A Winner and Thanksgiving Pregame

We have a winner of the eBook Hitchhiking to Heaven Prizewinning Recipes 2010! But once again, alas, I have no way to contact this fine person. Will Mary Ann please step forward to claim this prize? She mentioned an amazing preserve called Fire and Ice Jelly that I wanted to contact her about even before I randomly generated her as the winner. That just sounded stellar to me. Please do check back to the comments on the giveaway; I asked people to discuss their favorite jams. There are some mouth-watering responses there! Thank you to everyone who participated!

So, onward ho! Being that this post is about the winner of Shae's eBook, I figured I'd talk about a special jam discovery that involves Shae and her passion for fruit. She spends some time up in Alaska (beautiful post on that here) and while she was there this summer she picked loads of lingonberries, also known as low-bush cranberries. Being the superlative person she is, she sent me a ziploc bag of them. Now do you know anyone who would do that for you? I was so happy! I made some jam of it that was, to be honest, nothing to write home about. It was delish but set a bit firm. My fault, not knowing the lingonberry well enough to be finely attuned to it's quick jelling characteristics. I did, however, hoarder that I am, stow a small bag of them in my freezer. I took a small bit out the other day to make some jelly, which calls for cooking the berries to extract the juice for the jelly, leaving the pulp.

Long story longer, I was making turkey drumsticks to get ready for Thanksgiving. You have to have a bit of turkey before it all comes down, don't you agree? So, while I had this turkey burnishing and some squash roasting, I realized I needed some cranberry sauce. That pulp would be perfect, I thought. But how to dress it up? I went down into my vaults and saw that I had some clementine marmalade left from last winter (which is initially how I met Shae, by the way). I dumped the marmalade into the pulp and made the most gorgeous lingonberry-clementine sauce I've ever had. Truly. It is incroyable!

My point being that if you add a jar of marmalade to some cooked cranberries, you may find a wonderful new friend to invite to your Thanksgiving Day dinner! And yet another way to use up those jars you've been collecting all year.

Red Peppers

At our local super farm market (Adam's Fairacre Farms) they have a section with produce marked with low prices for quick sale. Sometimes it's packed with great deals, like bags of red peppers for 99 cents. (Digression: my keyboard doesn't seem to have a cent symbol. Is that how the way of the world is going?) So, along with the bag of apples and pears, and ripe bananas, broccoli rabe, and zucchini (which I don't even care for), I took home two bags full of those peppers. Only problem is, I've got to prepare everything. I chopped all the zucchini and froze it for bread at a later date. The broccoli rabe was also frozen for throwing into a nice soup one day. The peppers I roasted on the grill and prepared two ways: one, on the right, is just with garlic and olive oil to keep in the fridge for bread and cheese, or sandwiches, the other, on the left, is a romesco sauce I, no exaggeration, threw together. As I have mentioned, I'm not too keen on recipes and feel my way through things. I liked it just fine. Froze half and kept the rest in the fridge for a quick meal. I was tired and on the tail end of a cold, so here is what I remember:

Romesco Sauce (Sorta)

Filled the food processor half way with roasted red peppers.

Sauteed up two ripe tomatoes with a handful of garlice in some olive oil, then in the processor with the peppers.

A handful of walnuts (almonds or hazelnuts are proper, but all I had was walnuts).

Some nice, cheesy bread crumbs I had in the fridge (made from a batch of croutons gone awry).

Whizzed it up, while pouring a goodly amount (3/4 cup?) of olive oil in;

then a 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar (maybe less?) to finish it off. Salt and pepper, too.

Now I gotta slog through the banana bread I have on deck, and apple and pear sauce...I can't imagine what life must have been like, back in the day, when folks depended on their harvest for their livelihood. A man I was buying used canning jars from said that his mother often said that the worst thing to see in the kitchen was a large basket of vegetables that had to be preserved right away. My word.