A Different Take on a Thanksgiving Mainstay

What happens when you combine...

Some Cranberries...

Some Sugar...

A Stick of Cinnamon and a Vanilla Bean?

You Get Sugared Cranberries

I first had these when I went to a delegate meeting the week of Thanksgiving.  I didn't try them at first because I thought they looked like frozen grapes - but strange grapes.  Then a lady walked up and said, "Oh these cranberries are delicious" and I said, "What?", and she said, "Sugared cranberries."  So I tried them and was very impressed.  Never thought I would enjoy a fresh cranberry.  So when I got home I looked up a few recipes, found one I liked, and what do you know - I impressed my friends.

Sugared Cranberries

2 cups sugar

2 cups water

1 bag of fresh cranberries

1 stick of cinnamon

1 vanilla bean

sugar for coating

Make sugar syrup with sugar and water, add cinnamon stick and vanilla bean as sugar is getting close to completely dissolving.  Once sugar completely dissolved remove from heat and stir in cranberries.  Weight down with plate to keep cranberries submerged and refrigerate overnight.  

In the morning drain cranberries (can keep sugar syrup to put in tea to sweeten)  and take small batches and toss in sugar to coat.  Allow to sit out and dry for a couple of hours.   Enjoy.

Necklaces and Taco Soup

As usual I spent the Thursday before Thanksgiving with my mom at a local fundraiser for a children's camp.  I helped ladies make a weathered garden post.  The posts came from my parent's back porch at the home where I grew up.

                                           

This year my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Marvin came, as well as my cousin Duane and his wife Becky, to enjoy the day at camp as well as spend time with mom and dad for the weekend.

As usual Thursday evening rolled around and I was expecting company for supper and had no idea what I was going to make and it was already 4 pm and I was busy making jewelry with my mom, Elsie, and Becky.  Elsie saved the day by suggesting I make taco soup.  I served it with homemade bread, applesauce, carrots, and brownies and ice cream for dessert.  There were no complaints.

Taco Soup

The fixings : corn chips, lettuce, sour cream, salsa, and cheese. 

All put together.

Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day, one day past the 2 week keep
in the fridge time period.   Don't worry, it still tasted fine.

Finished it off with Lowfat Fudgy Brownies, made with my special
mandarin orange olive oil I picked up when I was in California.

Ice Cream good till the last bite and then some.

Taco Soup
1 lb hamburger
1 onion chopped

1 can corn (I used frozen corn from my freezer)

1 can kidney beans

1 can black beans

1 can stewed tomatoes

1 pkg hidden valley ranch

1 pkg taco seasoning

(I also added a couple shakes of Penzy's chili 3000 spice, mostly because I only had a partial pkg of hidden valley ranch)

Brown the hamburger and onion until cooked, add rest of ingredients and simmer.  Serve with the following items.

Shredded cheese

Sour cream 

Salsa

Lettuce

Tortilla chips

Lowfat Fudgy Orange Brownies

3/4 cup flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

4 1/2 Tbsp mandarin orange olive oil

1/2 cup + 1 Tbsp cocoa

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

Mix oil and cocoa together, stir until mixed, add sugars and stir until mixture looks like very dark brown sugar.  Add eggs and vanilla.  Stir briskly until smooth.  Mix flour and baking powder in separate bowl and then add to sugar mixture.  Stir until combined and smooth.  Spread evenly into 8x8 baking dish lined with parchment paper.  Bake 15-18 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool on rack in pan.  Cut when cool.

Here are a couple pictures of the jewelry we made.

           

                  

Saturday Night Football

Saturday night a few of us got together for some good eats and conversation over football (OSU vs Penn State; conflict of interest alma mater vs. first love) and iPad trivia. I think Tinbugs may have added something like 10 new apps to her iPad. (You know you've always wanted to give hot pink highlights to Santa.). While the results of the football game were... slightly disappointing, the company was excellent and the food turned out awesome.

First up the cheese and cracker tray with its 5 kinds of cheese with 3 kinds of crackers and an Italian focaccia cut up for dipping in olive oil and balsamic vinegar:

The Viking getting ready to chow down.

Cheese Plate--
Lemon White Stilton
Blueberry White Stilton
Guggisberg Swiss
Brie
Flax Cheese

Rice Crackers
Multigrain Crackers
Plain Cracker

Olive Oil Dip

The Olive Oil Dip-- Both ingredients for this were special delivery from parts out west--the balsamic vinegar was from Prescott, Arizona and the olive oil was Olivas de Oro from California









A bit of Cheese Trivia:

*Flax cheese doesn't really have flax in it. It was served at the Flax Festival.
*White Stilton can give you some hyper vivid dreams if you eat it too close to bedtime.
*If White Stilton were made in Stilton (the town for which it was named) instead of in the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottingshashire, it could not be called a Stilton cheese. Stilton is now in the wrong county- Cambridgshire.

Next we set about making Gyoza and Nori Rolls. Here is a plate full of plump gyoza waiting to be fried and steamed.  

And here are the Nori rolls cooked and sliced and waiting to be lifted with chopsticks and dipped in the sweet chili sauce by happy eaters.










 And to round out our meal with a bit of something more vegetable like, we had a very tasty Artichoke Olive Salad.

Many thanks to ViolinFingers and The Viking for having us over for a wonderful evening. I only wish I lived closer so we could get together more often.

Artichoke Olive Salad courtesy of ViolinFingers

1 can artichokes
1 can whole black olives
sliced cubes Feta cheese
cherry tomatoes, halved

Mix all together and toss with  Italian Salad Dressing or a mix of olive oil and vinegar.









