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 chicken stock

Learn how to make recipe-ready, freezable slow cooker chicken stock from only the bones of a roast chicken, a handful of veggies and water.

This is one of those recipes for DIY pantry staples that has been in my repertoire for years yet I haven't shared it with you yet.

Shame on me! I think it's because it's one of those not-really-a-recipe recipes that hasn't seemed "worthy" enough. Until now. Because I've been crockpot cray cray lately, as regular readers well know.

If you've never tackled homemade chicken stock, this slow cooker version will change your mind. It's not at all time-consuming because, well, SLOW COOKER. Plus, all you need to make it is the carcass of your last roast chicken (read: NO WASTE! Practically composting!), some common veggies you've likely always got in your fridge, some spices and water.

Talk about making something out of nothing!

Here's what you do: The next time you make a roast chicken, be a little less thorough than you might be when carving it -- leaving a little bit of meat on the bones means a more flavorful stock.

DIY smoked trout

Learn how to smoke trout, salmon, veggies, salt or just about anything else quickly, easily and with no mess on the grill or even on the stovetop.

Let's talk about smoked trout. Or smoked salmon. Or any kind of smoked fish. Do you love it? I do. Whether I enjoy it as part of a charcuterie board or a cheese plate at a cocktail party or added to a pasta dish or salad (like my bagels and lox pasta salad!), I'm a smoked fish junkie.

So the "I can do that!" DIY side of my brain kicked into high gear when I discovered an affordable little stove-top smoker a few years ago.

Yes, a few years ago. Believe it or not, I got this stovetop smoker, made by Camerons Products, for Christmas more than two years ago and just never got around to using it.

(To be fair, we wound up beginning a big cross-country move just after Christmas that year, so smoking fish for fun wasn't really my top priority.)

But I dusted off the box earlier this year and smoked some fish. And then some more fish. And then some salt. And now, since it's so easy, there's pretty much no stopping the smoking train around Casa de Ninj.

If you do nothing else this year that I've told you to do, do this: buy this stovetop smoker -- or give one to someone as a gift. It's the coolest thing ever, I swear. Not to mention that it's crazy easy to use and you can smoke all sorts of stuff with zero mess.

Here's exactly how it works:

Ginger spiced plum sauce

Spread this easy ginger spiced plum sauce on grilled chicken or pork, turn it into a jammy vinaigrette or swap it for fruit puree when baking.

Yep -- it's happened once again. It isn't even October yet, but every yoga-pants-clad food blogger is waxing poetic about all the pumpkin-spiced things that bring her joy. Except The Ninj. I may be wearing the ubiquitous yoga-pants uniform of the work-from-home writer, but I'm still refusing to talk about pumpkin. I'm still hung up on end-of-summer / beginning-of-fall fruit.

Plums to be exact, which you'll recall featured prominently in my recent fresh plum breakfast cake. Good lordy, y'all, I haven't even gotten started on apples yet, let alone pumpkin!

(And, frankly, when the heck did fall become all about pumpkin of all things? Not apples, not butternut squash, but pumpkin? I blame Starbucks.)

Plus, I realized, much to my chagrin that, given my lack of a real garden this year, I haven't canned or preserved very much. And that, my friends, is more than a little TRAGIC.

The lack of canning and abundance of fresh plums brought me to this ginger spiced plum sauce. ERMERGAHD, this stuff is so heavenly spread on freshly grilled chicken or pork -- just the right amount of earthy spice, tartness and sweetness. Shred the chicken and mix in the plum sauce and you've got the basis for an Asian-inspired taco that will blow your mind.

I have even mixed this plum sauce with a little oil and vinegar to make a jammy vinaigrette for a peppery arugula salad. And I also think it would be lovely baked into some marmalade muffins or my favorite homemade granola.

Make your own kale powder

It's easy to make your own kale powder in the oven or a food dehydrator -- a great way to sneak lots of veggie nutrition into smoothies, soups and more.

