Two post in one day?  What can I say? It’s Babette season! I’m in the kitchen, and loving it!

Hummus. It’s a Middle Eastern paste or dip made from ground garbanzo beans, olive oil, garlic and sesame seeds. Don’t pronounce it like “human” – that would be humus.  Humus is good for the garden, but who wants to eat dirt?

This recipe is hummus. Pronounce it like “hum” …and you can hum a little tune while you make it, because it’s wonderfully healthy!

The following recipe only has 162 calorie in ¼ cup. It provides 4.7 grams of protein and is rich in calcium and iron. (¼ cup of hummus has twice the iron as ¼ cup of raisins.)  

Hummus

1 can garbanzo beans

1/3 cup tahini (sesame paste)

10-12 cloves garlic

1/3 cup olive oil

1/3  cup lemon juice

½ tsp cayenne (more or less)

Salt to taste

Eat it with crispy fresh veggies for a yummy guilt-free holiday snack!

Blend oil, lemon juice, salt, cayenne and garlic cloves till smooth.

Add tahini.

Begin to add garbanzo beans a few at a time and blend till smooth.

Chill.

Serve with veggies or flatbread.

I will not be “cutting a caper” in this post. In fact, I’m going to cut out the capers. I used to have a jar of them in the fridge but I got so much grief from my family that I decided to toss them. 

“What is a caper anyway?”  I was asked over and over again.  “They look gross!”

Okay. A caper is a plant from the Mediterranean region. In Provençal the caper plant was known as tapeneï and its little edible bud was the tapeno.  

Tapeno buds have been eaten since as early as 1200 B.C. They were preserved in olive oil in pottery jars, and apparently got mashed into a kind of paste. 

And that has eventually became what we know today as tapenade.

So the name comes from the main ingredient I’m leaving out of my recipe today.  If you decide to add them – which I have done, but they don’t really make that much difference – you can add 2 tablespoons. 

(Some recipes call for anchovies also, but I have never put them in. I’d be the only person in my family who would eat it.)

So…sans the namesake tapano, here is my delicious recipe for olive tapenade.  I guarantee it will be one of the favourite hors d’oeuvre you serve this holiday season!

Ingredients:

3 cans black olives

2 cups kalamata olives

1 cup green olives with pimentos

1 bell pepper

½ cup olive oil

1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice

Directions:

Drain olives well and pack in cup when measuring

Run olives and pepper through a food grinder (do not puree)

Stir in olive oil and lime juice

Mix well and refrigerate for at least 24 hours before serving

Serve with crackers or bruschetta.

I’ve talked about how much I love go wild in the kitchen, and what a heroine  “Babette” is to me.  Well, I’m looking forward to one of those Babette weeks as we prepare for our family Thanksgiving Feast on Thursday! 

Today I made Cranberry Relish.

After you try this I’m pretty sure you’ll never buy a can of ordinary cranberry sauce again! It’s so easy and fast and so so good!

Ingredients:

12 ounce bag of fresh cranberries, rinsed well

1 orange with half peel removed

1 cup sugar

1 can crushed pineapple

¾ cup pineapple juice (add water to make full amount if needed)

 chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:

Chop orange, including peel, removing seeds

Wash cranberries

Place all ingredients (except walnuts) in a heavy saucepan

Mix well.

Bring to a boil

Lower heat to medium and cook for about 8-10 minutes, stirring.

You will hear the cranberries pop and the mixture will thicken as it cooks. 

Add chopped walnuts if desired.  Refrigerate.

I’ve always thought of persimmons as that bitter or slimy fruit we use to make nominally good cookies once or twice a year.  They are sort of plump and heart-shaped.  Before they’re ripe they’re too bitter to eat; and after the first frost they ripen to a golden slime.

 You scoop out the pulp to make persimmon cookies.  I’m not a huge fan, but the cookies are okay…

Then a few years ago I discovered the Fuyu persimmons, also called Japanese persimmons.  (Note the difference in appearance of the two varieties.)

 Unlike “regular” persimmons, you don’t have to wait for Fuyu persimmons to freeze before you can use them.  They ripen in the fall and you can pick them off the tree and eat them like an apple. They’re sweet and crunchy and tasty! 

