildness that moves me – the way they are pure instinct and beauty.

Perhaps I will have another life to surrender to that tug of wildness.

But in this life, this current one where my particular friend and I are trapped inside due to heat that is in the 110-degree range, a stifling, suffocating sweat bath of weather that may become what is normal for this time of year, I have made perhaps the most delicious ice cream to date (giving Spicy Sweet Corn and the one with the tamarind caramel a run for their money). It is simple and can easily be dairy-free if you like.

Also, I used an ice cream machine to churn (reluctantly because I hate my ice cream maker, but that’s another story. Currently taking recommendations if you have any.), but you could also just freeze it without churning and thaw slightly before serving. Easy and delicious.

Coconut Cherry Ice Cream With Toasted Almonds

Ingredients

2 cans of full-fat coconut milk (NOT coconut cream)

1/2 can sweetened condensed milk (or 1/2 cup sugar for vegan version)

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups pitted fresh cherries (ish. Don’t get too precious about this amount)

1/2 cup almonds, chopped and toasted

1/2 cup unsweetened coconut

Method

Place all ingredients except for almonds and coconut in a blender and blend until combined.

If you are going to churn with an ice cream maker, follow your manufacturer’s directions, adding the coconut and almonds in the last five minutes of churning.

If you are going to simply freeze, stir in coconut and almonds, and freeze until set. If you prefer, you can leave the coconut and almonds out for a couple of hours, and then stir them in before freezing completely. This will keep them more evenly dispersed in the ice cream (they will sink to the bottom while the ice cream is still liquid).