Cranberry muffins

I woke up in the mood to bake. Maybe because we got more than six inches of snow in the last 24 hours, and making (and eating) something warm feels so cozy. Maybe because it was time to do something with the bag of fresh cranberries languishing in our crisper drawer since November (not quite so fresh or crisp, but still usable).

My go-to recipe website had some great-looking recipes, but I ultimately chose this one to tweak because I thought the orange juice would counter the tart berries nicely, as well as providing some extra sweetness when I cut out the sugar. Using some of the comments, I substituted canola oil for shortening and added sour cream for moisture. I also made giant muffins, and increased the baking time by 10 minutes. The results exceeded all expectations!

No Sugar Added Cranberry Muffins

Ingredients:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup Splenda
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons orange zest
1-1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil
1/2 cup agave nectar
3/4 cup sour cream
2/3 cup orange juice concentrate + 1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs, beaten
1-1/2 cups chopped dried cranberries (or 2 cups fresh cranberries, chopped)
1-1/2 cups chopped walnuts

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Spray or grease a 12 cup and 6 cup muffin tin.
2. Mix together dry ingredients.
3. Stir in wet ingredients, mix thoroughly, then stir in cranberries and nuts. Pour into muffin cups and bake for 25 minutes or until brown (increase baking time to 40 minutes for large muffins).

Makes 18 regular muffins or six large muffins.

Canning 2011

I almost saved this for a Tightwad Tuesday post (always be ready to jump on a good deal), but couldn't wait that long to post about this year's cherry jam.

This is the third year we've done cherry jam, so we've found and perfected our basic recipes. A week ago Jim's mom had a line on cherries for a dollar a pound, but Jim said he wanted to wait and see if we could get a better deal. Then on Wednesday night we got a call from his dad. Apparently a friend of theirs had gone to a fruit stand and gotten several large boxes of cherries free (!!!) because the fruit was slightly damaged--and he wanted to know if we wanted a couple boxes. This was just what Jim had been waiting for, so he went and picked up the fruit.

Last night after dinner, Jim and I sat around the table with the kids and sorted through what turned out to be about 50 pounds of Bing cherries, with a few Rainiers mixed in for good measure. About a fifth of the cherries were too badly damaged to use, but most of them were in really beautiful condition, and absolutely delicious. The biggest--and best--surprise of the evening was how hard our kids worked. Audrey was the fastest of all of us at stemming the cherries; Jim and Jimmy could barely keep up with sorting good cherries into her bowl for her to pluck the stems off.

This morning Jimmy pitted four quarts of cherries for my first quadruple batch of sugar-free jam. We had so many cherries, I decided to do a second quadruple batch, for which I modified my basic recipe by combining it with Jim's Spiced Cherry Jam recipe:


Sugar-free Spiced Cherry Jam

3 pounds (about 3 cups) prepared cherries (pitted)
½ of a 1.75-oz. package no sugar needed fruit pectin
1 cup artificial sweetener (I used Splenda)
1-1/2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon allspice
¼ teaspoon ground cloves

1. Prepare boiling water canner, jars, and lids.

2. Place prepared cherries in a 6- or 8-quart saucepan and use a hand blender to puree to desired consistency. (The recipe didn't call for it, but I actually simmered my cherries for 15 or 20 minutes while I was washing jars and getting the canning kettle boiling.) Gradually stir in spices, almond extract, pectin and lemon juice. Add butter to reduce foaming. Bring mixture to a rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, over high heat, stirring constantly.

3. Add artificial sweetener. Return mixture to a full rolling boil. Boil hard for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim if necessary.

4. Fill and seal jars. Process in water bath for ten minutes.

(makes about four half-pints)


So. Delicious.

Tonight it's Jim's turn to crank out a few batches of fully-leaded (sugared) jam. He had the kids helping him pit cherries, and as I type, I can hear him mashing up the first batch with his KitchenAid hand blender.

It's going to be a long (but deliciously aromatic) night.

Did I mention we'll be up at 7 a.m. to pick raspberries in Yakima River Canyon? Yep, more jam.

Yum

Go ahead and laugh; I would. Oatmeal is not one of those things you'd expect to inspire rave reviews, much less instant oatmeal. A couple weeks ago I bought a box of Oat Fit to put in my 72-hour kit. I had a few packets left over, so they've been sitting in my pantry.