When summer begins to wind down, my preserving instincts kick into high gear.

I start to panic: Fall is coming. What will I do without juicy fresh tomatoes? Or handful after handful of fresh basil? Or ripe peaches? Or fresh greens from right outside my back door?

Right now, my freezer is full of peaches, blueberries, strawberries and watermelon for winter smoothies and my pantry is loaded up with marinated dried tomatoes that I can turn into an amazing pasta sauce or layer on pizzas. And making a winter store of pesto and basil chimchurri is on my to-do list for next week.

So what about the greens?

While I have tried freezing heartier greens like kale and collards, they're really only good for soups and stews once thawed, as their cellular structure really breaks down once frozen. The best way I've found to preserve fresh greens is to dehydrate them and turn them into vegetable powders.

In the past, I showed you how to make tomato powder, which is an awesome way to add a huge pop of fresh tomato flavor to soups and pasta sauces or mix with yogurt or salad dressing to create a veggie dip. All it takes is a few hours in a food dehydrator or on low temperature in your oven.

Making greens powder -- in this case, kale powder -- is accomplished the same way.

My favorite use for this kale powder is very sneaky. Regular readers know Mr. Ninj, who never met a vegetable he liked, is my equivalent of mommy bloggers' picky 3-year-old eaters, so I'm always on the lookout for stealthy new ninja-like ways of sneaking vegetables into his diet.

Mixing this kale powder into his morning smoothies has become my secret weapon!

Bourbon fig jam

Enjoy easy, versatile bourbon fig jam on a charcuterie platter, paired with cheese, swirled into morning yogurt or slathered on warm toast. 

So, I guess you knew it was inevitable that I'd hit the bourbon, once I moved to Kentucky.

But, in true Ninj fashion, I'm not just drinking it or soaking holiday fruitcake in it -- I'm also cooking with it (not that the two don't go hand-in-hand at Casa de Ninj, mind you). Behold, this sweet and smoky bourbon fig jam, one of two recipes I created recently for the readers of Edible Green Mountains magazine.

(In case you didn't realize, in addition to being The Ninj on this blog, I'm also a freelance writer for a variety of other publications, both print and online.)

My article is an homage to bourbon as a winter warmer -- because boat drinks and icy glasses of white wine just don't cut it in wintertime, no matter on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you find yourself.

Meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade

Small-batch Meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade is just as gorgeous as it is delicious.

My history with Meyer lemons is complicated.

Mr. Ninj and I used to live in California, once upon a time. In The OC, in fact. However, no one who actually lived there ever called it "The OC" -- that's just stupid. Let's just say it was a very surreal experience.

My favorite part of living there, though, was that our postage-stamp-sized back yard had the biggest, most prolific Meyer lemon tree on the planet. No joke: ON THE PLANET, I'm sure. Each winter, when it produced its GIGANTIC fruit, I used to ship boxes of them back to friends and relatives on the East Coast. Yes, BOXES. I had enough Meyer lemons (and these suckers were BIG) to have my own mail-order business.

(And yes, I'm purposely using A LOT OF CAPS for emphasis, so you understand the awesomeness of my tree.)

Here's the funny part: Meyer lemons were not hip and trendy back then as they are now. I had a hell of a time finding any recipes that called for Meyer lemons -- and, unfortunately, this was before I knew how to can.

So we made a lot of lemonade. What a waste.

And now, of course, I know how to preserve and have about 17 bajillion recipes that call for Meyer lemons -- and I live in Vermont, which isn't exactly the citrus capital of the world.

God, I miss that tree.

(Hey, current residents of my old house at 21 Mallorca in Foothill Ranch, California -- can you send me some lemons? Pretty please? We fertilized the bejesus out of that tree and you are reaping the benefits. I will happily pay shipping costs and send you jam in return -- and I won't even hold it against you that you cut down those beautiful palm trees. Thanks.)

