In Search of Mexican Chocolate Shortbread

On vacation in Port Townsend at the end of June I encountered Oaxacan chocolate shortbread cookies made by Makabi & Sons, a lucky purchase at Aldrich's. A delicious slow burn, a touch of cinnamon, chocolate shortbread—I was hooked. I wanted to replicate this experience at home if I could.

As with my various adventures in canning, I compared recipes to identify key variables. This led to the first baffling discovery: A big swing in the amount of cinnamon relative to the amount of flour and cocoa powder between the first two recipes I read. Why oh why? 

I didn't read every recipe I found and try to come up with my own proportions. Instead I decided to try the first two I found, with one small adjustment.

Recipe #1: Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Viktoria's Table. It calls for the same amount of cinnamon as my second candidate but has only half as much flour, cocoa powder, butter etc.

Recipe #2:  Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Averie Cooks. 

Recipe #3: Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Rachel Cooks. This one's a little like Recipe #1 and Recipe #2 had a baby with a small mutation on the sugar gene. It has the proportions of #2 for flour, butter, and sugar, but only half the cinnamon; the addition of dark chocolate chips of #1; and it uses powdered sugar rather than granulated sugar.

I baked recipes #1 and #2, saving #3 for later. On #1 I reduced the cinnamon to 1 teaspoon, making the proportions more comparable to #2. The recipe calls for 1/8-1/4 teaspoon of cayenne; I went with 1/4 t. The recipe calls for 2 ounces of shaved dark chocolate. I had dark chocolate chips on hand so I used those, no shaving involved although maybe I should have chopped them to make smaller bits.

Taste test results: I wouldn't kick either of these to the curb, but recipe #2 is my favorite. I thought the addition of dark chocolate chips to #1 might give it the edge, but no. #2 has greater depth of flavor, probably thanks to the additional spices in the mix. I also think the thicker slices of dough in #2 gave a more genuine shortbread consistency. #1 might have fared better with that thickness but it called for thinner slices and I followed the recipe. That yielded a consistency a little more like a regular cookie, perhaps thanks to the dark chocolate in the batter.

The cayenne provides a nice slow, delayed burn at the back of the throat. Either recipe could stand a bit more cayenne for my taste. I was trying to come close to the Makabi & Sons cookies and didn't quite get there. I'm now curious about Recipe #3 and whether powdered sugar would yield the final dryness and snap of the store cookies that was part of the appeal along with the heat. Try those if you find them in the store; they're delicious! And they'll give you a baseline for your own adventures in baking.

ADDENDUM: Came back to add the either genius or over-the-top (or both) idea I had while munching on these. What about making a sandwich cookie with the chocolate cherry jam? Or a bowl of ice cream topped with the jam and the cookies adding crunch. I mean, you do you, but this all sounds decadent and wonderful to me. I'm planning to make a blackberry chocolate chili jam based on this Larder Love recipe later and that's another candidate, but possibly too much chili overall.

Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed

What is it with the wildly varying proportions in recipes for making mint jelly?!

I made apple mint jelly once before, using a recipe from a Reddit thread because I had a lot of gleaned apples that year and could make the recipe that involved cooking the apples down, extracting juice, and adding vinegar. Yes, this is extra work, but a number of mint jelly recipes call for this approach. Apple juice as medium, essentially.

Right now it isn't apple season but boy, do I have mint (as one does), so I decided to make it using some bottled apple cider I have on hand.

Various recipes call for cooking the mint leaves in water or juice, then going forward with the recipe. I don't want to use pectin so I'm going to lean on apple juice plus some added lemon juice. I remember doing this with the previous batch and getting a good jell.

The proportions thing, though.... After cutting all the mint in the yard, stripping leaves, and setting the small leaves aside to dry for mint tea, I have 2 cups. Do I start with a recipe based on one cup and scale everything up accordingly? If I do that, which one-cup recipe do I start with—the one that has a 1:1 ratio of mint to liquid or the one that has 1:4?? (That one just sounds weak-ass, if you'll pardon the term.) The National Center for Home Food Preservation does a lot of testing, particularly for whether the ratios are food safe, so I'm inclined to stick with them and ignore their use of pectin. Below my recipe I list the sources I consulted with their varying ratios, what liquid they used, and whether pectin was involved.

Ingredients

2 cups packed mint leaves, roughly chopped
3 cups apple cider (I used commercial cider because I had it on hand and it's time to use it up; this could be apple juice instead)
2 cups sugar
2 T. lemon juice
~1 T. dried mint leaves, optional

So my starting ratio is 2:3:2, plus 2 T. lemon juice.

Instructions

Read the National Center for Home Food Preservation on canning basics if this is your first time on the merry-go-round.

Sterilize your canning jars and get everything ready. 

• I put my jars on a big roasting pan in the oven at 200 degrees for at least 10 minutes. Timing this right gives you warm jars when you're ready to put hot product into them, which is important; hot jelly going into a cold jar can crack it.
• Put a small plate in the freezer to use for your jelling test.
• Get that big pot of water warming. If you're using a full-sized canning kettle it will take a while. I sometimes use my soup pot for a smaller batch, placing a metal trivet in the bottom to keep the jars from touching the heat directly. I may also speed things up by using my hot-water kettle for a faster heating of a smaller quantity and pouring that in, maybe doing this a couple of times.

Extract mint-flavored juice. Bring the chopped mint and apple juice or cider to a boil in a large pan such as a Dutch oven. You can muddle the leaves a bit with a potato masher if you like. Once the juice has come to a boil, cover and set off the heat to steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the leaves out and toss them in the compost.

Make the jelly. Place the minty juice in a Dutch oven or other large, heavy pan. Stir in the sugar and lemon juice. On high heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook until the liquid runs together when you lift the spoon, or test on that plate you put in the freezer to see if the liquid will wrinkle when you run the tip of a spoon through it. This will take a while because we're not using pectin in this recipe. I used a thermometer, but I find that even when I don't hit the recommended 220 degrees if I've gotten over 205 my products will set up.

