Honey Ginger Plum Sauce

Sweet Plum Sauce Before Cooking

Recipe by Robin

Inspired by my successful Spicy Plum Sauce, I wanted to try making a sweeter, milder plum sauce. Like the spicy sauce, this sauce contains garlic, ginger, and Chinese Five Spice. Adding honey and sugar and leaving out the crushed chilies makes the difference. Note that ginger still adds a noticeable kick, and you can adjust the amount to anywhere between strictly sweet to downright zingy. Since commercial plum sauce is made with salted plums, you can stock a trio of salty-spicy-sweet plum sauces in the pantry to prepare for any culinary occasion or mood.

Low Sugar Mirabelle Plum Jam

After a Jam Session

Recipe by Robin

Yellow plums and apricots seem similar, but they’re nothing alike to the food preservationist. True, they both belong to the Prunus genus and can be hybridized into such oddities as apriplums, plumcots, pluots, and apriums. But plums have more sour flavor components, thicker skin, and lots more water than apricots. Many plums also have less pectin than apricots. So tweaking my apricot jam recipe to preserve our Mirabelle plum tree’s bountiful harvest has been challenging. At last, after 3 years of experimentation including large batches that did not gel, batches that gelled too much, and over-sweetened batches, here is the perfected low sugar plum jam recipe.

Spicy Plum Sauce

Savory Ingredients with the Sweet

Recipe from Jon

Because our Mirabelle plum is an overachiever, producing huge amounts of sweet-tart yellow plums every year, I’ve wanted to make plum sauce for a long time. This year my new friend Jon, a master of sauces, dips, and all things Asian, graced me with a recipe. This plum sauce has the characteristic sweet-sour-pungent flavor interplay, plus quite a kick from the red chili flakes and large amount of ginger. In truth, I didn’t quite use the recommended chili dosage, choosing instead a heat zone with moderate and pleasant afterburn. The key is to taste the mixture at various points as you prepare it. Jon points out that tasting is also important to achieve your ideal level of Chinese Five Spice. Different batches of Five Spice and red chili flakes vary in strength, so feel free to fine-tune this recipe to your own tastes and ingredients.

Confessions of a Compulsive Jam Maker

Strawberry Pineapple Jam

by Robin

Do you see your plum tree loaded with fruit and think, “Looks like time to make jam.”  Do you have a friend with persimmon trees who gives you fruit for jam every year? Is your supply of homemade jam stacked high in a cabinet, or overflowing onto random bookshelves? If you saw an overloaded peach tree in a parking lot, would you gather enough peaches to make jam even if they weren’t quite ripe yet? Do bulk prices on raspberries put you in a jam-making frame of mind? Do you frequent blackberry thickets that most people don’t know about, with jam making in mind? Minutes after finishing a batch of wild plum jam, would you buy a half-price flat of strawberries at the Farmers’ Market so that you could make some jam? Have you ever arrived at a U-pick farm super-early so that you could pick as much fruit as possible, then go home and make jam? Congratulations! Like me, you are a compulsive jam maker.

DIY Prunes from Plums

Prune Plums After

Method by Robin

In autumn, a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of…prunes? OK, I made that up. Since I’m no longer a young woman, how would I know? But a middle aged woman who spies the last of the season’s prune plums at her favorite natural foods store…that I can speak to. Prunes make are a naturally sweet snack that’s a fun way to enjoy fruit in winter. Don’t believe me? How about if they’re preserved in brandy afterwards? Dipped in chocolate? But I digress…

Dehydrator Dried Tomatoes

Dried Heirlooms & Super Bushes

Method from Excalibur and TomatoDirt

Tomatoes! Here in the Santa Cruz mountains, we still have them ripening like crazy in the garden. I’ve made baked tomato sauce and slow cooker tomato sauce, which I’ve frozen for a rainy (January) day. Bruce made raw tomato sauce and I experimented with baked tomatoes and even candied tomatoes. We’ve had herbed tomato soup, fresh tomatoes with basil and balsamic, chili spiced Romanesco cauliflower, turkey Hungarian goulash, squash with fresh tomato sauce, and more tomato/veggie/pasta dishes and salads than we can count. Freezer is filling up. What’s next? Dried tomatoes!

Low Sugar Raspberry Jam

(Almost) Instant Gratification

Recipe Adapted from Happy Girl Kitchen

Red raspberries: my absolute favorite fruit! They’ve been scarce this summer compared with golden raspberries, which are also delicious but too subtle in flavor to make good jam. Since raspberry season is so short, preserving them in light honey sauce is a way to eat them almost indefinitely. This year I also tried raspberry jam, adapted from the Happy Girl Kitchen recipe for Low Sugar Strawberry Jam that I posted a couple of weeks back.

Low Sugar Strawberry Jam

Strawberries in Winter

Recipe by Happy Girl Kitchen

Making strawberry jam is magical. First, there’s the delicious scent of cooking berries that rises from the pot and permeates the kitchen. Second, there’s the way the berries foam up to several times their original volume while cooking, as they release air. How can berries be so full of air in the first place? Then there’s the always-magical gel point, where boiling fruit settles down and becomes jam. Lastly, there’s the magic of opening a jar in the winter and spooning out memories of summertime fields. Now is the time to start preserving!

Low Sugar Strawberry Pineapple Jam

Now and Later, to Keep and Share

Recipe by Robin

Strawberry season. Here on the central CA coast, we are blessed with a long one, often beginning in late April and sometimes extending into November. In fact, it was the prospect of a season-long supply of Live Earth Farm strawberries that inspired me to sign up for their weekly CSA produce boxes.