Usually my standard breakfast is a slice of my homemade bread with some organic peanut butter and a glass of low-fat milk. Quick, but plenty of energy. I've been too busy to bake lately so I've been eating cereal for breakfast for a while. Yesterday morning I finished off the last of my only box of Grape Nuts. So when I got home from a walk in the rain this morning, and glanced around for something to warm me up, the oatmeal caught my eye.

While it was still cooking in the microwave, my mouth started to water because it smelled so good. What's truly amazing, is it tastes even better than it smells.

Did I mention it's sugar free? And no, I'm not getting paid for this post. It really tastes that good.

Cherry jam

One of Jimmy's favorite books introduces the preposterous idea that it's possible to get tired of jam. Obviously, Frances' mother must have stocked her pantry with the store-bought variety, because as anyone who puts up their own preserves knows: there's no such thing as too much homemade jam.

Through Jim's folks, we got a great deal on Bing cherries; we bought 40 pounds at 50¢ a pound. We pitted and canned the first 25 pounds, which yielded 18 quarts. With the last 15 pounds, I made a quadruple batch of sugar-free cherry jam, and we still had a few pounds left over for eating fresh.

I used the same recipe from the pectin package as I did for the strawberry jam, but with a few additional modifications.

A single batch of cherry jam calls for three pounds of prepared fruit and the equivalent of that is about one cup to one pound. Since cherries compress quite a bit when they are pitted and ground, I started with four heaping quarts of cherries--I measured them out in a big glass two-quart measuring cup, which I heaped as high as possible. Then I pitted the cherries before grinding them.

I fired up our KitchenAid stand mixer, used the food grinder attachment, and made a total of 12 cups of ground cherries. I simmered them down for about a half hour to thicken the consistency before adding the other ingredients.

Then I used half the amount of pectin called for, because when I cracked into a jar of my new strawberry jam on Sunday, I found that the texture was more like paste than jam--tasty paste to be sure, but a bit too thick for my liking. I also used less Splenda because I wanted to bring out the tart flavor of the cherries; I used 1 cup per batch.

The quadruple batch yielded 7 pints of jam, and I was very pleased with the results of my alterations to the recipe. The flavor was sweet but tangy, and the consistency was thick but not gelatinous. Ah, success!

Strawberry jam

Canning season has officially begun here at the Big Red House. On Thursday I picked up our order of Klicker strawberries from Winegar's, which sells them locally. The berries are a bit spendy (20 pounds set us back $50, but we did split the order with a friend, which helped)--though in hindsight, they were completely worth the cost because they arrived in a food-grade plastic bucket already hulled and sliced.

With all that prep work done, it only took me an hour to cook, can, and process my jam. This is the first year we've made strawberry jam, and I experimented with a sugar-free batch, while Jim made a batch of the fully-leaded variety.

I used the recipe from the "no sugar needed" pectin box, with a couple modifications. I doubled the recipe and added butter, which the pectin instructions recommended to reduce foaming. I also eliminated the cup of apple juice that was called for, and added lemon juice.

Sugar-free Strawberry Jam

4 cups prepared strawberries (hulled and sliced)
1 1.75-oz. package no sugar needed fruit pectin
1-1/2 cups artificial sweetener (I used Splenda)
1-1/2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Prepare boiling water canner, jars, and lids.

2. Combine prepared berries in a 6- or 8-quart saucepan and mash gently to release juice. (The recipe didn't call for it, but I actually simmered my berries for 15 or 20 minutes while I was washing jars and getting the canning kettle boiling.) Gradually stir in pectin and lemon juice. Add butter to reduce foaming. Bring mixture to a rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, over high heat, stirring constantly.

3. Add artificial sweetener. Return mixture to a full rolling boil. Boil hard for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim if necessary.

4. Fill and seal jars. Process in water bath for ten minutes.

Yield: 4-6 half pints (doubling the recipe, I filled four pint jars)

Guilt-free less brownies

For the past few weeks I've been fixated on brownies.

It all started because of my church assignment to teach food preservation and emergency preparedness classes. A couple months ago my mother-in-law and I taught an evening cooking seminar called "Wheat 101" about the nutritional value of whole wheat, how to grind flour at home, baking bread, and a few other cooking-with-wheat tips and tricks. It was so popular, I decided to do a "Wheat 102", which I taught two weeks ago. The whole idea was to present fun ways to use wheat in every-day cooking, so as to keep food storage rotating regularly. We had one presenter who did a wheatgrass display, one who showed how to steam wheat and use cracked or puffed wheat, and I demonstrated making whole wheat brownies and pizza crust.

