Connecting Recipies

It is the time of year to try out some of the luscious recipes that seem to be everywhere you look. This past weekend I started out making Fresh Cranberry-Orange Relish. It tasted even better than I anticipated but it made a very large amount. I decided to use it for part of the fruits in a modified Golden Stollen recipe and also added it to give more spunk to the soup I was making for lunch. And then I made half a pumpkin custard in a grab-it to use up the half can of pumpkin not needed in stollen. So - it was quite a day for cooking experiments...and all a domino effect started by the relish!

As usual - I was not a stickler for following either the ingredients or the directions in the recipes.

For the Cranberry-Orange Relish, I used 2 oranges rather than 1. I cut the ends of the oranges off before I cut them into eights. My food processor was big enough to hold everything so I put all the ingredients in it at the same time and processed until everything was more finely chopped than shown in the picture on the Wegman’s web page. So far I have eaten it by itself (what a treat it was using a spatula to clean up and enjoying ever last bit of the relish left in the bowl!), stirred into soup, and in the golden stollen. And there was still enough to put in the freezer too.

The Golden Stollen was in my last Gleanings and I had commented about attempting to modify it to be gluten free. As a first experiment, I replaced the 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour with teff flour. I used olive oil instead of butter and honey instead of sugar. I decided not to add nuts since the teff flour already has a nutty flavor. Instead I added 1/3 cup of the cranberry-orange relish. For the cup of dried fruit, I cut up dried prunes and apricots along with crystallized ginger. Raisins were used to fill up the cup. It ended up being slightly skewed toward the crystallized ginger. I simple stirred the dough thoroughly then mounded it onto a cast our griddle (picture on the left above). It cracked a bit as it cooked. I brushed butter on it when it came out of the oven but did not add the powdered sugar (picture on right above...after I had cut several sample pieces from one end). I told my husband it was a new pumpkin bread recipe and he tried it - and liked it….a first for my attempts to entice him to enjoy gluten free breads.

Of course - we both enjoyed sharing the small pumpkin custard for our dessert that evening.

Find some great foods of the season to be part of your celebration of the season!

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 25, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

The Secret Life of a Cardboard Box - infographic

Developing Economies At Highest Risk of Climate Change Disasters - resilience outranks risk

3D-Printed Exoskeleton - Engineers at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Philadelphia used a 3-D printer to make a lightweight plastic exoskeleton for a 2-year-old girl named Emma Lavalle.

Slideshow: Echoes of the Ancients - large file but wonderful images of Mesa Verde and other Southwestern US National parks

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #20 - learning about more birds from around the world with each of these postings

Sunflower Party Time - great pictures of the plant and some insects

Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano (pictures)

Easy whole grain pumpkin-banana bread - sounds yummy….but I would just double the recipe to use up the whole can of pumpkin

Make Room for (the New) Daddy - Essay and slide show from Marlo Thomas

Renewable Energy’s Growth Over the Past 15 Years - infographic