Optional mint intensification. Taste the liquid early on (carefully! It's very hot!). If you'd like the flavor to be a bit more minty (mintier?), place the dried mint leaves in a teaball and put that in the liquid to steep while it's coming to the jelling stage. I did that for this batch and my official taste tester said it's the perfect mintiness, meaning it's very minty.

Canning step. Pour the hot jelly into hot, sterile jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a dampened clean paper towel; put the lids on. Process 10 minutes in boiling water, timing it from when the water returns to the boil after putting the jars in.

Yield: 5 quarter-pints that jelled beautifully with zero pectin. Picture below only shows four because one has already been used up by Chief Taste Taster, aka my Sweet Hubs.

What I don't do that you may find in other recipes. 

• I don't add a drop or two of green food coloring because I like the natural golden color. That commercial mint jelly looks like Jell-O to me. If the bright green is important to you, by all means go for it.
• I don't save some fresh mint leaves to chop fine and stir in at the end as the jelly goes into the jars. Some people like little things floating in their jelly. I don't.
• I also skip skimming the foam in some recipes. I stir it down and mix it in. If it really looked foamy all across the top of the pan I might skim it. When I do, I put the foam in a little jar to go in the fridge because it's perfectly good! In peak canning season I might end up with a jar of mixed flavors from three or four different recipes and it can be delicious, a sort of bumbleberry jam by proxy.

Mint Jelly Recipes

List below has the recipes I consulted and the proportions, along with whether or not they add any lemon juice or vinegar (another element that varies widely) and whether they use pectin.

Ratios listed are in cups for mint:water:sugar, with a note if the recipe calls for apple juice instead of water. I'm listing them in order by the volume of mint leaves and liquid. If the recipe calls for apple juice then it shouldn't need as much sugar for sweetness, although it needs it for jelling action.

• Mint Jelly #2, NCHFP: 1:1:3.5; 1/2 c. vinegar; uses pectin
• Mint Apple Jelly, Andrea's Recipes: 1:4:4.25; uses pectin
• Mint Jelly #1, NCHFP: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
• Ball Canning (via Reddit; not on their site now): 1-1/2-2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 4 T. lemon juice; uses pectin
• Mint Jelly, Canning Diva: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
• Classic Mint Jelly, Serious Eats: 2:2:2; 1 c. vinegar; uses pectin, specifically Pomona's so you also need to have calcium water on hand and I do not
• Mint Jelly Recipe Without Pectin, Learning and Yearning: 2:2:3; 1/4 c. lemon juice
• Apple-Mint Jelly with Fresh Mint, Brown Thumb Mama: 2:3-1/4 apple juice:3.5; 1/2 t. lemon juice; uses pectin
• Unknown source from that Reddit thread: 1-1/2:4-5 c. (apple juice produced from apples, plus 2 c. white vinegar):3-1/2 c. (helpful ratio here: 7/8 c. for each cup of juice)

Related Reading and Recipes

• Mixed Citrus Ginger Marmalade, Take 2
• Spiced Apple Butter Recipe 
• Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce
• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup 
• When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam
• My Circular Economy of Apples 
• Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe
• "Sweet Harvest" 
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe 
• Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini)
• Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!
• Pears, Pears, Pears! 
• Future Marmalade 
• Vegan Cranberry Caramelized Red Onion Orange Chutney Recipe Experimentation
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

Spiced Apple Butter Recipe

Admittedly not the biggest tweaks I've ever made to a recipe, but here it is. In this year's food preservation I found myself going back to last year's canning posts for recipes and links and I'll keep this running tally going.

I had rounded up quite a few apple butter recipes when I invented my Chai Apple Butter Recipe last year. I wanted one that used apple cider vinegar for the extra tang; some recipes don't include that, or don't use much. For this batch I started with The Pioneer Woman's apple butter recipe. 

Since I was simultaneously working on two other recipes I used the slow-cooker method that Food in Jars uses for her Salted Caramel Pear Butter (made a batch of that two days ago). My slow cooker has a steam vent hole in the lid. For the first stage of cooking in this recipe I block that with a chopstick to keep the moisture in and cook the flavor into the flesh of the apples. That comes out for the later stage when I need the liquid to cook off.

The Pioneer Woman calls for adding a cup of water. I substituted apple cider. Why not make it even more appley when you have the chance?

Earlier this year I processed a lot of gleaned apples with my corer/slicer and had both skin-on and peeled in the freezer. For this recipe I used the ones with the skins, for the extra pectin and flavor. This saves the peeled ones for a future apple pie or other dessert use. Go with what you have and what you prefer. You can run the cooked mash through a food mill if you started with unpeeled apples and don't want the extra fiber.

Of course, per the title here, I oomphed up the spice. She called for 1 teaspoon of apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice for three pounds of apples. I drew some inspiration from British Mixed Spice, discovered along the way in my never-again-will-I-make-ketchup research. I wanted it to be cinnamon-forward. This might sound like a lot of seasonings but it didn't taste overly spiced with that dusty quality I've created at times with over-enthusiastic perusal of the spice drawer.

I needed to deal with the aftermath of the Great Freezer Defrost of 2025, so my quantities are larger than my starting-point recipe: 4 pounds of apples. More than this quantity of pears had worked just fine in the slow cooker. You can scale this back to the quantities in The Pioneer Woman's recipe.

Ingredients

4 lbs. apples, cored and chopped. These can be frozen or canned, skins on or off according to your preference

1 c. apple cider vinegar

1-1/2 c. apple cider or apple juice

3/4 t. salt

1-2/3 c. brown sugar

2 t. vanilla paste or vanilla extract, if you have it on hand

2 t. flaky sea salt or kosher salt

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. black pepper

1/4 t. nutmeg

1/4 t. mace (optional; for me this is the essence of pumpkin pie spice)

1/4 t. cardamom

1/8 t. cloves

Directions

Place apples, vinegar, cider/juice and salt in slow cooker and stir to combine. Turn it to high. Cook for 60-90 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the fruit to be soft enough to be blendable.

