Jam and Spread Recipes & Ideas

If you’ve ever been overambitious and purchased too many juicy summer peaches at the farm stand or farmers market, preserving them in the slow cooker is just the answer. Making peach butter requires no peeling, no pots to stir on the stove, and none of the canning equipment you need when making peach jam. Slow-cooker peach butter is the easiest, hands-off way to make sure your peach haul is turned into something tasty. Fruit butters get their name from their thick but spreadable texture.

Have you heard of the Pumpkin Spice Latte? It’s an obscure, indie drink that only the most in-the-know coffee drinkers are familiar with. (Kidding.) This butter is a riff on that notorious beverage — only it’s better, because you can spread it on toast. To make this magnificent fall creation, you whip milk, salted butter, pumpkin purée, powdered sugar, ground spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and allspice — and some vanilla bean together.

Ruby red grapefruits tend to get all the glory, but lately I’ve been relishing the white-fleshed yellow variety thanks to an abundant little grove of grapefruit trees near my mother-in-law’s house in Southern California. The best yellow grapefruits have just the right balance of acid and sugar — not too sweet, not too puckery, and with a pleasant trace of bitterness. This makes for excellent marmalade and a nice change of pace from the standard orange kinds.

Earlier this year, I couldn’t wait to share the UK edition of Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries II with you, even though the book was a little hard to pick up here in the United States. But now things have changed. As promised, Ten Speed Press has just released the US edition, titled Notes from the Larder, making it a little easier to find, and if you’re not up for messing with conversions or if you don’t have a kitchen scale that reads in grams, a little easier to use.

During my early childhood years, my family lived in Southern California. Our house was tiny, but the backyard was a huge, tiered thing that sloped upwards to a two-story garage and an alley that served all the homes on the block. That property was a wonderland to a small child and nothing was more magical to me than the fact that we had three productive plum trees. My sister and I would pretend we were pioneers and the plums were our harvest.

We know, leftover wine isn’t usually an issue in our kitchen. However, sometimes you don’t have a use for that half empty bottle of Merlot (especially if it wasn’t top notch to start with). Well, start looking at the bottle as half full… of wine jelly. Spread this homemade delicacy over cheese or package it into a unique hostess gift.Wine jelly is made like other types of jelly, by reducing the liquid, sweetening, cooking and adding thickener.

I’ll admit it, I’m a coconut fiend. I eat or drink from this luscious fruit daily. I sip on coconut water and sprinkle generous handfuls of the unsweetened, dried variety all over my morning bowl of oatmeal. But all that is kiddie stuff compared to this coconut butter. It’s a sure-fire way to get the maximum concentration of rich, velvety coconut flavor and texture in each bite. Coconut butter is unlike coconut oil; it’s an entirely different animal.

Mardi Gras is on Tuesday. Do you have plans? We’ve got a fun, super easy recipe for an impromptu party—hot dogs! But they’re gussied-up hot dogs, boiled in a spicy broth and served with saucy onions.This recipe comes from chef David Guas, a New Orleans native who owns the Bayou Bakery in Arlington, Virginia. David says these spicy dogs are a classic Mardi Gras food; people serve them along the parade route or at parties.

Have you ever made warm, silky, cinnamon-spiked applesauce? It’s the simplest thing in the world, and it’s a good way to use up windfall apples, or ones with brown spots on the edge of going bad. If you’ve never tried this simple cooking DIY, then why not celebrate fall with a little pot of applesauce this week? You only need apples, water, a bit of citrus peel (if you want) and cinnamon (if you’re so inclined).

I will forever look back at June 2010 as the Month of the Cherries. First there was a revival of a favorite cherry tart recipe, then roasted cherries and cherry vinegar. Now, as a final ode to this favorite fruit, I offer Cherry Chutney. Amazing stuff, this. Read on for the recipe!This scrumptious cherry chutney offers all the things we love about chutney. It’s sweet, sour, gloppy stuff that goes well with roasted or grilled meats like pork and chicken.

Yesterday, we showed you our favorite recipe for light and fluffy pancakes, and several of you shared some great tips and recipes of your own. Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s move on to the fun stuff – the toppings. Pure maple syrup is never a bad choice, but we’ve grown to love this simple blueberry maple syrup recipe that’s made with just two ingredients. Can you guess what they are?Yep, it’s blueberries and maple syrup. No big mystery there!

