Cranberry Molasses and a Giveaway: Put 'em Up! Fruit by Sherri Brooks Vinton

Cranberry molasses! Is this a great idea, or what? I absolutely love pomegranate molasses and use it all the time. Mostly drizzled on salads. So vibrant, so tangy! When I saw this recipe in Sherri Brooks Vinton's newest canning book, Put 'em Up! Fruit, I knew I had to try it. Especially since I had some cranberries languishing in the freezer. And it's a little more local than pomegranates for us easterners.

If you are a canner, you've probably read Brooks Vinton's first book, Put 'em Up, which was structured by the fruit or vegetable to preserve. This book moves in a similar way, but focuses on fruit, and for each recipe of a preserve there is a companion recipe to "Use It Up!" There's a chunk of preserving information in the beginning of the book, and then the fruits start alphabetically, with apples, of course, and everything has a color-coded tab at the top of the page, so you can quickly thumb to a section. The book is colorful and easy to dive into, with beautiful pictures by Hudson Valley photographer, Jennifer May.

It's very obvious that Brooks Vinton has been at this for a while, and her enthusiasm for local produce and making eating well accessible to everyone is immediately evident. She's bubbly about cool things like gastriques and making cider vinegar, but still includes stalwart recipes for applesauce and classic jams. This book truly is for beginners and pros alike.

The cranberry molasses that I tried from the book is so simple! Next time I would probably try lowering the sugar because that's my thing these days, and it might help the ability to cook it longer without it jelling. The only thing I'll take Brooks Vinton to task for is not giving you an idea for the left over cranberry pulp. The book is chock full of little tips like this, so I'll let it pass! I used a cup  in some muffins, and I put the rest in a smoothie. I hope to try the molasses with the companion Use It Up! recipe: duck confit salad with cranberry molasses. Could that sound ANY better? No, it can't!

Cranberry Molasses

adapted from Put 'em Up Fruit by Sherri Brooks Vinton

Yield: 2 cups

4 cups of water

1/2 pound of cranberries

2 cups dark brown sugar (I used light brown sugar)

Bring the water and cranberries to a boil, and let them simmer for about 15 minutes, letting the berries pop and soften. Strain the juice through a fine sieve to get all that gelatinous pulp and seeds out. The juice is brilliant red!

Bring the juice (it will be about 2 cups worth) and sugar to a boil in your jam pan. Let it simmer until it coats the back of the spoon. Brooks Vinton recommends 10 to 15 minutes, but I went longer, about 30 neglecting to notice the comment: "the molasses will thicken as it cools." Mine was thick and lovely, but did jell slightly upon cooling. It is so soft though, that a few stirs with a fork turns it back into syrup. You can process this in a boiling water bath for ten minutes, or stash in the fridge for up to three weeks.

 

Please visit the book's webpage where you'll find a trailer, and videos to some of the recipes in the book. There are other chances to win a copy of the book! Some are over already, but some haven't even started yet. Check out this list of folks on the book blog tour:

April 8: Food In Jars

April 9: Punk Domestics

April 10: Autumn Makes & Does

April 11: Local Kitchen

April 12: Mission: Food

April 16: Tigress in a Jam

April 17: Daily Dish Recipes

April 18: Shockingly Delicious

April 19: The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking

April 22: From Scratch Club

Congratulations to the winner: Deborah Rosen. Many thanks to all who entered! There's still time to win at The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking and From Scratch Club!

Thanks to Storey Publishing, I have one copy of Put 'em Up! Fruit to give away. To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment on this post. Comments will close at 11:59 p.m. EST on Friday, April 19, 2013. The winner will be chosen at random and be posted to the blog the next day. With Blogger it seems I can't email commenters directly (your email address remains anonymous to everyone, even me), so if you are not linked to a blog please leave a way for me to reach you, or check back to see if you won. And my sincere apologies, but only U.S. residents are eligible.

Disclosure: I was provided a copy of Put ‘em Up! Fruit free for the purposes of review and participation in the blog tour. One copy will be provided to the giveaway winner, courtesy of Storey Publishing. I received no monetary compensation and all opinions are my own.