Blend with an immersion stick blender if you have one. Or remove a couple of cups at a time, blend in a blender or food processor, then return all the blended sauce to the slow cooker. Be careful when blending hot semi-liquid foods. Don't fill the container at or above the halfway mark, keep a towel over the top, adjust the lid so you're letting steam escape rather than build up. All of this is why I prefer my immersion blender.

Mix the dried spices together, then add the brown sugar, vanilla and spices to the pot. Prop the lid slightly ajar so steam can escape, maybe with your spatula or a chopstick laid crosswise so the lid can rest on it on one end. 

Cook on high, stirring often, until it's the color and consistency you want. If you want to be thick and spreadable this will take a while, 2-3 hours. If you stop much sooner, congratulations! You have made a spiced applesauce. 

Stirring often means every 15 minutes or so. Food in Jars says to stir every 30 minutes but if I waited that long I'd have apple butter stuck on the bottom of the pot. You can let it go a bit longer early on when the pot has plenty of liquid in it. The more it cooks down and thickens, the more you need to be sure to scrape the bottom thoroughly. 

How hot your slow cooker gets will be a factor only you can judge, and that will affect your stirring frequency and total cook time. Food in Jars blogger Marisa notes that the older Crock-Pot had a gentler low temperature than newer ones. That's my experience with my newer model; I really can't go off and leave it.

Prep your jars for canning according to the safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

My yield: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz. jar in a reuse experiment from a commercial product (nice straight-sidded jar)

Canning posts usually show something like this as the triumphant closing shot, or maybe a close-up of the delectable contents. 

In reality the closing scene is more like this. 

I should have taken a picture even earlier I was making full use of every flat surface in the kitchen and had three recipes going at once. Maybe next time.

Related reading and recipes

• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup
• When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam
• My Circular Economy of Apples
• Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe
• Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini)
• Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!
• Pears, Pears, Pears!
• Future Marmalade
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce

I may have noted recently that I don't think green tomato ketchup is worth the effort.

Also noted: Large quantity (~6 pounds) of green tomatoes plus chopped onions plus canned apples, all prepped and in the fridge under the assumption that I'd be making another ketchup recipe.

Third note to file: Lots of green tomato chutney and green tomato/tomatillo chutney already on hand in all their chunky goodness from last year and earlier this year.

Hence the thought experiment: What if I followed a chutney recipe but then blended it to make it smooth like ketchup? I should have some pretty screamin' awesome sweet/tangy sauce that would be great with fries, tofu, on oven-baked yams, maybe over rice, with cheese on crackers if it wasn't too runny to sit there, blend with yogurt to make an interesting dip. Many possible uses! Although not a ketchup! (And yes, blended green chutney sauce looks quite a lot like split pea soup.)

I give quantities as if you had diced or chopped things. I heartily endorse throwing ingredients for this into the food processor and whirling them up to save time. You're going to be pureeing and smooshing to get the lumps out anyway.

This makes a big batch! I'd already committed myself with the earlier prep. This could be cut in half with proportionate adjustments to everything. Cook time will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are.

Inspirations

• Green Tomato Ketchup recipe by From the Larder
• My own Green Tomato Apple Chutney Recipe, developed last year
• Creative Canning Green Tomato Ketchup, which was the winner of the two recipes I tried last weekend

Wet ingredients

• Green tomatoes: ~6-8 cups, yield from ~6 pounds
• Yellow or white onion: 1-1/2 cups, diced
• Apple: 2 cups, diced, canned, or even applesauce if that's what you have
• Green bell pepper (or another sweet bell pepper color if that's what you have): 1 whole pepper, diced
• Dried fruit: 1 cup of whatever turns your cranks. I like a combination of dates and dried cranberries
• Vinegar: 1 cup. Malt or apple cider vinegar preferred; white vinegar will be sharper; red or white wine vinegar is fine. Just needs to be labeled 5% acidity.
• Brown sugar: 1-1/2 cups. OK to substitute white sugar if that's what you have
• Green or red chilis, optional: 1-2, diced, if you want to add some fresh chili heat. Substitute 1-2 t. crushed red pepper, tasting and adjusting for your heat preference as the recipe cooks down
• 1 T. fresh grated ginger, or ginger paste from a tube (so handy!)
• 4-5 garlic cloves, crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
• Optional: 1-1/2 T. vegan Worcestershire sauce, if available. Regular is fine if you don't have vegan, but then you should label this for any gift recipients who might prefer vegan
• Optional if you want a thinner sauce: 1/2 c. sherry, cooking sherry, or something you routinely substitute for these (apple cider or apple juice could work here)

Dry ingredients/Seasonings
Stir the dry spices together in a small bowl, then add to the wet ingredients. Yes, yes, you can absolutely dump the measurements straight into the sauce without mixing them first, but combining them first gives you a better distribution in the liquid than if you end up with a surprise clump of ground ginger.

• 1 T. fennel seeds, whirled in a coffee grinder or pounded with a mortar and pestle
• 1 T. ground mustard
• 1 T. salt
• 2 t. ground cardamom
• 2 t. ground black pepper
• 1 t. smoked paprika
• 1 t. cinnamon
• 1 t. ground cardamom
• 1 t. ground ginger (or increase fresh ginger above)
• 1/8 t. nutmeg
• 1/8 t. cloves

Put all ingredients except for the optional sherry or apple juice in one big stockpot (takes longer) or divide across two pans, preferably wide saucepans or Dutch ovens with plenty of surface for evaporation of the liquids.

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a rapid simmer/low boil, and cook, stirring often, for around 60-90 minutes. Tomatoes spit when they boil so wear mitts, pay attention. Don't cover the pans; the goal here is some evaporation. Frequent stirring is essential to prevent some of the sauce burning to the bottom of the pan. Ask me how I know.

