Cooking down some canned pumpkin and a few persimmons with maple syrup and spices will make your house instantly smell like the holidays and spice up even the most basic meals. #meandthemoose #pumpkinrecipes #persimmonrecipes #dessert #fruitbutter

Pumpkin and persimmon butter

November 08, 2021 by Rebecca Davis in Baking, Dairy-free, Fall, Gluten-free, Holidays, Kid eats, Nut-free, Recipes, refined sugar free, Sweets, Toddler eats, Vegan, Vegetarian

Cooking down some canned pumpkin and a few persimmons with maple syrup and spices will make your house instantly smell like the holidays and spice up even the most basic meals.

Take me to the recipe!

I’m a sucker for persimmons. I can’t help myself when they arrive in the grocery stores. But I never know what to do with them. I love baking with them, but I’m trying to have fewer baked goodies hanging around in preparation for baked-goodies-hanging-around season. And if I’m going to eat them on their own or in a salad, they need to ripen, which, in my frozen kitchen, takes forever and a day.

This is my grand compromise: A cooked down “butter” that’s thick and slightly sweet that pairs with toast, graham crackers, apple slices, pretzels, Dutch babies, regular babies, cornbread, muffins, oatmeal. etc. One could also use this “butter” as a fruity addition to an autumnal cheesecake or mix it with an ice cream or other custard. My favorite way to use it is mixed with mascarpone and a couple of eggs and then baked with a pie shell for a spin on pumpkin pie.

The best part about this concoction is that you don’t need to ripen the persimmons. You heard me. As long as you use fuyu and NOT HACHIYA*, you’re fine with unripened persimmons. Of course, the more you let them ripen, the better they taste, so it does behoove you to wait at least a little while before making this butter.

*Why not Hachiya, you ask? Well, those are the larger, more ovular persimmons and if you don’t wait until they’re almost completely mushy to eat them, the tannins in the fruit make your mouth feel gluey and dry. It’s awful, trust me.

Anyway, whatever you choose to do with it, you’re only 20-30 minutes away from the endless possibilities, so get to it!

Pumpkin persimmon butter

Time: 25 minutes, mostly active
Yield: 2 cups, depending on how much you cook down the mixture

1 can pumpkin puree
4 fuyu persimmons
1 Tbsp dark brown sugar (light is also fine)
¼ cup maple syrup
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp ground ginger
1/8th tsp ground cloves
1 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
1 large pinch of kosher salt
½ cup water

Peel the persimmons and cut into quarters.

Add all ingredients to a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Transfer to a large pot.

Heat over a medium-low flame until just beginning to bubble. Turn the heat down to low and cook, stirring frequently to prevent burning, until the persimmons totally break down and the mixture has thickened slightly, about 20 minutes.

Deal with a fall heatwave with these frozen cider slushees! They can be spiked, spiced, or enjoyed plain! #meandthemoose #cider #falldrinks #frozentreats

Apple cider slushee

September 23, 2021 by Rebecca Davis in Dairy-free, Fall, Gluten-free, Kid eats, No refined sugar, Nut-free, Recipes, Sweets, Toddler eats, Vegan, Vegetarian

Move over pumpkin spice latte, apple cider slushee is coming for your “best fall drink” title! This easy bev can be spiced, spiked, or enjoyed straight up.

Take me to the recipe!

This may be a very Northeast specific rant, but why is it so hot at the beginning of fall? I feel like September, much like that other “changeover” month March, is a tease. Occasionally it’s chilly and crisp and then BAM — humid and gross. It rains and then the sun comes out immediately to really perfect those sweatbox conditions. It feels slightly chilly at 7 am, but by 9 it’s 80 and the air is heavy. How do you dress? What do you eat? I want to want all of the cozy things, but it’s too. damn. hot.

Anyway, that’s why you should freeze your apple cider. You get the coziness of fall, but the refreshment of an iced drink!

You can absolutely spice this cider by adding cinnamon sticks, crushed whole cardamom pods, anise pods, or some fresh ginger, bringing the cider to a boil, letting it simmer for 20-30 minutes, and then straining out the spices. I don’t love adding ground dried spices to my cider because I feel like it makes the cider slightly gritty, but it’s not a deal breaker. (Really, nothing is a deal breaker for me when it comes to cider.)