Filling for Nori Rolls and Gyoza (based on Bon Appetit's Crunchy Beef Nori Rolls recipe):

3 caps Shittake mushrooms, diced
1/2 shallot, diced
1 lb. ground beef
3 c shredded carrots
3/4 tsp fresh ginger, grated
1 egg, beaten

Fry diced mushrooms and shallot together in butter until cooked through, then mix with the other  (raw) ingredients. Use as directed in your recipe of choice.  Quantity was sufficient for filling 5 eight inch nori rolls and 25 to 30 gyoza wrappers.

For dipping sauces we used sweet chili sauce,  soy sauce with rice vinegar, and faux soy sauce with white vinegar.

Weekend Fun

A few weekends ago, the three of us were able to spend a "siblings weekend" together  at a local state park where one of us (read Tinbugs) was participating in a mini triathlon for breast cancer research, part of the girls tri too series.  We had a great time, and even had time to do a little bit of cooking.

We started out the weekend by seeing a beautiful sunset out across the lake, and ended with a breakfast pizza as we rushed to get out of the cabin and back on the road by checkout time. In between we hiked (a smidge), waded in the water...ignoring the pigeons, plotted the opening scene of our future Murder Mystery Supper, checked out a garage sale, ate ice cream and fried cheese at Young's Dairy, painted, watched movies on cable tv, painted water lilies, alliums (purple puff ball flowers), and Lake Atitlan, cheered on Tinbugs, and in between had a lot of good conversation.

A few snaps from the race, which consisted of  250 meter swim, 7 mile bike ride, and 2 mile run:

Waiting on the beach... almost time.

1 part down, 2 to go

A proud member of the Tinbugs Fan Club walking to get a better view of the running section of the race.

Almost to the finish line... just a quarter mile to go.










Booyah!!! That race was so rocked.

And, since I probably should say something about cooking, our "big" recipe of the weekend? An Autumn Tart from a Polish blog we stumbled across on FoodGawker.

http://anyzkowo.blogspot.com/2012/08/tarta-z-cukinia-i-bakazanem.html

The start....

           Ready for the oven....

                         Ready for some eating.....

 If you are looking for something light and beautiful, and have a bit of time on your hands, consider making this tart. It was very good and beautiful, but took a bit of time to slice all the veggies. Maybe because we used a peeler to get the thin slices?  In our version we exchanged the eggplant for summer squash and baked it in a rectangular roasting drip pan, as that was what we could find in the cabin cupboard.

The Painters

The Paintings

Homemade Ketchup

 Tomato time! Late summer always brings so many memories of previous harvests with all the vegetables popping with flavor and produce waiting in pecks and bushels and crates to be frozen and canned.  Mostly I remember coming home from school to tomatoes on the stove top, steaming and simmering their way into the tomato sauce we would enjoy the rest of the year, or sitting down at Grandma Weaver's dinner table to a bowl of her canned cherries or peaches.  Summer flavors stretched round to all the rest of the year.     

This year Mom was nice enough to show me the process of canning with a water bath.  We kicked off our weekend of canning by making ketchup.  When I told my Grandma that Mom and I were thinking of making ketchup and tomato sauce this weekend, she told me about the old days of simmering and canning.  When they used to make ketchup, she and her sisters would build a wood fire in the wash house and spend all day stirring the tomatoes in a big copper kettle hung over the fire as they slowly boiled down into ketchup. Her verdict on that ketchup? "Oh, that ketchup was sooo good."  After hearing about all that hard work, flipping the switch on the crock pot for my own ketchup's twelve hours of simmering felt completely decadent and lazy.

For this ketchup we looked up several different recipes online then went with a simpler combination version of those.  On the cinnamon, you may want to add a bit more than we did, depending on the type of cinnamon you are using. We ground up a few small pieces of Penzey's Cassia Chunks Cinnamon, which is quite potent, and we didn't need to use very much at all.

Homemade Ketchup

10 lb. tomatoes, quartered and trimmed

2 onions

1 head garlic, top trimmed off

Place the tomatoes and onions in (un-reactive) pans and roast at 400 degrees for 20 to 30 minutes.

Pour the tomatoes into a colander to drain off the extra liquid (we ended up with about 3 cups of liquid).  Then run the tomatoes, onions and garlic through the food processor to puree them.

Once the veggies have been pureed, mix them into the crock pot with 

1 c white vinegar

1 c apple cider vinegar

1/2 c white sugar

1/2 c dark brown sugar

2 tsp salt

2 tsp black pepper 

1/8 tsp cinnamon, ground cassia chunks 

Cover, and simmer on high for 1 hour. After 1 hour, remove the lid and cover with a splatter guard.  After another 1-2 hours, turn down to low and simmer for another 8-12 hours.

Using the splatter guard allows the excess water to boil off.

Once the ketchup is the desired consistency and taste, transfer the ketchup to glass jars for processing.  Here is a half pint jar of our new tasty ketchup waiting for its turn in the hot water bath.

My verdict on our ketchup? Yum.

Addendum: Having now used the ketchup for a few weeks, I am not as certain about the recipe as I was initially.  I tend to be someone who adds ketchup to many different foods, and this is not a ketchup you can use as liberally as Heinz 57. The flavor profile for the bottle I am using seems to keep changing, and not necessarily in a positive direction. The vinegar taste is becoming a little stronger, and the garlic flavor is now a bit weaker, as is the overall seasoning.   Will need to do some tweaks next time I make this.  Perhaps more garlic, a few more spices, maybe use a different type of cinnamon... Will add more notes once I work my way into a second bottle.