At 60-90 minutes the vegetables may not be entirely soft yet. Taste the seasonings and oomph up flavor notes you'd like to have a bit more of. Go carefully here, maybe 1/4 t. or 1/2 t. at a time if it's something that could end up overpowering.

Continue to cook until everything is soft enough to blend. I tried my immersion blender first, then went to the regular blender. Be careful blending hot liquids. Put in less than half the container's capacity, have the lid cracked open a tiny bit to let steam out, start on a low pulse and step it up as the contents puree and liquify.

Return to the kettle and cook a bit longer to reach the consistency you want. This is ready to can now, though. 

If it's thicker than you want and you'd like a more pourable sauce, add 1/2 cup of sherry (idea borrowed from the Creative Canning recipe linked above), apple juice or apple cider, and cook another 5 minutes or so.

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

Yield will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are. My yield: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.

Related reading and recipes

• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup
• When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam
• My Circular Economy of Apples
• Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe
• Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini)
• Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!
• Pears, Pears, Pears!
• Future Marmalade
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

February Delights

Even a short month can hold delight in every day. That is, if you seek it out. Writing "Today's delights" at the top of a dedicated space on the journal page is a bit like picking up a fresh piece of stationery, getting a nice pen, and writing "Dear Person I Care About" at the top of the paper. (Sidebar: This is a thing people do still actually do, and sending or receiving a letter definitely counts as a delight.)

That is to say, once you've started and you've put it down in writing, that blank spot waits for you to fill it with something.

Early this month I finished reading the delightful book Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day, written and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. The inspiration for the book came out of the earliest days of the COVID era (which we're still in, by the way, along with all the other overlapping eras that create a deep need for small delights in our days). She suggests writing our own lists of 52 things to look forward to, or things that bring us joy (or delight). That's one per week, and surely you can manage to find delight at least once a week.

I build a list of far more than 52 things every month, a few at a time. Some delights definitely come up again and again. I "reappreciate" coffee and good food and chocolate again and again, flowers and trees, sunshine and seasons, birds and mosses, hugs and belly laughs, my body reaching up in yoga, our home of four years and the way we've made it more ours, changing weather, shifting seasons, and the night sky. All right there, gifting me with fresh delight every time I pay attention.

February delights:

1. Good progress on a new jigsaw puzzle
2. Ordering a tin of Cougar Gold cheese as a gift for family who work for the federal government
3. The spinning windcatcher in our front yard rotating fast, twinkling in the sun
4. Snow on the ground when I got up
5. Mesmerizing flakes drifting down past evergreen boughs tipped with white
6. Satisfying ping of canning lids
7. Rich flavor of tayberry jam
8. Bright sweetness of raspberry jam
9. Winey depth of blackberry plum preserves
10. Sitting down after something like 7 or 8 hours of canning
11. Snow frosting everything
12. A storyteller's skill
13. Arriving at the headquarters exactly when two coworkers got there and all of us waving as we walked towards each other
14. Knitting in a meeting--tons of progress, beautiful colors
15. Two couples walking our neighborhood loop at different times, holding hands
16. One of these women saying to me as I left the housing wearing a big teal wrap, "I love that color!"
17. Walking fast in the cold on a downtown sidewalk feeling as if I were flying
18. One of the students bringing ginger cookies to improv class
19. Laughing
20. Waking to a snow-covered world
21. The sound of rain on the roof when I don't have to go out in it
22. Sweet and salty pickled cherries in yogurt with almonds
23. Blue sky peeking out
24. Lush flavors of mushroom soup I made
25. Birds twittering
26. Having all that counter space to do lots of cooking
27. How much light our living room holds on a cold, sunny day
28. Ducks paddling at the shore as waves rolled in
29. Mossy roof of a tiny sign kiosk with a jaunty fern growing out of it
30. Fresh zing of homemade raspberry and tayberry jams
31. Flurry of jays' cries high in the trees as I listened to a podcast interview with adrienne maree brown talking about connecting with the natural world
32. Curving up in Warrior 1
33. Buttery-good mushroom soup with oyster crackers
34. Hot bath
35. Walking with my sweetie
36. Moss-covered tree posed like a dancer
37. My sweetie describing how he'll fix the hummingbird feeder to make it nicer for them to land on with their tiny feet—such sweetness in that thought
38. The beautiful kitchen light fixture my sweetie made
39. Being inside warm and dry when cold rain is pouring down
40. My sweetie making a new bigger platform for Tiggs to perch on so he can watch kitchen action while not on the island or range hood!
41. Seeing Jupiter in the sky from my bedroom window, then Rigel and Sirius
42. Birds in the tree and on bushes doing their bird thing
43. Quiet sense of home stuff moving along while I work: washer and dryer humming and chugging
44. Printer putting out actual page, not weird tiny symbols and gobbledygook
45. Black-capped chickadee, perky on the suet cage
46. Finding the credit card, ID, and transit cards that were hiding in a backpack after a trip
47. Felting with wool for the first time, to fill a small couple of holes in a favorite blue wool jacket
48. A nearly full moon shining in the early morning darkness
49. Morning sun's rays shooting through tall pines
50. Riding my bike downhill
51. Full moon in the night sky
52. Venus shining over the neighborhood
53. Sun's warmth on a cold walk
54. Softness of Tiggs' fur
55. Holding my sweetie's hand on a walk
56. Spicy tingle of Bengal Spice tea
57. Seeing 3 other people on bikes as I rode to the office on a very cold morning
58. Driver who waited in the slip lane for me to bike past uphill, then waved and smiled when I waved at him
59. Softly falling snow
60. Energy of an in-person meeting
61. Little ferns growing out of the moss on the Dr. Seuss tree outside the living room window
62. Freshly baked bran muffins with melted butter
63. Speedy help from the data/GIS whiz on my work team
64. Finishing slides that are the right length
65. Sweet potato fries with garlic aioli
66. My body's curve as I reach to the sky in yoga
67. Warmth of Tiggs on my legs
68. Fresh homemade oatmeal cookies
69. Rain, gentle on the roof
70. Beautiful results of framing a big puzzle I started over a year ago and finally finished
71. Insistent train whistle in the distance
72. Hot fresh biscuits with butter and local honey
73. How great the kitchen counters look (new, after a big remodeling project)
74. Birds swooping joyously from fence to bush to feeder to tree and back around
75. Being outside in fresh air
76. Bright gold tall yolks of fresh local eggs
77. Satisfaction of pruned raspberry and tayberry bushes
78. Not needing my coat on a walk
79. Mossy sculptures in the woods composed of tree limbs and stumps and trunks
80. Feeling good about finishing a set of slides I need to present to a legislative committee
81. Belly laughs
82. Bright yellow leaf on the path in the nearby forested park
83. "Spread Kindness" on the display sign on the #21 bus
84. Creamy mushroom soup with lots of paprika, eaten fresh after making with oyster crackers
85. Frogs' chorus in the night
86. Crocuses poking up out of a mossy planting strip
87. The deep cushion of moss, not grass, in that planting strip
88. Night chorus of frogs bellowing for love
89. Tiggs playing with an old toy I got out that he hasn't seen in a while, pouncing again and again
90. Smell of wood smoke on a walk
91. Walking with my sweetie
92. Sitting in a coffee shop/bakery with the hum of people
93. Assyrian flavors in lemon labneh, roasted cauliflower steak, zoug
94. Tiny purple flower blooming by the sidewalk
95. Sleeping in, warm and cozy
96. Trying a new recipe that's a keeper
97. Sea salt dark chocolate truffle
98. Coziness
99. Rain on the roof, a steady drumming
100. Flowers blooming on the capitol campus
101. Unexpected scent of lily of the valley on a downtown street
102. Homemade tomato jam and Cougar Gold on crackers
103. Birds twittering on the suet cage
104. Tiggs making that chittering sound from his tower seat by the window where he can see those birds
105. Bird going for a ride on the wind spinner in the yard
106. Hearing a barred owl hooting in the rhododendron park midday
107. The way the blue paint I picked for the bedroom picks up colors in a painting and a framed jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall
108. Perfect timing to roll through stop signs on uphill stops riding home in the dark (which, by the way, is legal in Washington thanks to Safety Stop legislation enacted in 2020)
109. Biking at night
110. Spring! Blue sky and sun! 60 degrees!
111. Trees budding
112. Flowers blooming
113. Calls of a jay
114. Tiggs fully stretched out in the sunshine (on my puzzle table)
115. Tiggs doing his "roll and scroll" on the living room rug, tipping his head back to look at us, beaming happiness and chirping/talking
116. Glorious warmth of the sun!
117. Flowers blooming in so many places
118. The way the rust orange of a thrift store jacket went perfectly with a top, scarf and hat I already owned
119. Taking a selfie with my mushroom "pinecone" stump friend just because
120. Beautiful glassy water in the bay, ducks floating here and there
121. Stars and planets in the night sky, and being able to see those overhead in our neighborhood