Apple cider slushee

Time: 6 hours, or overnight + 5 minutes active time
Yield: 2 slushees

2 cups apple cider
2 shots Calvados or other apple brandy, optional

Fill a standard ice cube tray with fresh cider. Let freeze for at least 6 hours or overnight.

Chill the cups you plan to use for the slushees in the freezer while you make the drinks.

Add the ice cubes to a blender (the higher powered, the better) and pulse 3-4 times or let run for about 3-4 seconds. Pulse again or run for 1 more second at a time until the cubes are crushed to your liking. In my experience, the cubes crush up very quickly and you don’t want them to re-liquify.

Spoon the crushed ice into the chilled cups and add 1/8-1/4 cup of fresh cider. Add 1 shot of calvados (optional).

Two-bite strawberry shortcakes

June 27, 2018 by Rebecca Davis in Recipes, Sweets, Toddler eats, Vegetarian

The road to these stupidly easy strawberry shortcakes was long and winding.

I started obsessing about scones right around the royal wedding and thought, these would make a great base for a shortcake. Upon further research, I learned that "short" cake just means a cake with a high fat-to-flour ratio, like scones or biscuits. But I wondered, what's the difference between the two?

Martha Stewart thinks they're basically the same, but many commenters found that suggestion insulting to both Brits and southerners. Food52 had a much more detailed description of the differences, but after reading I felt less inclined to use either traditional scones (too much butter) or traditional biscuits (too much technique) as my shortcake base. The only specific shortcake recipe I found that appealed to me was the classic from Bon Appetite, but it calls for two hard-boiled egg yolks and I'm generally too lazy for that.

See the tiny flecks of black? Those are the vanilla beans dispersed in the cream.

Enter, the Never-fail Biscuit from King Arthur. These use no butter, so if you're looking for a butter-y flavor, these may not be your biscuits. However, they are so so easy and come together so fast. There's no resting or freezing or rolling or cutting, but you end up with a flaky, risen biscuit that is easily adapted into a sweet shortcake.

And! These are tiny, two-bite shortcakes, so you get the taste of sweet summer fruit, without eating a huge dessert. I didn't healthify these thanks to the tiny portion size, but you could surely swap in gluten-free flour, full-fat coconut milk, and coconut sugar in this recipe with good results.

A couple of notes:
- I made lots of changes because I wanted sweet biscuits and I didn't have self-rising flour, so I had to fiddle with the ratios of salt, flour, and baking powder a bit. In the end, I used less salt and less baking powder than the original recipe.
- I also added more sugar, a little more cream, and half of a vanilla bean instead of using an extract (though you could add 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract instead. KA suggests using 1 tablespoon, but I felt like I could taste the alcohol of the extract a bit).
- You want to really make sure these shortcakes are cooked. I don't know why, but I felt like I could taste raw flour before I cooked them for an extra minute or two. See notes in the recipe for some tricks to tell if they're really done.

Two-bite strawberry shortcakes

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
Scant ¼ tsp fine kosher salt
3 Tbsp sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
¾ cup + 1 Tbsp heavy cream
½ vanilla bean, scraped and seeds added
1 Tbsp demarara or other coarse sugar for sprinkling on top
24 medium strawberries
1 cup whipped cream

Preheat the oven to 450.

Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl and whisk to combine.

Measure the heavy cream in a large measuring cup and add one extra tablespoon. Using a small sharp knife, cut the vanilla bean pod in half lengthwise. Scrape out the inside of the pod and add the brown seeds to the liquid. Whisk vigorously to disperse the vanilla beans.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, making sure to scoop out any vanilla beans on the bottom of the cream mixture. Mix just until the wet and dry ingredients come together and begin to look like a flaky dough. This is a dry-ish dough, but you should be able to form the mixture into a ball easily with your hands. If the dough is falling apart, add ½ of tablespoon of cream at a time and mix again with your hands. You want the dough just coming together without falling apart, but without becoming too wet.

When the dough is together, scoop off a small amount (about 1 tablespoon) and lightly roll into a ball with your hands. Place the balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Sprinkle the tops of each ball with demarara or other coarse sugar.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating the tray once during baking. My best indication that the shortcakes are done was that the extra sugar on the tray (not on the shortcakes) had burned ever-so-slightly and the bottoms of the shortcakes were a dark caramel brown.

Yield: 24 mini shortcakes