When we moved from California to North Carolina, my awesome friend Judy, aware of my pain at leaving the tree, sent me a baby Meyer lemon tree via mail order for me to grow in a pot. Yippee! I had so many visions of continuing my Meyer lemon dynasty on the East Coast.

Here's where the Meyer lemon saga gets complicated. Because I thought Judy's idea was so great, I gifted my mom with the same kind of baby Meyer lemon tree for her birthday. In 2004.  The same year I got my tree. Which then got some kind of disease and died (well, Judy claims I "killed it" -- whatevs -- but I know it was a disease.) And my mom's tree did not get the same disease and lived.

So The Ninj, who loves putting up food in Mason jars and craves all things Meyer lemon, has no tree. The Ninj's mom, on the other hand, who doesn't even cook any more and could give a rat's ass about Meyer lemons, has a tree. A 10-year-old tree that produces about four big lemons each year.  The universe is cruel.

Now, to my mom's credit, she generously gives them away ... but, here's the kicker, only one per person.

You know what you can do with ONE Meyer lemon? A whole lotta nothing, Mom, that's what.

So when I received my ONE Meyer lemon from Mom this year, I thought long and hard about how to use it. I even polled my Facebook users (btw, good suggestions, Feeps -- I think I'll make Meyer lemon curd next year). That's when I decided I could stretch the lemony goodness by pairing it with some gorgeous blood oranges and making them all into a marmalade.

Cidered jerky (beef or venison) -- and tips on buying a dehydrator

Some great tips for buying a dehydrator, in which you can make this tangy cidered beef jerky or venison jerky.

A big hug and WELCOME to all you jerky fans!

Since my first chicken jerky post two years ago, I have been promising to post another jerky recipe. At long last, it's here.

Why so long, you ask? Honestly, it was the photographs. Let's face it: jerky does not photograph well.

I've made this particular cidered jerky recipe a bunch of times and the photo shoots were miserable failures. The did not pass the "would I eat this?" test.

But recently I realized that, as with so many things in life, striving for perfection was preventing me from being happy. Because this jerky is so freakin' good that it makes me really, really happy to both eat it and share the recipe with all of you.

Regular readers who know of my ongoing battle for backyard produce with the deer on our property will appreciate that the batch of cidered jerky featured in these photographs came from a big buck taken on our property last year by the intrepid young man who hunts our land.

In fact, I gave the hunter some of this jerky to try. The next day he texted me to let me know he ate it all in one sitting and proclaimed it "awesome", with FOUR exclamation points. So it's officially hunter-approved.

Hard cider: how to make your own

Making hard cider is one of The Ninj's favorite fall activities. Now is the perfect time to get some fresh-pressed juice and get started. The process takes some time but the payoff is delicious! If you'd like to learn how to make your own hard cider, check out my three-part tutorial.

Be sure to read through all three installments before you begin. There are many helpful links throughout to the cider-making supplies that you will need.

• MAKING HARD CIDER, PART 1 (procuring juice, beginning the fermentation process)
• MAKING HARD CIDER, PART 2 (racking for clarity)
• MAKING HARD CIDER, PART 3 (bottling)

Make your own vegetable powders

Via Facebook and Twitter, I'm still reading about folks putting up the last of their tomatoes for the winter, so I think you'll find this post quite timely.

While I do grow my own tomatoes in my garden, my yield is often not what I hope. I have also had much better luck with small, prolific tomatoes like Sungolds than with bigger, beefier tomatoes, ideal for slicing and canning.

So, like many of you, I usually turn to my local farmers when it's time to put up tomatoes for the winter.

This year, I bought half a bushel.

Now, that may not seem like much but, trust me, when you wash them and line them up on the kitchen counter, it's a lot.

And I mean A LOT.

I didn't weigh my box but a quick search shows that the standard weight for a bushel of tomatoes in the United States is 53 pounds. So I'm guessing I had about 25 pounds of tomatoes.

Instead of simply making the whole lot into sauce for the freezer, I got a little creative this year.