Putting this list together tells me even more about the themes and delightful resonance than I originally thought of when I started the post. Listing them chronologically lets me recognize the way I tune into seasonal shifts. 

And so many! I don't aim for a specific number per day since I can't force delight. It just comes, every single day, as long as I expect it.

Reading this list makes me feel delight-full. What's on your list?

Related Reading

• January Delights
• Riding Always Makes Me Happy. Yes, Always.
• Go Ahead. Make My Day.
• A Solstice Post: Gifts I Give Myself by Riding in the Winter
• 30 Days of Biking, Day 30: Happy!
• Walking in February: Of Woods and Water
• A Year of Poems: February
• Reruns: February Posts Worth Revisiting

Snicker Snicker Snickerdoodles, Made with Almond Flour

I've made snickerdoodles for years, usually using a Joy of Cooking recipe. I remembered making them with almond flour a while back and thinking they tasted really good but I couldn't remember which recipe I'd found online. Easy enough, I should be able to search and find it, right?

But wait, I'm finding multiple recipes and can't tell which one I made. And they all have different ratios for the ingredients. Really different in terms of almond flour, sugar, eggs, and butter, and those are pretty important to cookie quality. A few even commit the cardinal sin of leaving out the cream of tartar, which is precisely what gives them their specific tangy goodness. Those recipes were nonstarters for me. They're just sugar cookies dipped in cinnamon and sugar, not true snickerdoodles.

I settled in and did what I usually do when confronted with conflicting recipes: I drew up a matrix to compare quantities, then decided what I'd go with for my version. I checked a couple of recipes that used regular flour just to compare the overall wet/dry ratios, recognizing that almond flour is higher in fat so regular flour would call for more butter or shortening.

The only good snickerdoodle is a bendy snickerdoodle. I'm not the only one who thinks so. All the recipes I consulted in my hunt for a good recipe using almond flour specifically noted the importance of having cookies that end up a bit crisped at the edges but still flexible in the middle. At least we all agree on that. That makes the baking technique important here: Preheat the oven, take the cookies out before they brown on top, and let them sit on the sheet for a bit more carryover baking from the heat in the cookie sheet before you take them off.

I'm sharing my own recipe first, then linking to the ones I used to develop this. They turned out great!

Almond Flour Snickerdoodles

Yield: Approximately 6 dozen cookies

Oven temperature: 350 degrees

1/2 c. unsalted butter

1/4 c. coconut oil (could use shortening, or all unsalted butter if you don't have either of those)

1/2 c. white sugar

1/2 c. brown sugar

2  large eggs

2 t. vanilla

3 c. almond flour

2 T. tapioca starch, cornstarch, or potato starch (adds stretchiness to the dough consistency)

 2 t. cream of tartar

1 t. baking soda

1-1/2 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. fine sea salt

To roll the dough balls in:

1/3 c. white sugar

1-1/2-2 t. cinnamon

1/8 t. nutmeg

Dash or two of cardamom (optional)

Cream together the white sugar, brown sugar, unsalted butter, and coconut oil until it looks light and fluffy. 

