Cranberry, Plum and Asian Pear Chutney

Last Monday I had some time and decided the pears that had been in the garage for two weeks needed to be used. I also had plums from my brother's tree in my freezer and a big bag of cranberries from Costco. Chutney seemed inevitable. I put it all on to simmer before I went to yoga class. I realized when I got home that it would be great if it weren't so runny. Fortunately, I found a package of pectin in my cupboard.  I used a recipe I found online as a guideline.
 https://www.food.com/recipe/plum-pear-cranberry-chutney-494523
 This is what I ended up doing to make this chutney:

Ingredients
2 pounds fresh cranberries
1 pound 5 ounces plums, chopped
2 pounds asian pears, chopped
1 whole green pepper, chopped
1 chopped serrano, seeds included
1 1/2 cup raisins
4 cups granulated sugar
1 cup crystallized ginger, chopped
3 cups white vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 sticks cinnamon
1 heaping teaspoon whole allspice
1 heaping teaspoon whole cloves
...and later
6 teaspoons calcium water
1/2 cup sugar and
3 tablespoons pectin dissolved in 1/2 c water

   I did not peel the plums or the asian pears. All ingredients went into my enameled cast iron dutch oven and simmered on low for three hours. I even forgot to put the whole spices in a cheesecloth, so that will be a prize to pick out of the finished product.   The kind of pectin I found in my cupboard is activated by calcium, so made the calcium water as directed and added 6 teaspoons of it to my cooked mixture. Then I mixed 3 tablespoons pectin with 1/2 cup sugar and stirred it with 1/2 cup water and added that to the pot. After the whole thing returned to boiling, I let it bubble another minute and started ladling into jars.
   I processed the jars for fifteen minutes. This recipe made 21 jars of various sizes, for a total of about 18 cups of chutney. It is delicious on leftover turkey sandwiches!

Those Thanksgiving Cookies

For the past several years I have not hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my house, so I bring cookies! These are three of my stand-bys and ones that everyone loves. The first two are ones my mother-in-law used to bring to gatherings, and the third I learned from my own mom. They go fast, so make a lot of them.

Walnut Filled Cookies
from Phyllis Kelly
Ingredients
Dough:
   4 cups flour
   2 cups butter
   1 1/2 cups sour cream*
   2 egg yolks
Filling:
   2 cups walnuts, finely chopped
   2 cups sugar
   2 tablespoons cinnamon
   2 egg whites, unbeaten

   Cut the butter into the flour, as for pie crust, until it is like cornmeal. Add the sour cream and egg yolks and mix well. If the dough is very sticky, add a little flour. Divide into 10 balls, wrap in wax paper, and chill overnight.
   Mix sugar cinnamon and nuts. Add egg whites and stir until thoroughly moistened. Cover and store with the dough until ready to assemble.
   Roll one ball of dough at a time into a large circle. Top with 4 heaping tablespoons of the  nut mixture. Use a knife or a pizza cutter to make twelve wedges. Roll as for crescent rolls and bake on a cookie sheet for 30 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
*Use pure sour cream, with no bean gum or carrageenan, for best results. (I use Daisy brand)

Chocolate Toffee Bars
from Phyllis Kelly
Ingredients
2 sticks of butter or margarine
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
6-8 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I use walnuts)

   Cream together butter and sugar. Then beat in the egg and vanilla. Stir together flour and salt and then mix into the butter mixture. Spread the dough into a 13x9x2-inch cake pan. Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and then pull out the pan and sprinkle the chocolate chips on top and bake for 6 more minutes. Remove from oven. Spread the melted chocolate chips over the entire top and then sprinkle with the chopped nuts. Cut into 2-inch squares. (I like to cut these diagonally in one direction, but then you do have odd bits left over.)
Note: I was having trouble with the step of melting the chocolate chips. Sometimes they would melt beautifully and other times not. When it does not work it is very frustrating to spread. So last time I made these I let the dough keep cooking for the full 21 minutes and I melted the chocolate chips in the microwave oven on 50% power for about 90 seconds. Then I spread it over the cooked dough.