Paradise Jelly

This month's Tigress' Can Jam is the second to last month of the year-long jam! Cosmic Cowgirl (also of Confituras fame) gave us the pick of pomes, that is, apples, pears and quinces. Phew! What would the jam be without those guys? And, being both a quince and jelly fanatic, I decided to do a quince jelly. But not just any quince jelly. This is Paradise Jelly, my friends. I've been eyeballing this recipe that I've adapted from the Joy of Cooking for a while now.

Clockwise from top right: crabapple, lingonberry, quince.

It's an old school recipe that combines apples, quinces and cranberries. I used crabapples, quinces and lingonberries, otherwise known as low-bush cranberries—a wild Alaskan gift from the ever-generous Shae of Hitchhiking to Heaven. It's the most beautiful jelly I've ever made, as all three fruit add to the rosy hue, and the name is certainly fitting.

The married juices with some crabapples in the background.

Paradise Jelly

adapted from The Joy of Cooking

makes 4 to 5 half-pint jars

The basic method is to extract the juice from all the fruits separately, because they have such different cooking times.

3 pounds of crabapples

3 cups of water

Cut the crabapples in half, removing the blossom end and stems. Combine with water and bring to a boil, simmering gently for about thirty minutes. Strain. Reserve juice.*

1 1/2 pounds quinces

3 1/2 cups water

Cut the quinces coarsely in chunks. Add water and bring to a boil, simmer for about thirty minutes. The longer you cook them the more pink they will get. Don't use a high heat. Strain. Reserve juice.*

8 ounces of lingonberries (or cranberries)

3/4 cup of water

Bring to a boil, strain and reserve juice.**

*My next post will be about incorporating the pulp of these fruits into a great preserve. Food mill them and stash them in the fridge.

** See this post on what to do with this fruit pulp.

Combine all the juices. You will have about five cups of liquid. Measure four cups of juice, and add three cups of sugar. I froze the last cup for addition into a jam or jelly. It is high in pectin—all three fruits are pectin rich—and will serve well as a pectin stock.

Now proceed as with any jelly. Bring to a boil, and continue at high heat until the jelling point is reached. This is 22o degrees using a candy thermometer. You want to be familiar with the jelling stages though, as the temperature is never a sure indicator of a gel. Jelly is temperamental, but not entirely mysterious. Trying an apple jelly first to see what will happen is always a good starting point. It won't set you back financially, or emotionally!

You should have your jars boiling away in the water bath. Jelly making is an instance where you want the jars sterilized (boiled for at least ten minutes) so you can process them for only five minutes. If you process your jelly for ten minutes, you may lose the set you worked so hard for by cooking it away. That's why processing times are shorter for jelly.

Is there anything better than warm, fresh bread with butter and jelly?

In my opinion, it was so worth the extra work! This would be a gorgeous glaze for turkey or duck, I think. And as a tart glaze, of course, like so many jellies. But we like it straight up on some homemade bread with butter, just fine, thank you very much! (Though I think some little toddlers around here would be fine eating it right off the spoon!)

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.

Apple Cranberry Conserve

When I was a child my mother could keep me quiet for a few minutes while peeling an apple or an orange. The reason being she would do it so that the peel was removed in one piece, creating a long spiral. Oranges, mainly clementines I seem to recall, would be able to be reformed into their former shape. Apples were harder to execute and thus, cause for a more rapt audience. Every once in a while it didn't work, which made it all the more exciting. Could she do it? Would she? Isn't that a beautiful thing? That peeling an apple could be such a thing of talent, beauty, and suspense?

That's what I was thinking about when I was peeling all these Ida Red apples, my favorite these days. Yesterday was cold, and snow started falling in the afternoon, the first of the season and not just a dusting. I had bread rising and these apples to cook up; perfect cold weather activities in my book. I had just started some clementine marmalade in a pot, then removing it to a bowl to sit. I didn't clean the pot, just started adding apples to it, so that orange-y syrup could mingle in. This conserve was a total whim, and lucky for me it came out great. Which is not hard when you work with such great ingredients that naturally go well with each other. Note that there is no sugar--it's sweetened only with some juice and a little bit of jelly. We had it in our oatmeal this morning, and it was delicious. It's really gorgeous, rosy pink and studded with golden orbs. I love the fruits of winter.

