Persimmon Fruit

I made a really quick sweet treat for after dinner. It involved the persimmons my landlady gave us and some sugar. That’s it. Just two ingredients. How easy is that?

So, here’s what you do. Cut the top off of the persimmon. Peel the fruit with a paring gizmo. Cut it up into a dice. Not fine, just little chunks. I haven’t figured out whether to use the core or not. When I was eating one of them like an apple I ate the whole thing (minus the skin). When I cut it up for tonight’s dish I did not use the core.

The fruit I used was as firm as an apple. My neighbor, Phil, said that his daughter-in-law likes when they get all soft and gummy. I haven’t tried them that way and like them firm. Oi Lin, my landlady, said to eat them when they were firm.

So, cut up one persimmon and put it into a sauce pan. Put two soup spoons of white sugar into the pot. I’m betting brown sugar would be interesting too. Run the sauce pan under the tap and put just a little bit of water in. Turn on the heat and bring it all to a boil. It’s not going to take very long at all. Stir it around with a spoon until the fruit is soft.

I suppose you could eat this as it is for a really sweet treat either hot or cold. You could put it on an English muffin, or a piece of toast, or a roll. Or, do like I did. I put it on top of a bowl of cottage cheese and made a barley duke. My great grandmother Neddie used to make barley dukes all the time, but she used grape jelly and cottage cheese. It’s a lovely cheesey taste with a sweet note.
The pictures I shot were from my new Canon Rebel XSi camera.

Fig Apple Fruit Spread - Spirited Recipe

So, the guides and I made a Spirited Fig and Apple Spread this evening.

Here's how it started. Our neighbor Arnold came over the other night with a humongous bag of figs. I took some in to work because they like them there and pondered what to do with the rest of them. There were so many and I just don't eat them fast enough. These figs were ready to eat now! By the way, you can click on these pictures and they will get larger.

The guides suggested to me after dinner that I do something with the figs. I fired up my MasterCook program and put fig in the search. Out of 400 some recipes I just wasn't getting anything that made my heart sing. Also, not all of those recipes that came back from the search even had figs in them, so I don't know what was going on with that.

I settled back and one of the guides suggested I put them in a pot and cook them up. I fiddled around on the Internet looking for somebody making fig jam and came up with a recipe. Except I really didn't have all the sugar they were asking for and I didn't have the pectin and I don't have canning jars.

So, from this point on I just surrendered to Spirit and we started to cook. In go the figs into my biggest sauce pan. I rinsed them off, pinched the stems off and just squashed them into the pot. Figs exploding everywhere. On some of the smaller ones I discarded obviously thicker skins but most of the skins went into the pot.

The guides said, "One cup of sugar", which I poured around the figs. Then, they suggested an apple and I remembered that apples could be used to help firm up in the absence of pectin. I took two apples that were so soft that nobody was going to eat them. I pealed them and then grated, on the small holes in the grater, right on top of the figs and the sugar. I took a few trial stirs and set the heat to medium.

This mixture was so thick even in the beginning that bubbles popped up around the sides of the pan. I'm looking at it seeing lumpy bumps and shreds of skin and think, "Ah, the Cuisinart stick blender." Grabbed that and a minute or so later everything was nicely smoothed out. Still lots of tiny bumps from the seed parts of the figs...I'm assuming those are seeds. Anyway, think Fig Newton.

This stuff is so thick now it is bubbling like a volcano and I'm getting splashed. It's hot now too. So, I grabbed a handy dandy screen shield and that helped out with the splashing.

It really didn't cook that long. I saw it turn red which was a really cool color. Got even thicker and tasted delicious. So, maybe 5 minutes tops.

I let it sit for a minute or two and then washed out three containers, one leftover jelly jar, a nice anchor hocking glass container and a small custard dish with a lid. Nothing matched, but if this sets up and I will be sure to let you know, I've got a couple of friends I want to give some too.