Pear honey

If you like jam you'll love this vintage recipe for pear honey -- sweet and spreadable with a hint of ginger. Enjoy it on toast, muffins or even as a basting sauce for chicken!

I have been looking so forward to writing this post.

And not simply for the opportunity to introduce you to pear honey (it's not really honey, honey, but we'll get to that in a minute) but rather to talk about backstories.

My sister-in-law once asked me how I decide what to put on the blog. Largely, my inspiration comes from the seemingly never-ending supply of food magazines to which I subscribe (probably too many), Pinterest pins (probably too many) and aha! moments of my own (probably not enough).

And then sometimes they are simply handed to me.

A few weeks ago, given the overwhelming number of pears we got from our trees this year (yay, pear trees -- keep up the good work!), I made and posted about pear butter. Yum. In sharing a link to the pear butter post on my Facebook page, a follower commented something Amazon-ish like "If you like pear butter, you should try pear honey."

Here's where the backstory gets interesting: The commenting follower was Margaret, a college classmate of mine that I didn't know well as an undergrad and have only come to know better and consider a friend in the past few years, thanks to Facebook and 5-year-interval college reunions. In her comment, she mentioned that her mother used to make pear honey all the time.

Whaaaa? Pear honey? I was intrigued.

I (of course) googled around and found that pear honey isn't honey at all but actually a sweet pear jam. Bizarrely, it's made with pears, sugar and ... wait for it ... canned pineapple.

I know, right? Who the hell decides to put these things together for the first time? "You know what this pear jam needs? PINEAPPLE!"

Whatevs.

But I was willing to take Margaret's word for it. But given the variety of recipes for pear honey on the interwebs claiming to be "the best," I decided to go for a proven recipe: I asked Margaret if her mother, Helen, would be willing to share her recipe.

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.

CSA Share Ninja Rescue 2013: pickle roundup (20 ways!)

It is indeed Monday, the day we share the CSA Share Ninja Rescue, a weekly feature in which you tell me on Fridays what veg you got in your CSA share box (or found at the farmers' market) that you don't know what to do with and I'll give you a whole bunch of recipe ideas on the following Monday.

But the feature may look a little different today. I decided to shake things up a little and not focus on specific vegetables but on a technique instead.

So today we're talking preserving: namely, preserving through pickling. 

Pickling is a great way to preserve a lot of the garden's excess bounty to enjoy over the winter months, when your CSA or garden isn't overloading you with delicious, colorful veggies.

Additionally, I tried to include a lot of recipes and posts from some of my favorite bloggers, rather than just recipes from professional chefs and foodie mags (although they are represented as well). Who knows? You might find a new blog to follow!

Lastly, for all of you who are thinking, "Great, Ninj, but I don't can!" or perhaps, "This is lovely, Ninj, but I don't like cucumbers!" -- don't worry, I've got you covered, too. (Come on, would The Ninj leave you hanging?!!!)

Let's get pickling, shall we?

Cucumber Pickles (canned)

• Garlic Dill Pickles from Food in Jars
• Dill Spears from Sherri Brooks Vinton's Put 'Em Up
• Best-Evah Dill Pickles from The Ninj 
• Curry Pickles from Homemade Trade
• Sweet-n-spicy Bread and Butter Pickles from Martha Stewart

Other Pickled Vegetables (canned)

• Pickled Chard Stems from Local Kitchen
• Pickled Garlic Scapes from The Garden of Eating
• Carrot and Daikon Radish Pickle from What Julia Ate
• Pickled Pepper Rings from Sweet Domesticity
• Pickled Rhubarb from Well Preserved

No-Canning-Required Recipes

• Quick Cucumber Pickles from Rachel Ray
• Cider Vinegar Pickled Beets from Food and Wine
• Pickled Radishes from Bon Appetit
• Refrigerator Dilly Beans from The Ninj 
• Pickled Eggs from What Julia Ate
• Fermented Dill Pickles from The Ninj
• Fermented Honey-Garlic Pickles from Well Preserved
• Pickled Carrots from David Lebovitz
• Pickled Green Strawberries from Kitchen Apparel (guesting on Shared Appetite)
• Pickled snow peas from Alana Chernila

Do you have a favorite pickling method or recipe? Leave a comment below: The Ninj wants to know.

