Slow cooker strawberry butter

Slow cooker strawberry butter is sweetened naturally with pure maple syrup and a touch of honey -- enjoy it on toast or stirred into yogurt or oatmeal. 

I scored the very last of the local strawberries from a neighborhood farm market this week. Which threw me into such a panic (No more strawberries until next year? Gaaaaaaah!) that I had to preserve them.

I froze a bunch for smoothies and then thought about strawberry jam. But then I tried to think of something else with less than a bazillion pounds of sugar.

And that reminded me to check Marisa McClellan's latest preserving book entitled Naturally Sweet Food in Jars. This is a whole book of preserves made without refined sugar. Yes! No white sugar -- amazing, flavorful jams and preserves sweetened only natural sweeteners like honey, maple and fruit juices.

Squeeeeeeeee!

I do so love to can but sometimes the amount of sugar required to keep our favorite jams safe for canning makes me feel like I'm defeating the purpose of putting up healthy fresh fruit.

You know what I mean? (It's why my yummy pear honey is used very, very sparingly around Casa de Ninj.)

After making a couple of batches, I've decided this strawberry butter is my new favorite thing. It's like apple butter ... only so much freakin' better. I've been spreading it on toast, natch, but we also love to stir it into plain yogurt for breakfast.

And I haven't even begun to start baking or making overnight oatmeal with it yet!

Slow cooker chai apple butter

Easy slow cooker chai apple butter: Use it as a flavorful spread or swirl it into your morning yogurt, oatmeal or cottage cheese.

Last day to talk about apples, I swear. But that doesn't mean I'll start talking about pumpkin. Heck no -- that ship sailed this year and I can't say I missed it.

No, we'll move directly into preparations for this food blogger's high holy day: Thanksgiving! And then we'll talk about all the blow-your-mind things you can make with those tons of Thanksgiving leftovers.

But before we start talking all about the Thanksgiving sides and Mr. Ninj's famous deep fried turkey, let's have one last hurrah for apples. Which I've doctored into a chai-spiced apple butter that is super easy, because it calls for ground chai tea and is made in the slow cooker.

Taralli -- buttery Italian Easter cookies

Taralli are simple, buttery, traditional Italian cookies, often made for Easter, reminiscent of scones and, when unglazed, perfect for a not-too-sweet breakfast or cocktail cookie.

In my family, these cookies have always simply been called "Mom's Italian cookies" and they were always made for Easter (and sometimes Christmas). It was years before I realized that a) they were a traditional Italian cookie that other Italian families besides ours knew about and b) they had a name: taralli (although there are umpteen variations on how to spell it).

They are very buttery, cakey cookies, simple to make and amazingly delicious in their simplicity. This is a recipe that lets the good, natural taste of butter really shine through (I have since seen other recipes for taralli that call for almond or lemon extract, but I prefer this simple buttery taste).

They don't have much sugar in them, so they are not very sweet. In fact, I prefer to eat them for breakfast, as they are almost more like a scone than a cookie. Similarly, they make a great cocktail cookie or afternoon tea cookie.

However, if you have a sweeter sweet tooth than I, you can certainly ice them. Growing up, we always iced them, with a simple glaze made from confectioners sugar, moistened with a little lemon juice and milk -- just enough to make a thick liquid to spoon over the cooled cookies. And, as they were Easter cookies, we added a drop or two food coloring to some of the glaze to make them pastel shades of pink, green and yellow, as well as white.

Pumpkin ginger cupcakes (gluten-free or not) -- and a giveaway

These delicious pumpkin ginger cupcakes with mascarpone frosting can be made gluten-free or not.

Yes, I know it's November and therefore the all-pumpkin-all-the-time blogger recipe pumpkinpalooza should now be over, right?

Wrong.

As I have mentioned before, The Ninj respects seasonality. To wit, I held off this year on pumpkin-izing the blog until October, to give props to apples and pears in September.