Beat in the eggs one at a time, making sure each egg is fully beaten in before moving on.

If you're a sifter you can sift the dry ingredients together and then add them to the batter. If you're like me you'll sprinkle them over the surface of the batter, doing your best not to leave a big clump of the leavening agents.

Mix together until blended. Don't overbeat. You should have a nice fluffy batter.

Chill the dough in the fridge for 15-30 minutes if you have time to do so. It will make it a bit easier to work with.

While the dough chills, heat the oven to 350 degrees and prep your cookie sheets with silicone mats or parchment lining.

Mix together the white sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom if you're using that in a small bowl.

Roll the dough into walnut-sized balls and roll these in the sugar/cinnamon mixture before placing them on the cookie sheet. They'll spread on their own into nice rounds.

Bake at 350 degrees for 9 minutes. Take them out of the oven and let them sit on the sheet for the carryover baking for another 5 minutes or so before moving them to a rack to finish cooling.

Enjoy!

Other Snickerdoodle Recipes

• Almond Flour Snickerdoodles (Grain-Free), Meaningful Eats: This recipe comes the closest to what I made but I couldn't just follow it. No cream of tartar! This omission is what sent me off in search of other sources.
• Almond Flour Snickerdoodles, Crumb Top Baking: Smaller amounts of everything; based on 2 cups of almond flour.
• Almond Flour Snickerdoodles, Gluten-Free, Vegan Richa: I'd try this one if I needed to make a vegan batch but I'd have to add cream of tartar. Even smaller quantities; based on 1 cup of almond flour.
• Keto Snickerdoodle Cookies, How to This and That: If you want to make a batch with an artificial sweetener this one might work for you.
• Soft & Thick Snickerdoodles, Sally's Baking Addiction: I turn to Sally pretty often. This is another 3-cup recipe, made with regular flour instead of almond flour.
• Snickerdoodle Cookie Recipe, Show Me the Farm: Made with 3 cups of regular flour.

Related Reading

• Seriously Good Oatmeal Cookie Recipe
• Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever
• Keep that Streak Going: #30DaysOf Something that Matters to You (no recipes, but a peek at my snickerdoodle past)

2024 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

This year started off wonderfully with family time on a visit with my younger sister and her partner, who live in Friday Harbor. Back from that refreshing break, I shifted into high gear for the legislative session, which always brings work with tight timelines that requires some deep thought for bill analysis. I love that part of my job so that's not a complaint, simply a reality. My sweetheart and I celebrated our 17th date-a-versary (anniversary of our first date), which happens to fall on the wedding anniversary of my parents. They were married for 68 years so I consider that fortuitous.

In late December 2023 I spent some time writing blog posts and setting them up to publish over the course of January so I could get off to a good start. Having some kind of recurring theme keeps me in the writing habit and for this year I took a run at having a round-up each month of poems about that month. I'll list the top 10 posts of the year below and we'll both know whether poetry draws as many readers as recipes.

January: Started the year off with A Year of Poems: January. Last year I wrote about my Grandma Humphrey's rocker and how I hoped to give it a new life; a local furniture pro took it on and gave me The Rocker, Refinished. Over on Bike Style I did my final post that revisited old posts with Riding Down Memory Lane: January. I didn't rely solely on those pre-planned posts, though; I captured a sunny-day ride to testify to the Senate Transportation Committee in First Ride of 2024. Slow Down captured some thoughts I've come to with time, age, and insight into what works for me. Reruns: January Posts Worth Revisiting was another version of reviewing old posts, both from this blog and from Bike Style.

Unfortunately, ride #2 of 2024 didn't end with me as happy as I'd felt from ride #1. A crash on my bike thanks to black ice in a shady spot resulted in a sprained knee and the ensuing thoughts, Thank Heavens for Kind Strangers and Transit. 

We spent the first 2-1/2 months living in a couple of different rentals while remodeling work continued on our house. Before my crash this meant walks to the park from a different starting point, a new perspective. 

February: Then it was time for A Year of Poems; February. Time sidelined on the sofa icing my sprained knee meant time to read through old drafts and decide if I wanted to finish any. That brought me back to Shared Streets: A Vision, based on a post I wrote years ago when we lived in Spokane. The transit story continued with my experience getting to a meeting in No Thanks to No Sidewalks! Time for another visit to the archives with Reruns: February Posts Worth Revisiting. My habit of collecting poems on various themes as I encounter them set me up to publish How We Get Where We're Going: Transportation Poems, the latest in a growing collection of poems about transportation over on Bike Style Life. Anyone who works with me knows I pay a lot of attention to the words we use. That led me to write Seeing and other Ways of Knowing, to prompt reexamination of common metaphors. 

March: As a word lover of course I own plenty of bike books; I've published a couple of lists of recommendations over on Bike Style and added another one in celebration of Women's History Month in March, Bike Books I Recommend: Women on Wheels. Even more word-nerd love thanks to my poetry reading came out in A Year of Poems: March. My trips down memory lane continued in Reruns: March Posts Worth Revisiting. March also brought A Thrilling Night when I received the Woman of the Year award from the Puget Sound chapter of WTS (Women in Transportation Seminar) International; such a joy to be there with my team and many colleagues! I take a run at #30DaysOfBiking more often than not and I've found some public accountability via social media helps me stick with it so I wrote Just Ride. Every Day. It's That Simple. 

A huge milestone: The remodeling of our kitchen and laundry and a bunch of other elements of the house wrapped up at last and we moved back in. It's wonderful! This is the last house we intend to buy and we're making it ours.