Blueberry vinegar

More excitement around Casa de Ninj this summer: the high-bush blueberries are producing!

Regular readers will recall that last year was pretty much a crapfest in the wee orchard: no peaches, no pears, no cherries, a handful of blueberries and a few measly apples. Pffft. Hardly worth the countless hours I spent hand-picking beetles off all the trees.

Of course, all this misery was courtesy of Mother Nature, who is a fickle broad indeed, giving us a killing late spring frost in 2012 -- as if we hadn't gone through enough cold all winter. Similarly, this summer she has given us unseasonably cold temperatures alternating with blistering heat and seemingly endless rain. For cripes' sake, it's mid-August and I'm still waiting on the tomato harvest; if we don't scoot this along, my unripe tomatoes will be touched with frost before I can eat them.

But it turns out there's a silver lining to all this craptacular weather: the blueberries are thriving.

I'm done complaining. We only have four blueberry bushes and I have already harvested at least six quarts, with many more out there just waiting for me. We have oodles, even with my sharing them with the birds this year (we're all peacefully co-existing now that I've started feeding them and gave them some bitchin' bird baths).

So I was delighted when the week's "assignment" from Sherri Brooks Vinton's Put 'Em Up Fruit for the From Scratch Club's virtual book club turned out to include blueberries.

Booyah.

I already put up some of what I'm calling Black and Blue Jam this year, using the aforementioned blueberries and a boatload of wild black raspberries foraged from the edges of our woods, so I wanted to try something other than jam. Behold: Sherri's book offered up blueberry vinegar!

Orange-cumin chutney and chutney cheese spread

I'm doing a lot more canning this summer than in past years. Partly because the wee orchard has finally started bearing fruit (thank you, fertilizer) and partly because I'm cooking along with Sherri Brooks Vinton's Put 'Em Up Fruit as part of the From Scratch Club's virtual book club.

Our latest assignment topic was blackberries, raspberries and oranges. Now, you know The Ninj tries to cook and eat locally as much as possible but, given that I'm certain I'll never find an orange grown in Vermont, I decided to stray and buy some oranges to make one of Sherri's chutneys. (I also made a great mixed berry jam, but that's a discussion for another post.)

I'm glad I did because the chutney inspired perhaps one of the most hilarious conversations ever. Let me set the scene for you:

I'm jammin' up some chutney in the kitchen and Mr. Ninj comes into the house from the garage.

Mr. Ninj: "Wow, it smells good in here. Whatcha making?"
Me: "Orange cumin chutney."
Mr. Ninj: "ORANGE HUMAN CHUTNEY?????????????!!!!!!!" (yes, shrieking)
Me: "Yes. Orange human chutney. It's like Soilant Green but much tastier."

Dudes, I am never that quick with a witty comeback! 

So of course we now refer to it only as Orange-Human Chutney. (Sorry, Sherri.) I usually make jar labels for my canned goods: I can't wait to make that one.

Roasted sour cherry sauce

I had never eaten sour cherries until this summer.

Given that we have sour cherry trees in the wee orchard of the farmette we bought two years ago, you would think I would have eaten them last year.

But no.

Last year was pretty craptacular for our fruit trees. We had nearly no apples and not a single pear, based on a late spring frost that damaged all the blossoms (not to mention the pear-loving deer). We had a peach tree, mateless and pathetic, so no fruit there.  There were also two plum trees which were the wrong types to cross-polinate with each other. And the sour cherry trees just yielded what looked like pits on stems.

Additionally, last year we were new to our farmette and still figuring out how to care for all these trees and plants -- in fact, I spent much of last year simply trying to identify what we had so that I could learn how to care for it. I spent more than one of what I call "What the Hell Is This Day" at the local nursery: I bring in photos of the plants in my yard and ask the nursery workers, "What the hell is this?"