8 cups of peeled, cored apples, chunky dice

1 cup of cranberries

1 cup of golden raisins

1/2 cup cranberry raspberry juice (any juice with no added sugar would be fine)

1/4 cup crystallized ginger

2 tbsp. of grape jelly (I used this niagara grape jelly I made, adding sweetness and gloss)

1 tbsp. pumpkin pie spice

Simmer for an hour until apples are softened. When you pull a wooden spoon through the bottom of the pan and there is no water forming at the edges, and the sides don't close immediately, you can call it done. Ladle into mason jars and seal. Once cool, keep in the fridge. I am sure these could be processed but I didn't choose to. I know I'll eat it too quickly.

Apple Cranberry Crisp

After the fat and sugar and alcohol laden weekend (no complaints here!) I decided I should watch the sugar intake. I always buy too many apples (how can you not when huge baskets of big, beautiful Ida Reds are only $2. 99!) so to finish up the cranberry sauce from T-day I made another apple cranberry crisp. Only this time I tried to make it less buttery and sugary. It came out great, so great that I could only take one picture before devouring it and that's why it's blurry! Always take more than one picture. I had it with cream on the top yogurt which satisfied my decadent streak (or swath, if you will). The apples turned a pretty pink and cranberries added both sweetness and tartness.

Put three apples, not peeled, but diced into a greased glass baking pan (13x9). Add a half pint of cranberry sauce (which did have sugar). Make a crumb mix with 1/2 cup whole oats, 1/4 cup wheat flour, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon and 1/4 cup oil. Sprinkle on top and bake for almost an hour at 375 degrees.

Baby Z helped me out. I gave him his set of play pans and sprinkled a little oat, flour, sugar, spice mix in one of the pans and gave him a wooden spoon. Instead of mixing it, he ate it all and chewed on the apple cores I gave him, and he made quite a mess. A lovely mess.

Cranberry Spice Yogurt Cake

As I went for this morning's walk, which was truncated due to the nip in the air, I could smell winter lurking. The leaves are all down, smoke is churning out of a few chimneys on this quiet Wednesday morning, and the wind is blowing the water on the pond making it choppy and gray. The smell is welcome, really, because it's new and it made me excited about the holidays coming up, mostly for the food. Gravies and creamy potatoes, and all sorts of heavy things. I'm never able to fit too much dessert in because the main course always ruins it, doesn't it? So, I'm making some holiday cake a little early so I can enjoy it while it steams away in my hands, not ruined by a crispy pile of turkey skin (yes, I can't resist it) or a gratin of some sort. I'll still make it for the holidays though because it was one of the easiest recipes around, somewhat good for me (yogurt and whole wheat flour! Come on, give a girl a break!) and looks just so homey and pretty with it's sparkling cranberries and crisp layer of brown sugar crust. Visions of sugar plums, indeed!

This is based on the yogurt cake I wrote about here. I tweaked it to make my own slightly tart, not too sweet, holiday version. I also made some cranberry sauce with cranberries, sugar, orange juice and zest to plate the slices with, but I'm not sure I'll get that far today!

2 cups of whole wheat white flour

1 tbsp. baking powder

1 cup brown sugar, and a handful extra for topping

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 cup of whole milk plain yogurt

1 tsp. of pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves--yeah, I'm lazy, so sue me! I got this at the health food store in the bulk section to save me some time this season. Also, it's fresher!)

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tbsp. spiced rum

Preheat the oven to 350° F, and grease a ten-inch springform pan. In a large mixing-bowl, gently combine the yogurt, eggs, sugar, vanilla, oil and rum. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and spices. Add the flour mixture into the yogurt mixture, and blend together. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and top with cranberries--as many or as little as you like. I didn't pack them in so they could have space to mix with the handful of brown sugar that you need to scatter over them. Bake for 45 minutes, until the top is crispy brown, the cranberries are popping and oozing their tart goodness, and a knife comes out clean. Let stand for ten minutes, run a knife around to loosen, and turn out on a rack to cool.

P.S. I entered my Cranberry Spice Yogurt Cake in the Bon Appetit Holiday Bake-Off contest. You can vote here.