Orange Creamsicle Fruit Dip

The Boy was playing a computer game today and at the end, the little cartoon girl made fruit kabobs with apples. He was excited. We had to go to the grocery store and get red and green apples RIGHT NOW.

Luckily, I apples (and strawberries, a pineapple and two colors of grapes) on hand.

My kids eat a LOT of fruit.

So fruit kabobs it was.

But I wanted dip to go with it. It's just been that kind of a summer.

There are a lot of different mixtures into which you can dip fruit. I found this one over at Madigan's kitchen. The orange part of it intrigued me. The Boy has been downing orange juice like nothing else, so I figured he would go for this.

And it was easy.

And I had all the ingredients on hand. So there was nothing holding me back.

Mix the pudding and whipped topping together. And next time, for goodness sake, help The Poor Girl get all of her fingernails painted.

Stir in the orange juice.

Spend the rest of your day cutting up fruit and pound cake and skewering them onto kabobs. Unless your Boy insists, just skip this part and put all the fruit a bowl. My Boy insisted. That was the whole point of this snack, after all.

This was yummy. The orange went really well with every fruit we dipped it in. We had some left over and took it camping the next day. We didn't bring any back.

Click here for Printable Recipe

Orange Creamsicle Fruit Dip

1 8 oz Container Whipped Topping

1 Small Package Instant Vanilla Pudding Mix

6 oz Orange Juice 

Fruit for dipping (strawberries, mango, grapes, pineapple, etc)

Mix the first three ingredients together. Add a little more orange juice to thin out to desired consistency, if needed. Wash, cut and prep the fruit. Refrigerate until ready to serve. 

Canned Pears

I love canning. I don't know why, really, but there is something so satisfying about seeing all the jars lined up on my counter. I am pretty sure it is genetic in nature. As kids, we spent a lot of time with my grandma. When she needed it, she had an enormous garden filled with anything and everything she would need for her and her family for the entire winter. She had an entire room in her basement filled with jar upon jar of preserved fruits and vegetables.

When The Girl went to my mother-in-law's and came back with a huge bucket of pears, I really, really didn't want the to go to waste. So I pulled out my Ball canning book. If you want to get started in canning, this is the book you need. Turns out, canning pears is a pretty simple task.

Get everything ready. This is important. Everything. Line it up on your counter. You might have to spread out onto the table, too. Notice I have a blue pot filled with water. Start this boiling now. I also have my syrup beginning to boil in the silver pot. I prefer a light syrup, so I used a mixture of 2 cups of sugar for every 6 cups of water. If you prefer, you can add more sugar. A medium syrup will take 3 cups of sugar for every 6 cups of water and a heavy syrup will need 4 cups of sugar for every 6 cups of water.

Pears are like apples in that they start to immediately turn brown when you peel them. While this doesn't affect taste in any way, it makes a pretty big difference appearance-wise. To prevent browning from occurring, add a couple tablespoons of Fruit Fresh to a large bowl of water. Again, do this before you start.
Cut the pears in half and take out the core. They make corers, but I just used my melon baller and it worked beautifully.
Use a paring knife to cut out the bottom and top stems.
Then peel the skin off. Check carefully for any imperfections in your fruit. When eating fresh, it's not such a big deal, but when you are preserving, it is very important that you use fruit that is not damaged in any way. See that brown spot on the left? Cut it out.
Drop your pear halves into the Fruit Fresh mixture.
Once your syrup solution is boiling, add in enough pear halves to form a single layer. Boil this for about 5 minutes. This is called a hot pack and is the USDA recommended method for canning pears and most other fruits. I looked around and didn't find anyone who recommended using a raw pack (non-cooked) method. Not only is the quality so much better with a hot pack, but the chances of ending up with some type of food-born illness dramatically increases.
After five minutes, add the pear halves to the (very) clean canning jars. Pear halves are a little tricky to fit in, so squish them a little bit if you need to. Then fill in with some of your boiling syrup.
Run a rubber spatula or table knife around the edges of the pears to get all the air bubbles out. You want them all out. So squeeze your pears a little bit to make sure it all escapes. Air is extremely bad for anything you want to preserve.
Fill the jars up with syrup until you have about 1/2 an inch of space at the top of the jar.

All these handy little blue tools came in a box that I highly recommend. This one is marked off in quarter inch increments to help you figure out where 1/2 inch is in your jar.

Tighten the lids onto the jars.
Place each jar into the boiling water bath.
Process these jars in a water bath. If you will notice, I do not have a proper canning pot. Mine burned up with my house and I could have sworn I replaced it, but for the life of me, I couldn't find it. You need at least an inch of water above the lids and the water needs to be boiling. I processed in boiling water for 30 minutes. If you live at a higher altitude, you will need to go five or ten minutes longer.

That's it. The process is really not difficult, even if it is fairly time consuming. I ended up with 12 quarts and it took me a couple hours. Of course, The Kids wanted to try them right away. Then The Girl piped in and said we should wait until tomorrow. With any luck, we will get to have pears sometime this winter.

Watermelon Sorbet

The other day, I came home from the grocery store with the biggest watermelon I have ever seen. I nearly had to abandon The Boy to get it in the car. Thinking that not even this family can eat that much watermelon, I went about searching for watermelon recipes.