Soon after Elizabeth mentioned them, we spotted cara cara oranges at our local grocery. We ate a few for afternoon snacks, but then our thoughts quickly turned to dessert. Wouldn’t this sweet citrus make a great jam curd? Why, yes it would!We’d hoped the curd would end up as pink as the fruit, but alas, it seems the pink color comes from the flesh of the orange and not the juice. All the same, we love the sunny orange hue that we did get!

My untraditional use of chutney may have been influenced by the fact that it came to me in a very international way: from an Israeli woman whom I met at a Thai Buddhist temple in San Diego. She got it from a German woman who got the recipe while in India.

Have you ever had apple butter? Personally, we can’t get enough of it! Apple butter is applesauce that gets slowly cooked down until it becomes a thick, glossy, caramelized spread. So good on toast and swirled into ice cream. And here’s how to make it at home:Step 1: Choose ApplesThe best apples are the ones that taste good to you. We like apples that are tart and tangy, but you might prefer ones that are more sweet and mellow. Both are good!

Last week we showed you the gooseberriesGooseberries are naturally tangy, with tiny seeds inside berries with rather thick skins. They also have little “tops and tails” on either end, remnants of stem and flower. These have to be yanked off before cooking or eating. This isn’t too onerous a task, though; we plowed through this small batch in just a few minutes.To make jam with the gooseberries, we weighed them then measured out about 3/4 of their weight in white sugar.

For many of us, spending the whole day in the kitchen canning is a realm in heaven. Others just scoff and roll their eyes: who has that kind of time on their hands? While I usually fall into the former category, this past week I was also part of the later. Busy, busy, busy me. At the same time, a 1/2 case of coveted, rare Blenheim apricots were reaching their peak on my kitchen counter. What’s a canning geek to do?The three-day jam method, of course!

Spicy and sweet, crystallized ginger can add a wonderful zing to cookies, cakes, ice cream, and cranberry sauce. We also like it finely chopped and sprinkled over savory dishes like roasted acorn squash and pumpkin soup. Chewing on the ginger treat can even help soothe an upset stomach. Although a jar of it can be outrageously expensive at the store, crystallized (or candied) ginger is quite simple to make at home.Use the freshest, most tender and firm (not spongy) ginger root you can find.

You may remember our last attempt at this jam, when it turned out a wee bit hard. But because the flavor was so good, and because we were determined not to let the jam win, we gave it another try…This time, we made a couple of changes. We peeled the peaches, making the jam a little paler than our last batch.

Looking for a new way to enjoy this sweet and earthy vegetable, a friend suggested we try pickling! Now that we’ve tried it, we may just need a jar of pickled beets on-hand 24/7 to satisfy our craving.Read our review of Alton Brown’s recipe for pickled beets after the jump…For our first venture into pickling, we wanted a simple, straightforward recipe that we could potentially use as a base for future variations. Alton Brown’s recipe from his Beet It!

Plums are in season, and we have been busy thinking up more ways to use them. We were inspired by Heidi Swanson’s Rosewater Plum Compote a couple weeks ago, and we set out to make our own plum sauce. We love tea and plums together, so we played around with an Earl Grey concentrate and sweet-tart red plums until we found a combination we liked. The tea gives the sweet plums undertones of tannins and herbs, and these deep flavors ripen as it sits.

Tahini is a major/strong> ingredient in Middle Eastern cooking, and it forms part of the standard recipe for many dips and spreads like hummus and baba ghanoush. In the Middle East, tahini is just a paste of oil and lightly toasted sesame seeds. With a good food processor or blender it’s a snap to make, and it will keep for a month or so in the fridge. We like to make a big batch to have on hand for impromptu hummus production. D.I.Y.

Jam looks intimidating – boiling and canning and sterilizing and botulism all rolled into one specter of potential food poisoning. But while canning itself is much easier than it looks, you don’t need to mess with that for just one or two quick jars of jam. An hour or two will give you a jar of jam that can be frozen for up to six months or refrigerated for a month with that taste of summer fruit locked inside.