April: The first day of April brought not one but two posts on poetry, no foolin': A Year of Poems: April and Celebrate National Poetry Month. I celebrated the general niceness of people I encounter while riding my bike in Go Ahead, Make My Day and went back to more past posts in Reruns: April Posts Worth Revisiting. I celebrated Earth Day two ways: Earth Day Market Ride 2024 and Earth Day Poems for Every Day. And I quite happily wrapped up a successful biking April, as I described in How #30DaysOfBiking Rolled in 2024.

May: May is Bike Everywhere Month, which strangely I ended up not writing about directly as a thing to pay attention to. Maybe next year; after all, it does get plenty of national press. I added to my poetry collection with A Year of Poems: May and again rode down memory lane in Reruns: May Posts Worth Revisiting. While not a post about Bike Everywhere Month, Bike/Life Lessons Learned does share some reflections on what riding a bike has meant to me.

I got to attend the WTS International conference since I'd won the chapter award. Hehe in New Orleans, it was a fantastic exodus: seeing so many smart, talented women transportation professionals in one room. 

May ended with the fulfillment of a dream I've had since high school: seeing and hearing Billy Joel live in concert. So fabulous to be with an entire packed stadium, people of all ages singing along to every song. 

June: June got rolling with A Year of Poems: June and another collection over on Bike Style, Still Walking, More Poetry. Seems to me just about any topic can lend itself to a poetry collection if you're so inclined, and I'm inclined. I have plenty more collections started that will appear someday in the future when I feel as if I have enough to make it worth hitting Publish. My trips down Blog Memory Lane continued with Reruns: June Posts Worth Revisiting. In an echo of my posts for winter solstice in 2022 and 2023, I wrote Summer Solstice Readings to mark that longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. I decided one of my older posts was worth a refresh and updated If Electric Hand Dryers Were Bicycles.

I made it to Spokane for a celebration of another section of the Children of the Sun Trail being completed. My WSDOT colleagues, city leaders and the neighborhood celebrated with poetry, music, and of course riding along the trail. 

July: A Year of Poems: July opened the seventh month of the year. After fielding a request from one of my daughters to share our family's beloved bran muffin recipe with a friend, I realized I couldn't find an online version of the recipe I have committed to memory thanks to so many batches over the years so I put it out there for others to find in Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever. I wrapped up my visits to the past with Reruns: July Posts Worth Revisiting.

In July I got to travel to Baltimore for a conference and heard the wonderful Veronica Davis speak, the author of Inclusive Transportation*. I added on a weekend with one of my brothers and his wife and we had a great couple of days of exploring museums and riding a small ferry around the Inner Harbor. If you ever go to Baltimore, know that the Museum of Visionary Arts is well worth the visit and they have a fabulous art museum. I appreciated the easy light rail connection from the airport and transit around town.

 

August: By now you can guess that A Year of Poems: August published the first day of that month. I had enough gardening chores and other activities beyond work that this was the only post for August. Sometime in late July or August my Bike Style blog went down. With all I had going on it was going to take a while to work through the technical issues and restore it so I let it go for a while.

September: A Year of Poems: September led into a busy month of harvesting and preserving—so much preserving that I ended up with highly painful hand cramps at one point from all the slicing, dicing, peeling, coring, prepping, lifting and toting. I captured my various searches for recipes in a series of posts that tell you what I did every weekend: Future Marmalade, Pears, Pears, Pears!, Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!, Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini), and Apples, Apples, Apples!. When I created my own version of a recipe I included it in the post along with links to the ones I made or was inspired by. This way next year after all those chutneys have had a chance to mellow and I find out which ones really turned out great I can repeat the winners and tweak the also-rans.

I also got the chance to return to my former hometown of Spokane for a conference and go on walking and biking tours of sons of the wonderful additions to the local networks. 

October: A Year of Poems: October took me into fall. The gardening and harvesting work wasn't quite done and I shared some inspiration in Keep It Growing: Poems about Gardening. As the nights got colder and the days got shorter I finally gave in and dealt with Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes. 

October held travel I didn't have time to write about while it was happening, from a national transportation safety summit in Houston (really bad transit scenario: no light rail to the airport, a bus ride would take over an hour to the downtown area) to a great first-ever trip to Switzerland for an international committee meeting on transportation in urban and periurban (surburban) areas. I didn't have time to do a lot of touristing but it was wonderful to experience a country where trains, trams, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks form truly connected networks for a carfree life. My sweetheart did the hard work of figuring out how to get the Bike Style site up and running and restored a backup from last year. Yay! I'd hate to lose all that writing and the memories I captured of so many rides and so much learning.

November: A Year of Poems: November kicked off my birthday month. I got back into bike blogging with Riding in the Rain, Wheeling through Winter: Bike Gear DEFGs (to follow the ABCs) as a long-overdue follow-up to one of my early posts on the ABCs of winter riding. I added to the growing collection of poetry roundups with A Dusty Collection: Poems about Dust, regular everyday dust and stardust too. I realized that with all my "canstravaganza" blogging I hadn't yet captured the recipe I used to make a batch of blackberry apple chutney. I closed out the month with Thanks + Giving: a bit of deconstruction of the word into its constituent parts and some poetry on each of the two terms.

December: With A Year of Poems: December I completed my poetic journey through the months of the year. In anticipation of the legislative session and thinking of the things I've learned along the way in advocacy and public policy, I published Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Homework. People tend not to think much about the state legislature until it's in session but some preparation now will help people get ready and be more effective. Listening to an episode of 99% Invisible while I walked in my neighborhood inspired How Many Minutes (by Bike) Is Your Neighborhood?. This year marks my third year of composing a post in honor of Winter Solstice 2024 with links to readings, a playlist, and my posts of the last couple of years.

We spent a really wonderful weekend with my younger sister and her husband at Point Ruston and Tacoma: Delicious food at several local restaurants, a visit to the LeMay Car Museum (yes, I know, unusual destination for me; they do have a few bicycles and did you know several auto manufacturers started as bicycle manufacturers?), and a walk on the pathway by the water, where quotations from Dune are inscribed on the walk because author Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma. 