Russian Teacakes
from Nina Ownby
Ingredients
1 cup butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup finely chopped nuts (I have used walnuts, pecans, or hazelnuts)

   Cream together butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Blend the salt with the flour and mix into the butter mixture. Stir in the chopped nuts. Chill.
   Roll into 42 balls and bake on cookie sheets at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes. Let cool for about 3 minutes and then roll in powdered sugar and put on a plate to cool completely. Then roll each cookie in powdered sugar again.

Strawberry Rhubarb Freezer Jam

We went strawberry picking last weekend when my parents were visiting, and with six motivated pickers we picked nearly 50 pounds of hoods and shuksans at Sauvie Island Farms! This left us with strawberries coming out our ears, even after making three amazing strawberry pies for Father's Day. What to do, what to do? We washed them all and froze them whole for later use. (My mom was washing them all afternoon, and I finished it up just before midnight.) On Monday, our imperfect produce box arrived with a fat bunch of rhubarb stalks and my brain started  to remember a delicious dessert my husband and I shared at 1891 at Multnomah Athletic Club on our anniversary earlier this year: strawberry rhubarb tart! Here is how I recreated it...

For the jam:
4 cups crushed perfect strawberries
3 cups chopped rhubarb
5 1/4 cups sugar, divided
juice of one lime
2 packages Sure Jell pectin
   (pink box, for less sugar recipes)
1 1/2 cup water

   Stir the crushed strawberries with 3 cups of the sugar in a large bowl. Set aside. Mix all the remaining ingredients together in a medium saucepan and stir, over medium high heat until it comes to a rolling boil. Continue stirring as it boils for at least one minute. (I went for two minutes.) Turn off the stove and stir the hot mixture into the strawberries. Continue stirring for about 3 minutes. Ladle into clean jars. Let stand to set on the counter for twelve hours. Keep one jar in the refrigerator for immediate use. Freeze the rest for later, or to give away!

   We had a lot left in the bowl after filling ten jars (some of ours were tiny). So we made tarts.

For the tarts:
1 package Pepperidge Farm frozen puff pastry
12 heaping tablespoons of jam (about 1 3/4 cups jam)

   Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. We cut the puff pastry along the fold lines, and then cut each strip in half to make twelve rectangles. Eight of them fit easily on my cookie sheet, so we folded up the edges to contain the jam. The other four pieces we stuffed in individual tart pans. In the center of each piece of dough, spoon a heaping tablespoon of jam. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. Remove and cool. Enjoy!

Blackberry Toasted Coconut Pie

I work with a guy, whom I often refer to as Willy Wonka, who makes the most amazing-tasting candies, and they are like nothing you have ever tried before. One day he brought me a beautiful sugar-coated, delicately gelled treasure to taste. It was the size of a double-thick Sacagawea dollar coin and was cream colored on the top and deep purple on the bottom. He said he was working on a line of candies based on pie. This gorgeous thing could be eaten whole, or peeled apart to taste each flavor separately. It was heavenly! He called the flavor blackberry toasted coconut. I felt the gauntlet had been thrown, so I came home that night and made a pie version. Lucky for me, I had picked too many triple crown blackberries last summer for my birthday, so my freezer had them just sitting there waiting!

I used a Pillsbury pie crust, which I had in the refrigerator already. (If you want to make one from scratch, I recommend the one from this blog, January 2010.) Arrange in a 9-inch pie dish and pinch the edges. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the filling:
6 cups fresh blackberries (thaw first, if frozen)
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup minute tapioca
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

For the topping:
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut
two shakes salt
5 Tablespoons butter

Stir together all the ingredients for the filling. Pour into the prepared pie shell, and bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the topping. Put everything, in order, in a food processor and pulse several dozen times until it is well mixed. You could probably do this in a bowl with a hand mixer too. Then dump the whole thing in a bowl and squeeze it repeatedly with your (washed) hands, to make big lumps. Put the bowl in the refrigerator.

When 30 minutes is up, pour all the crumbs onto the pie. Make sure it reaches all the way to the edges. Turn down the oven temperature to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Continue cooking the pie for another 30 minutes.

Remove the pie from the oven and turn off the power or gas. Let the pie cool for an hour before you slice it. If you can find Breyer's Natural Vanilla, your pie will love you for it. Otherwise, pie is forgiving. This pie and that candy still dream of each other on odd Tuesday nights.