And guess what? Pumpkins are still in season, even though Halloween is over and it is November! I mean, hello? Ever heard of pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dessert?

But I'm here to do you one seasonal dessert better, since regular readers know I'm not a fan of pie: pumpkin ginger cupcakes with a creamy mascarpone-cream cheese frosting. Now THIS is a Thanksgiving dessert that I can get behind.

And did I mention these cupcakes are gluten-free? OR NOT!!? And that either way they are moist, not cloyingly sweet and perhaps the most perfect dessert EVAH?

Yeah, I'm pleasing the heck out of everyone with this one, especially for Thanksgiving. Pfffft: Who the hell would eat pie when you can have cupcakes?

Bourbon apple pumpkin butter

Slow cooker bourbon apple pumpkin butter -- so simple to make in the crockpot, using fresh pumpkin.

It's the third week of October: Are you sick of pumpkin yet?

I hope you appreciate that I haven't been overwhelming you with pumpkin recipes; I've been trying to let apples and other fall favorites have their time in the sun. But I couldn't resist this recipe. It showcases not only flavorful fall apples but also finally-seasonally-appropriate pumpkin ...

... and booze!

There you go: Possibly the most perfect fall recipe yet, no?

I have no doubt you have seen lots of recipes flying around the blogosphere this month for pumpkin butter. But have you really looked at them or made any of them? It's safe to say that 99 percent of them involve cooking down some canned pumpkin.

Come on, peeps: We can do better. (Ninjas always do better.) And it's not hard.

If you're going to go to the effort to make a pumpkin butter, why not use some fresh pumpkin? Jeesh, and if you throw it in a crockpot and then immersion-blend the bejesus out of it, it practically cooks itself.

Which is exactly what I did.

Roasted pear and cardamom butter

Holy crap, we've got tons of pears in the wee orchard!

Regular readers will know how amazing this is, after the Great Pear Theft of 2011 (thanks to the deer and possibly a bear) and the Great Season of No Damned Fruit At All of 2012 (thanks to the weather). Although, to be fair, the animal thieves did teach me that I could harvest the fruit by shaking the tree while I waited for my fancy new fruit picker to be delivered.

We have two pear trees -- a seckel and a Bartlett (I think) -- in amongst a bunch of apple trees, two sour cherry trees, one plum and one peach, which must have heard me talking about how I thought it was dead and was going to cut it down because it yielded a number of peaches in its own defense this year ("I'm not dead yet!").

When we purchased the farmette several years ago, I was more than a little excited about the wee orchard, envisioning the lovely pears and apples that I could pick and eat or turn into gorgeous desserts.

But it's time for a reality check: homegrown fruit is damned ugly.

Unless of course you want to spend most of your time -- I mean a LOT of time -- monitoring the trees, spraying for diseases and handpicking gross-ass caterpillars and bugs, you're going to end up with ugly fruit. Mr. Ninj spoke recently with the owner of a commercial apple orchard; he talked about how they have a team that walks around the orchard with a laptop, monitoring the trees and feeding the data into special software programs that show them the short time windows they have to spray the trees to avoid massive fruit loss due to fungal infections and the like.

Um ... no thanks. The Ninj and her laptop don't have that kind of time.

Homemade Butter and Buttermilk Rum Pound Cake

Buttermilk rum pound cake, made with homemade butter and buttermilk

Regular readers know that I'm participating in Grow It Cook It Can It's Cook It! 2012 monthly technique challenge. The March challenge was making your own butter. After reading Caroline's post I figured it would be like ... well ... like buttah.

Put some cream into a mixer and let it run for 10 minutes. Voila -- butter and buttermilk. (See? Like buttah.)

Seriously. I brought my Kindle into the kitchen because I thought I'd just dump in the cream, turn on the mixer and read some chapters, just relaxing by the fire, while the butter made itself.

It started off as expected, see?

But ... how relaxing does this look to you? (Good thing my Kindle was still relaxing in my chair, not on the counter.)