By this time of the season, eating fresh strawberries is no longer a novelty, yet they’re still at their peak of flavor and freshness. We’ve eaten them plain, dipped them, drunk them, shortcaked them, frozen them, and even saladed or balsamic-minted them. What’s next? That’s right, strawberry jam!

Brandied Cherries

A Lot of Cocktail and Dessert Potential

Recipe by Robin

When I posted a recipe for Cherries in Light Honey Sauce recently, my friend Lynn, a prolific inventor of party drinks, mentioned that these could be used in a new drink she’s concocted. When we chatted more about her ingredient list, it turned out to be ideal to “brandy” the cherries. Always on the alert for new recipes, I thought, why not brandy some fresh cherries instead of adding brandy to the preserved honeyed ones?

Cherries in Light Honey Sauce

The Finished Product, Ready to Store or Share

Recipe by Happy Girl Kitchen and Robin

My most popular post ever, referenced in the Huffington Post’s 12 Unusual Uses for Honey, is about Berries in Light Honey Sauce, adapted from a recipe from Happy Girl Kitchen. This year, since cherry season is so short, I decided to try a similar recipe to preserve some whole cherries. 

April Fool’s Blue Food Exploration

Blue Food

In the immortal words of George Carlin, “Why is there no blue food? “ According to The Straight Dope, it’s because leaves are green. If they were orange, we’d have plenty of blue fruits and vegetables. It seems that Mother Nature wants to set up the maximum color contrast between foliage and flowers or fruits. This contrast helps animals find flowers to pollinate and fruits to eat. Plants actually benefit when animals eat their fruits. Since plants can’t move much, they rely on animals to transport seeds and "plant" them in other locations.

Chen Pi: Dried Tangerine Peel

Homemade Chen Pi

Recipe by Robin

A while ago I became obsessed with traditional Chinese herbal ingredients and their health benefits. Much of this interest came from reading The Chinese Herbal Cookbook by Penelope Ody, Alice Lyon, and Dragana Vilinac. The authors, according to the introduction, are trained herbalists in European and Chinese traditions, with medical rather than culinary training. Still, these “enthusiastic amateur cooks” have invented some unusual and intriguing recipes for specific health purposes. Their cookbook is one of my favorites, with sections about eating foods in season, immune-boosting, women’s health, and much more. Read my complete review on Goodreads.

Preserving Basil 101

Basil Ready for Drying

Recipes for Freezing and Drying

No matter what I do, I can’t outsmart a basil plant. I’ve tried pinching back the flowers, keeping it in a warm, sunny area, planting at the end of summer instead of the beginning. But even in our mild coastal California climate, basil knows it’s an annual, and its time is summer, not winter. Many herbs can be babied through the winter, but basil will have none of that. It will die come late fall, period. And so, since we have so much basil right now, I’m going to preserve some for winter.

Preserving Fruits 4: Freezing Strawberries

Frozen Strawberries for Next Winter

Recipe by Debbie from Live Earth Farm

In my last post I talked about how we’re not as excited about eating strawberries as we were early in the season, say in late April or even June. We’ve theorized that the berries themselves taste better earlier, but perhaps we just get used to them. In any case, we will be missing them come December or January, so why not freeze some now to enjoy during the winter? I’m imagining that Strawberry Sauce over chocolate pudding, or even a few plain strawberries, will soothe even the most winter-weary souls.

Low Sugar Apricot Jam

Good Results of a Jam Session

Recipe adapted from Happy Girl Kitchen

As I promised in my refrigerator Apricot Jam post, here's another recipe for Apricot Jam from a class by Happy Girl Kitchen, our local food preservationists. This small family-owned business tried many combinations to get the perfect apricot flavor, color, and gel. They experimented with alternative sweeteners such as agave and honey, but did not get  good results. Even though this uses more sugar than my recipe, it looks better, keeps longer, and has a more complex flavor. The addition of lemon is key to both color and flavor. Lemon also adds acidity, the factor that makes preserved foods keep safely.

Preserving Fruits: Berries in Light Honey Sauce

Assorted Raspberries and Blackberries

Recipe adapted from Happy Girl Kitchen

A most intriguing idea for preserving berries came to me in a jam-making class by Happy Girl Kitchen, and it’s not a jam. It’s berries in a light honey sauce. Honey preserves and intensifies the berries' flavor. These berries are particularly delicious over lemon bread, chocolate cake, or ice cream in the middle of winter. You can experiment with the amount of honey that you like. Happy Girl uses 1 part honey to 10 parts water, and warns that using more honey can overpower the fruit. But you might like extra honey flavor!

Preserving Fruits 1: Frozen Stone Fruits

Frosty Fresh-Frozen Apricots

Recipe by Debbie from Live Earth Farm

Next week is the middle of summer, and my thoughts turn to preserving the bounty of this time of year. I was talking with my sister Chris about the jam making class I took from Happy Girl Kitchens. She’s in the Southwest, so her local seasonal foods are quite different from ours on the central CA coast. She’s all about the chilies, and especially likes hot and sweet sauces: chilis combined with everything from bananas and mango to strawberries and rhubarb to apricots and plums.

Apricot Jam I

Blenheim Apricot Jam

Recipe by Robin

As noted in an earlier post, an apricot tree fell on my house recently and reminded me that I had some Blenheim apricots in the freezer from last summer. As promised, I made some apricot jam in addition to the apricot chicken. Frozen fresh apricots produce a fair amount of liquid—especially if many months go by before they are thawed (not recommended!) This liquid/solid combination seems well-suited to making jam. You could also try this with reconstituted dried apricots. Use 2/3 – 1 cup dried apricots and add water to equal 2 cups. Let it sit overnight in the fridge.