The problem – just like with most fruit – is that they all come at the same time.  What do you do with a hundred ripe crunchy Fuyu persimmons? 

Last year we came up with the idea of drying them, and discovered a yummy treat that will keep for a long time.

This is how we did it:

Wash and slice the persimmons.  You can slice in any direction but if you slice them horizontally you’ll see a pretty star shaped design in the center.

Lay the slices out on a cake cooling rack, and place in the oven at the lowest setting. (My lowest is 170°.)

It will take about 2-3 hours for them to dry completely.

Check as the persimmons dry, they will shrink in size and you can move them closer together on the rack, and add new slices to dry.  Remove the slices as they become completely dry and crisp.

Allow them to cool completely at room temperature.

Store them in an airtight container.  They will keep for months and they’re a great nutritious snack!

Butter Night has been a family tradition for more than 20 years. Every year we set aside a night to pour heavy whipping cream into quart jars and sit down to watch a movie while we shake the cream into butter.

You can read about how this tradition began in my last post, but today I’m going to tell you about the process of making butter.

You will need:

1 half gallon of heavy whipping cream (sometimes called manufacturing cream)

1 tsp. salt (this is optional – but we are all salt fiends)

Jars with tight fitting lids

Water, ice, a big bowl

FYI – A half gallon of cream makes about a pound and a half of butter (6 sticks) and you’ll have about a quart of skim “buttermilk” left after the fat has been taken out of it.

Pour cream into the jars, so they’re no more than halfway filled.  The less cream you put in the jar, the easier and faster it will turn to butter.

Close the lid tightly and start shaking the jar.  That’s all there is to it.

Be sure to close the lid tightly.

Once, years ago, we had butter night at my friend Robyn’s. Robyn and I home-schooled our kids together so we decided to watch “Squanto” and make Thanksgiving butter.  I was engrossed in the movie when Robyn’s little girl, Amber, came over and handed me her jar.  “How is this coming along?” she asked.  I didn’t take my eyes from the TV, but I took the jar from her and gave it a shake…not noticing that she had taken the lid off!  The mess was everything you can imagine.

We usually check the progress by the sound of it, rather than how it looks. When you first begin to shake it there is a thick glugging sound. There comes a point when it stops making any noise because the cream has turned into thick whipped cream… You can stop here if you want, and bring out the pumpkin pie and skip the rest of the steps…

But if you choose to continue to butter, just keep on shaking.

It will really be hard to shake, and it will feel like nothing is happening.

Persevere through this stage and you will suddenly hear a “thunk” and a “slosh.”  That is your chunk of hard butter bumping around in thin sweet buttermilk. (This is not the sour cultured kind of buttermilk you buy at the store.)

At this point we pause the movie and take our jars into the kitchen.

We’re very silly about our “traditional roles” in this part of Butter Night.  One or more of us usually bursts out singing “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof.

It’s the mama’s job to pour the buttermilk out of the jars and  into the original cream cartons to drink later. And then to plop the  chunks of butter into a big bowl of ice water in the kitchen sink.

It’s the papa’s job to squeeze the butter with his hands to get all the milk out of it.  Milk solids in the butter will cause it to spoil too quickly or become rancid.

We have to change the ice water a couple of times until it remains clear when you squeeze the butter.

Then we salt the butter.  I sprinkle the salt and John mixes it in.  Even after 21 years we ask ourselves, “How much salt do we put in?” We joke that it’s a tradition to not remember how much salt we use.  For our taste it’s about 1 teaspoon for ½ gallon of cream.

David’s “tradition” is to put the washed and salted butter into a smaller bowl and carry it from the sink to the counter.  He takes this job very seriously.  For many years he used the same red Tupperware bowl; and to this very day he carries bitterness in his heart because I threw it away.

Never mind that it had a big melted gouge on one side on the rim – it was his traditional butter-bowl!

We mold our butter in a little cast-iron muffin pan, but you can mold it in just about any kind of mold.  Or you can just let it harden in a little serving dish.

If you use a mold you’ll want to line it with plastic wrap so the butter doesn’t stick.

We take our little heart shaped butter patties “over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house” for our contribution to Thanksgiving dinner. The family loves it, and they dutifully assure us that home-made butter is so much better than store-bought.  I’m not sure it really tastes any better but it’s a lot more fun!