blue artichoke

As you all know, I love throwing things away. This includes shoddy recipes, but does not include food. I have already found two rubbish recipes this baking season. The first one I found several days ago. The weather got unseasonably warm and melted all the snow, along with the frozen food in the cooler on the front porch. I had a 3# bag of cranberries, all ready for holiday baking, that turned to mush and leaked bright red cranberry juice all over everything. I threw away a lot of food, but couldn’t bear to throw away such a bounty of cranberries. I had a recipe that called for 3# of cranberries and thought myself quite clever. The recipe was for cranberry jellies, a candy that sounded festive enough for Christmas. It was grueling. After simmering the cranberries with spices, I was supposed to pass them through a fine sieve. Impossible. I passed them through my food mill first, then through a fine sieve. That took about two hours and gave me Popeye muscles on my right arm. After that was easy; I spread them in a pan and put them in the fridge to firm up. I turned them out onto the counter, cut them into tiny cubes and shook them with some coarse sanding sugar until they were coated. They looked very pretty. Then I tasted one. Pow! Tart! I sprinkled a bit more sugar and put them in nice layers between sheets of wax paper in an airtight container while I decided what to do with them. I thought they’d be good mixed into a banana or pumpkin bread. I decided on a pumpkin bread so as to not confuse the ongoing Banana Bread Snackdown. When I opened the container today, they had exuded more cranberry juice and were seeping little lumps of gooey jelly. Argh! I stirred ~2/3 of those suckers into the bread batter. I made two loaves; I was that confident the bread would be good, or at least palatable. The jellies promptly sunk to the bottom of the pan and stuck to it. One loaf broke apart, with a few of the jellies clinging to the bread, but most jointed to the loaf pan in a crispy crust. The other loaf came out of the pan in one piece. Great things often come from mistakes; this is not a great thing. It tastes pretty good, but the jellied texture at the bottom of the loaf might be a bit unsettling. GC might take the good loaf to work to share with his colleagues. That’s right. I ain’t skairt to share my stinkers. I still have more of those little cranberry jellies left. I hate to throw away food; I’ll have to find some way to use up the rest.

So, that was the first rubbish recipe. The second was a cookie recipe. Date-Pumpkin Cookies. I have lots of dates still in the big tub ‘o dates I bought at Sam’s at Thanksgiving and I have fresh pureed pumpkin that I need to use, so this recipe had lots going for it. These are not cookies. The batter spread out a lot, so I ended up with an interconnected grid of cookies that were so thin and crumbly that it was nigh impossible to remove them to a cooling rack. They sunk between the grates of the rack and crumbled to pieces. What on earth can I do with these? I can’t give them away; they look like I put them in a bag and whacked them against the counter. I suppose I could mail them to someone and blame the post office for excessive roughness, except that I just gave away the ruse. I’m thinking about crumbling some up in a bowl of milk for breakfast, but what will I do with the other 7-½ dozen cookies? Actually I made up only 2/3 of the batter, then decided to try refrigerating the rest; maybe if the batter is cold when it goes in the oven, it won’t spread out as much and will have a more durable texture.

Anyway, those are two recipes I won’t be making again. Not a great start to holiday baking season. Hopefully today’s baking endeavors will go better.