But, so far, this year has been better. We're managing pests and diseases, and I've read up on how to care for the orchard. So imagine my delight when the trees actually starting producing fruit that looked edible.

Flourless chocolate cake with strawberry-rhubarb jam

 
I need you to make me a promise. Right now.

You must promise me that you will make this cake as soon as possible. It is imperative that you promise me this because, if you don't, your life will not be complete.

(Yes, the cake is that good.)

Mr. Ninj described it as "better than restaurant-quality"; I'm calling it my new go-to dessert.

But wait -- there's more: it is ridiculously easy to make.

How easy? Well, can you boil water and use a spoon? Then you are imminently qualified to make this cake.

I'm participating once again in the From Scratch Club's virtual book club; currently, we are cooking from Sherri Brooks Vinton's Put 'Em Up! Fruit. Every two weeks, the group is assigned a different seasonal fruit or group of fruits to preserve (put 'em up) and then incorporate into a recipe (use 'em up). And we share our results with the rest of the group (and I, with you).

Our first fruit group was strawberries and rhubarb, the classic early-summer duo. I decided to cheat a little bit and use my roasted strawberry-rhubarb jam, since Sherri's book included recipes both for strawberry-rhubarb jam as well for roasted rhubarb (which was very similar) -- and I had already made a bunch of jars of my jam.

Lucky for you, one of Sherri's suggested recipes for using the jam was this flourless chocolate cake (topped with the jam). Frankly, I tried this recipe because I was pressed for time and happened to have all the ingredients in my pantry, but it turned out to be an excellent choice.

What a cake! 

Fruit leather

Boy oh boy oh boy, have I got an addictive snack for you.

Fruit leather. Which is simply the grown-up name for the Fruit Roll-Ups we had as kids.

(Do they even make those anymore?)

I longed to have Fruit Roll-Ups in my lunchbox but they were a rarity around our house. This, of course, made them even more desirable, nearly as desirable as candy, which is what they tasted like to me.

This homemade version is no different -- well, other than the fact that it is made with real fruit and no sugar. But it still tastes like candy.

And it's GOOD FOR YOU. I think that makes it freakin' fruit candy!

And addictive? That barely sums it up. I cannot stop eating these bad boys. I made the batch you see here with only apricots -- and it was fantastic. But I'm already dreaming about the different combinations I can concoct when my favorite fruits are in season. I'm dreaming a lot about blueberry-peach.

ZOMG.

Roasted strawberry-rhubarb jam

There's a ton of rhubarb in my garden.

Last year, I was fortunate enough to inherit part of divided rhubarb patch that one of my neighbors was giving away. Given that I had only gotten turned on to rhubarb the year before, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with the harvest.

After today, I will never again worry about that because I have discovered roasted rhubarb jam.

And now I wish I had more, more, MORE rhubarb in my garden, perhaps an entire garden of just rhubarb, simply so I could make jar after jar of this jam. It is that good.

Oh, and did I mention absurdly easy? Set-it-and-forget-it easy? No pectin or lemon juice easy?

Yep, that easy.

Candied citrus peel

Candied citrus peel

I like to try one new, big recipe for the holidays each year.

Last year, it was my mom's "fruitcake", which has been more aptly renamed the Boozy Zenith Bourbon Pecan Cake.

The year before it was Dorie Greenspan's figgy pudding.

This year, it is going to be panettone, the sweet traditional Italian bread that my family eats every year on Christmas morning. (Check back next week for the full recipe.)

Although you can make panettone with a variety of dried fruits, traditional recipes usually call for candied citron or citrus peel. Earlier this summer I had come across a recipe for candied citrus peel at Homemade Trade; it has been on my to-try list for months. Fortunately, even though it's no longer summer here in Vermont, Florida citrus is all over the local markets right now.

Clearly, there was some fate involved here.