Turns out there are an awful lot of them. I have never really used watermelon for anything but eating, so this opens up a whole new world for me.

This recipe comes from Rachael Ray. I hadn't been over to her site for quite some time, and I ended up spending way too much time surfing over there.

You need some watermelon puree. Cut the watermelon into cubes and put it into a blender. Hit puree. (Haha, Goonies reference!)

Zest one lime. This is the hardest part of the whole thing. It's kind of like eating lobster. Lots of work and not much to show for it.
Add one cup of your puree to the lime zest and a half a cup of sugar. Simmer this for a few minutes so the sugar gets good and dissolved.
Add three more cups of puree and a pinch of salt. Then whisk in a can of sweetened condensed milk.
Pour this into your ice cream freezer.
Follow your freezer's directions.
When that gets done, you are left with this...
I loved this. It is so refreshing and the lime comes through a lot more than I thought it would. The one teaspoon is all you need. The kids didn't like this as much as I did, but I think it was more because of the lime. Next time I am going to leave that out and see if they like that better.

Click here for Printable Recipe

Watermelon Sorbet
6 Cups chopped up seedless watermelon
1/4 Cup sugar
Grated peel of 1 lime
Pinch salt
1 Can Sweetened Condensed Milk
Using a blender, puree the watermelon; you will need 4 cups watermelon puree.
In a large saucepan, bring 1 cup watermelon puree, the sugar and lime peel to a simmer over medium-low heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves; season with the salt. Pour in the remaining 3 cups watermelon puree, then whisk in the milk until incorporated. Pour the watermelon mixture into your ice cream freezer and follow it's instructions.

Fruit Salsa

I know. It's been forever. And ever.

But, I am nearly certain that this post will make up for it :)

I have had this recipe stored in my cookbook for ages. I haven't a clue where I got it, only that I look at it from time to time and think, "I must try that someday."

Well, someday became today. I needed something to take to our family 4th of July get together. I was, of course, planning on taking in the Jalapeno Poppers, but everyone is apparently making them as not a single grocery store I went to had a single jalapeno pepper in stock. I may cry.

Chop a small container of strawberries, a half a small container of blueberries, 3 kiwis and 2 medium size peaches and add it all to a large mixing bowl. Mmmm...I could stop here.
Add 2 tablespoons white sugar, 1 tablespoon brown sugar and 3 tablespoons strawberry preserves to the fruit.
Mix well. Oh my.
The recipe actually calls for you to make your own cinnamon chips out of tortillas. I was all for that until I realized I did not have the butter flavored cooking spray it called for. I made a quick trip to the grocery store to get some and what did I find?

Cinnamon graham crackers. And chocolate graham crackers. Maybe someday I will try to make my own, but these just sounded perfect.
And they are. I could eat this all day, every day for the rest of the summer. I could eat this with a spoon. The Boy IS eating it with a spoon. I had to put the container on the top shelf of the refrigerator so it wouldn't tempt anyone before we had to leave.

My version is heavily modified from the original for a couple reasons. The original called for golden apples instead of peaches. I forgot to add the apples to my grocery list, but had peaches on hand. In retrospect, I could have bought the apples in my emergency trip for butter spray, but it didn't occur to me. The original also called for raspberries instead of blueberries. Like the elusive jalapeno peppers, no raspberries were to be found this day. I truly believe you could add ANY fruit and be happy with it, so be creative and add what you like.

Happy Birthday America!

Pineapple and Strawberry Creme

If you are like the rest of the United States (with the possible exception of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam), you have been under snow. Lots and lots of snow. And you are probably ready for spring to get here. Well, believe it or not, it is just around the corner. I know this because we started track practice yesterday. This completely snuck up on me. I still cannot believe it is the first of March already.

I also know this because our grocery store now has pineapples in stock. I love fresh pineapple. Some people are intimidated by pineapple. It's a bit of a chore to chop up. I never can get all the skin (is it skin??) off. And then you have to cut around the core, but it is one of the few things I really think is worth the effort, unlike, for instance, lobster.

I didn't think ahead enough to document me chopping up the pineapple or strawberries. And truth be told, I don't really think of this as a recipe. It is just something I throw together. I have had the creme part stuck in my head for so long that I'm not even sure where I got it.

But as The Girl pointed out (after supper), it's Tuesday. We must try something.

Add 1/2 cup of ricotta cheese to 1 teaspoon sugar (or Splenda if you choose) along with 1 teaspoon vanilla. You can change up the flavors here by adding almond, rum, orange, peppermint, any flavoring you have on hand. You can also add in a teaspoon of cocoa powder.
Stir this up and you have dessert. You could just enjoy it at this point, but to REALLY go all out, add in some sliced strawberries and pineapple chunks.
This just screams "spring" to me. You can justify seconds (and thirds) on this because it is extremely healthy. And if you use the Splenda, amazingly doesn't even contain sugar. Trust me, you will not believe your taste buds. Not only that, but it takes about 90 seconds to mix it all up.

Maybe I should put it on a recipe card...

Click here for Printable Recipe

Pineapple and Strawberry Creme
1/2 Cup Ricotta Cheese
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon sugar
Sliced strawberries
Pineapple chunks

Mix it all together. Enjoy.