Thanksgiving prep- Spiced pears and cranberries.

I ordered my fresh turkey and will pick it up Tuesday night.
Wednesday night I will brine the turkey in my huge stock pot filled with water, 2 cups maple syrup and 1/2 cup salt.  That will swim in the brine until Thursday morning.
Stuffing with be with sausage, celery, onions, cranberries and the two quince I have left in my tree.  The chickens ate all the rest!  Quince tastes like a buttery pear but has the consistency of apricots.
Since  I was working with the pears, I  peeled many more and made spiced pears with cranberries.  This is really good heaped on a bed of mashed potato and celery root puree.  Or you could poach pears, cut in half,  in Chardonnay then serve with the pear canberries in the center of the pear.  Yummy and pretty!  It's also great as filling in Crepes with whipped cream on top and a glass of Cognac.  Viva La France!  Here is the recipe for
Spiced Pears and Cranberries
12 cups pear peices, cut from bartlett pears peeled, seeded and cut into chunks.
1 cup water
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp anise seed or two whole star anise
1 cup fresh cranberries
Mix all ingredients in a large stainless steel pan, bring to a boil and  simmer for 1 1/2 hours stirring frequently.  Skim off any remaining foam and spoon into  in glass jars and cool.  This will keep in the fridge for at least two weeks.
 We will have our usual candied sweet potatoes with butter, bourbon and maple syrup.  Thank goodness Steve is bringing home more Canadian Maple Syrup.  We just can't have a holiday with out it.
I am looking to eat out of the garden for our Thanksgiving feast as we did last year, so I think we will have beet green warm salad with oranges and pomegranate vinaigrette and  brandy cream carrots as sides with the turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes.  Apple pie, pumpkin pie and pumpkin chocolate swirl cheesecake for desserts.
Dinner will be served at 4:00 PM Thursday.  Call if you want me to save you a seat!
Have a blessed Thanksgiving!  And don't eat too much!

last of the pears but best recipe yet!

So last weekend I picked the last 40 lbs of pears. The wind was blowing hard and they were falling quickly.  The pears get bruised if they hit the ground so I picked all the rest to save as many as I could.
After making plenty of Ginger pear marmalade and pear mince meat for pies and pork chops I needed something else to do with bulk amounts of pears.
I don't know if you knew it or not but I make the BEST banaana bread in the world.  So I thought I would try to alter the recipe and make pear almond bread.  Steve doesn't like the taste of almond flavoring so I adapted the recipe I made to have just a hint of almond flavor.  This is the best breakfast bread yet!
Here is the recipe: It yeilds 2 regular loaves or 6 mini loaves (I like the William-Sonoma gold loaf pans)
Pear Almond Bread
2 sticks butter, softened to room temp
2 cups sugar in the raw, or 1 cup white and 1 cup brown
4 fresh duck eggs, if you don't have any use 5 fresh chicken eggs
4 cups organic bartlett pears, peeled, cored and sliced, about 6 medium pears
1 cup greek yogurt (plain of course)
3 cups flour
1/4 cup flax seed
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
4 drops (and I mean only 4 drops of almond extract)
1/4 cup of natural sliced almonds
Cream butter & sugar until fluffy.  Add 1 egg at a time and beat well.  Add pears, yogurt, vanilla & almond extract and beat well.  Batter should be light and fluffy with chunks of pears.
Sift dry ingredients together and slowly add to batter with mixer on low.  Watch out! The flour flies if you have the mixer on too high.
When well blended divide batter among loaf pans.  Sprinkle sliced almonds on top and bake.
Full loaf size 55 minutes, small loaf pans 35 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool on a rack.

Italian night-yummy

After weeks of having no italian food I was craving a good spagetti & meatballs.  But with not enough time between processing my pears and bedtime, I settled on sweet sausage sauce on fettucini with  a garden salad of butter lettuce, mustard greens, radishes (don't throw away those green tops use them in the recipe below) and my last two garden tomatoes with crumbled blue cheese and vinaigrette.
I sauted the sweet italian suasage (I bought home made- lower fat at the local store)with two cloves of fresh garlic, minced, 1 cup of radish greens, chooped to bite size and sauted for 5 minutes until greens were wilted and sausage was browned. Added 1/4 cup red wine and  simmered until wine is reduced and almost gone while scraping the bits off the bottom of the pan.  Then added a restaurant brand of spagetti sauce with sausage & cheese and simmered for 10 more minutes. Of course you want to be sipping a glass of the nice red wine while doing this.   Ready to mix with 1 lb. of fettucini.  Yummy! And the sweet smell of italian food lingers in the kitchen.