I do homemade wheat pizza crust all the time, but I had never baked whole wheat brownies. I figured it couldn't be too difficult, so I found a couple of recipes online to try and... whoah! Maybe the rest of the whole wheat-eating world just has apallingly low standards, because the first two recipes I tried were nasty: dry, crumbly, flavorless, and completely lacking the fudgy goodness so essential to an acceptable brownie. With only a couple days to go before my class, I started panicking. I needed a really tasty recipe, or I would have a hard time selling people on the concept of making every-day recipes with food storage items.

Thank goodness for Google; I found some great suggestions for changing the consistency of the brownies which helped me to understand the chemistry behind the undesirable results I had produced so far. With a bit more tweaking, I finally arrived at the recipe below on my third try. In all humility, I think it's actually better than brownies from a box, even the Hershey's Triple Chocolate Chunk mix you can buy in bulk at Costco. These whole wheat brownies have passed both the picky husband and picky teenager tests. You'll never notice the extra fiber hiding inside all that moist, rich fudginess! Oh, and if you want a non-stop one-way ticket to a diabetic coma, you can also frost them.

Fudgy Whole Wheat Brownies

1 cup vegetable oil
2¼ cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs, plus two egg yolks
2/3 cup unsweetened dutch process cocoa
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)
1 cup chocolate chips (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Lightly grease a 9" x 13" pan.
2. In a medium-sized mixing bowl add the sugar to the oil and stir to combine. Stir in the vanilla and eggs until mixed thoroughly.
3. In another mixing bowl, sift together the cocoa, salt, baking powder, and flour. Stir into the bowl with the wet ingredients until smooth, then add the nuts and chips, again stirring until smooth. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.
4. Bake the brownies for 25 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. The brownies should feel set on the edges and in the center. Remove them from the oven and cool on a rack before cutting and serving.
5. Frost if desired (see recipe below). Makes two dozen 2-inch brownies.

Chocolate Frosting

1 stick (½ cup) butter
2/3 cup unsweetened dutch process cocoa
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Melt butter in a small sauce pan (or in a glass mixing bowl in the microwave—on high for 30 seconds).
2. Stir in cocoa.
3. Alternately add powdered sugar and milk, beating on medium speed to spreading consistency.
4. Add more milk, if needed.
5. Stir in vanilla. Makes about 2 cups of frosting.

So... it was all well and good until my friend Debbie, who was attending the seminar, and who also happens to be diabetic, piped up and asked, "Do you have a recipe for sugar-free brownies?"

In the two weeks since, I've attempted four different batches of sugar-free brownies, which gradually evolved from a recipe I found on Splenda's website. The trickiest thing about cooking with Splenda is it has completely different chemical properties than sugar, and in baked goods especially, it tends to dry things out. The original recipe was for Butterscotch Brownies, but with my first batch I tweaked it by omitting the butterscotch chips and pecans, substituting whole wheat flour, and adding unsweetened cocoa. Success? Nope: dry, grainy and crumbly.

For the next incarnation, I added extra egg yolks (the secret ingredient which helped my whole wheat brownies to be so fudgy), as well as some sugar-free chocolate pudding, to try and combat the crumbly, dry texture. Unfortunately, between the pudding and extra yolks, I wound up with something similar to chocolate soufflé. On my third attempt, I omitted the eggs altogether. Better, but still too oily and gooey (without being fudgy).

Today I finally got it right. I cut back the pudding and the oil by half, and the result was a moist brownie with a rich chocolate flavor. Not as fudgy as I tend to like them but still pretty darn good for sugar-free.

Sugar-free Brownies

1 cup cold milk
half of a 1.4-oz package of sugar-free instant chocolate pudding mix (about 1/6 cup)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat flour
2/3 cup Splenda
¼ cup dutch process baking cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine flour, Splenda, cocoa, baking powder and salt in medium bowl; set aside.
3. Combine pudding mix, milk, oil and vanilla in a large mixing bowl with a wire whisk. Gradually beat in flour mixture.

4. Bake in greased 9" x 9”pan for 25 to 30 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack. Cut into bars.

Now I have the brownie bug out of my system, I'm free to move on and obsess about something really important—like whether I should color my hair for my 20-year class reunion this summer...

All of the taste, none of the guilt

Did I mention I gave up sugar again at the beginning of 2008? After Audrey was born, I felt (mistakenly) like I had a get-out-of-jail-free card, and I got a little nuts with the sugar again. I did my obligatory overindulgence around the holidays, and then it hit me: I was ready to climb back on the sugar-free wagon.

I realized even though I'm no longer pregnant and battling g.d., I felt so much better when I wasn't eating sugar, with the added bonuses of losing weight and not having my skin break out. Surprisingly, this time around hasn't been too hard; I've dumped my old friends Ben and Jerry and started hanging around with the Blue Bunny and Skinny Cow again.

On Saturday I was at Super 1 Foods doing my grocery shopping and I noticed Blue Bunny has a new flavor out: No Sugar Added Reduced Fat Cherry Vanilla. I know that sounds like a mouthful, but trust me: it's a delicious mouthful. Just add a bit of Smucker's sugar-free hot fudge on top, and it tastes like those cherry cordials Jim always gets in his stocking for Christmas. Only better.

After dinner conversation

I took the kids grocery shopping this afternoon and while we were on the frozen foods aisle, I let Jimmy pick out dessert. A boy after my own heart, he chose Blue Bunny's Bunny Tracks ice cream (they also make a sugar-free version—yay!) Now, ordinarily Jimmy has pretty good table manners (for being four), but tonight after dinner...

Jimmy: "Mom, I'm ready for dessert."
(Prolonged pause, in which I cup my hand up to my ear and look at him expectantly.)
Me: (finally) "I need to hear you say something else before I get your ice cream."
(Jimmy looks puzzled.)
Jim: "I think Mom is waiting to hear you say the magic word."
Jimmy: "The magic word?"
Jim: "You know, the magic word you should say when you want something..."
Jimmy: (thinking hard) "Uh... train!"
Jim: (unsuccessfully stifling laughter) "No, that would be please."
Jimmy: "Oh! Mom, may I please have some of that bunny crack ice cream?"

Yeah, Jim and I both lost it at that point.

I'm a skinny cowgirl

What a good girl I am; I just finished a tasty, nutritious lunch of boneless pork ribs, a spinach salad, a whole wheat biscuit, and a glass of skim milk. To chase it down, I indulged (guilt-free) in a no-sugar-added ice cream sandwich.

BGD (before gestational diabetes) I used to enjoy Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches and I recently discovered that they also make a version sweetened with Splenda. Now I can satisfy my jones for ice cream while still taking care of me and baby. Halelujah!

We will eat a last year's pippin of my own graffing ...

Another quote by the Bard—this one from King Henry IV:

Nay, you shall see my orchard, where, in an arbour,
we will eat a last year's pippin of my own graffing . . .

Disregard the fact that this quote is taken completely out of context and focus on its topic: apples. Last week two different friends with their own apple trees gave us big bags of the fruit—many more than we thought we could use. Jim is feeling the stirrings of his annual winter baking frenzy and wanted to bake something with the apples but was perplexed because I've been trying to steer clear of sugar. What a thoughtful husband; he went to the Splenda section of allrecipes.com and found a recipe. With a bit of tweaking, he came up with a sugar-free apple pie that tastes virtually the same as the fully-leaded version. It's not low-carb in the sense that he used regular all-purpose flour, but people watching their sugar intake can enjoy a slice with minimal guilt.

Jim's Sugar-Free Apple Pie

Crust:
2-1/3 c all-purpose flour
1/3 c cake flour
1 T Splenda
1/2 t salt
1/2 c shortening
1/2 c butter
1/2 c ice water

Glaze:
1 egg white
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon water
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Filling:
7 cups baking apples, thin-sliced, cored, peeled
1 cup Splenda
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1-1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 T butter, cut into pieces

1. Preheat oven to 425°. Make the filling: Place sliced apples into a large mixing bowl and set aside. Combine Splenda, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in a small bowl. Sprinkle mixture over apples and toss. Set aside.

2. Make the crust: In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, and salt. Using a pastry cutter or two knives, cut in vegetable shortening and butter until coarse. Add ice water, and mix gently until moist. Form two balls, and roll out one of them to line pie plate. Spoon filling into unbaked crust. Dot with butter. Roll out second ball, and cover pie. Fold edges of top crust under bottom crust, and flute edges. Slit top of pie to vent.

3. Make egg glaze: In a small bowl, beat egg white with 1 tablespoon water. Brush top of pie with mixture, and sprinkle with white and brown sugar. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350°, and bake until filling bubbles, about 45 minutes.