Toward the end of the year we had a delightful, relaxed couple of days with my beloved sister-in-law snacking and watching Christmas movies, then headed home. I wrapped up the year with an unfortunate bout of some respiratory crud that made me miss the days of masking and no viral stuff being passed around. I get my flu and COVID boosters every time I'm supposed to but they can't catch everything. 

Thanks to being sick and ensconced on the sofa with generic DayQuil and cough drops, all those things I'd planned to get to before the end of 2024 will just have to wait for 2025. That's fine because calendars are a human-made imaginary line that doesn't relate to anything happening on the earth or in the sky. Tomorrow is always tomorrow.

Top Posts in 2024

1. Spokane Blogs: Help Build the List (2010). Note that I haven't maintained this list in over a dozen years since I moved away from Spokane. It's the power of lists on the internet at work, and older posts build up  more Google-Juice.
2. Is there such a thing as a lowercase Nazi? (2012). This one is a reflection on the power of words, inspired in part by "Seinfeld" and in part by my time representing the legislative district that housed neo-Nazis for a while.
3. Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever (2024). Glad to find this delicious recipe, a family tradition, near the top of the charts.
4. I'm part Dutch, you know: What do YOU wear to bike? (2010). One of the shortest posts I've ever written, and an example of the kind of writing that led to me starting a whole separate bike blog.
5. Walking a Path (2021). My generally serendipitous approach to life, summed up well in this print by Oxherd Boy that I ended up buying for my office.
6. Kindness Matters (2018). Very happy to find this one in the top ten as well. This is one I'd include on a list entitled "posts I wish were in the top ten" if it weren't here under its own steam.
7. Paying It Forward: Why I Vote YES for Kids and Schools (2010). Not sure why a post about a school election from 2010 is so popular, but there it is.
8. Thank you for the gift of friendship: Goodbye, Christianne (2010). A tribute to a dear friend who died that year.
9. Seeing and other Ways of Knowing (2024). Thoughts on visual metaphors and how they leave people out.
10. Apples, Apples, Apples! (2024). Some of this year's harvesting, preserving, and canning.

*You should support, cherish and thank your local bookstore if you have one. Same goes for your local library. If you don’t have easy access, you can use the Bookshop affiliate link to order Veronica's book. If I ever get any commission through such links I'll donate the proceeds to organizations that support equity and accessible active transportation.

Apples, Apples, Apples!

It's apple season on top of tomato season and people are leaving bags just sitting out by the curb. Trees in the public right of way are dropping their bounty on the ground. People are posting on Buy Nothing: "Neighbor's tree is dropping apples in my yard. Please take these or I'll be composting them."

I abhor food waste thanks to my Depression-era parents so all that free food has to be put to some good use, right? And apples are my favorite fruit.

Getting the apples home carries its own stories and memories. The first ones this year grow close to home. There's a wide shared-use path near our house on the way to Squaxin Park. A tree there that produces somewhat bland gold apples with a bit of blush to their cheeks produces early, which was helpful when I wanted to make chutneys in August. I rode my bike down and picked up the ones I could salvage the most from.

My Sweet Hubs, knowing of my fondness for gleaning, spotted a tree producing beautiful snappy green and gold apples on another street as we biked along one day. I stopped and filled my panniers and I've done it again since then. That spot has the apples falling on deep, soft grass so they don't get as bruised as the ones falling on the path. 

The third big batch came from one of those neighbors leaving bags by the sidewalk. I saw them one day and didn't stop to pick them up. A couple of days later as I drove past en route to the office to return a vehicle used for a work trip, there they still sat. I stopped and picked up three of the bags. 

When I got to the office and went to carry them in so I could load them into my panniers to carry home by bike, a scene worthy of Laurel and Hardy ensued. The bottoms of the bags had softened sitting in the grass and apples began escaping and rolling across the garage floor. I'd get some contained and others would leak out a different corner. I chased them down and after many attempts worked out a precarious system of balancing the bags atop a notebook. Made it upstairs, genuinely worn out by the effort, and transferred them into the bike bags at last.

My list of recipes made, and recipes I considered that I may come back to if I spot more apples in the wild:

• Hot & Spicy Zucchini Chutney: 8 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints
• Blackberry Apple Chutney: 4 half-pints, 8 quarter-pints
• Apple Mint Jelly: 4 quarter-pints, made using this Ball recipe found via Reddit but without the pectin because of this Apple Mint Jelly recipe, although I didn't put chopped mint in as the latter calls for because jelly should be clear, not look as if you dropped something into the pot accidentally
• Chunky Caramel Apple Jam: Found this one via the Food in Jars Facebook group. 5 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints. I forgot to add the vanilla at the end and it still tasted great.
• Indian Apple Chutney: 13 half-pints
• Plain old Canned Apples packed in juice: 7 quarts
• Plain old Applesauce: 4 pints
• Maple Applesauce: 7 pints
• Apple Ginger Jelly: I did the prep for this and put the juice in the fridge while I traveled for work. Ended up with 12 cups of juice after the first straining, strained again after I came back and took out around a cup of pulp I added to the apple butter process below. The jelly turned out the most beautiful rosy color thanks to some of the apples having a blush to the peels. Yield: 5 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

Chai-Ginger Apple Butter

I put the cooked apple/ginger mash from the jelly prep through a food mill, ending up with a bit over 4 cups. The second straining of the juice yielded another cup or so. The pulp was pretty bland, with a hint of ginger. I had in mind turning it into applesauce but I already have several pints so instead I made apple butter. My recipe is a mash-up of:

• Slow Cooker Chai-Ginger Apple Butter 
• Adding vinegar similar to the level of Alison Roman's Apple Butter Recipe in the New York Times
• Using maple syrup thanks to Food in Jars' Maple Bourbon Apple Butter (can substitute apple cider for the bourbon if you make that one)

I've found that apple butter recipes vary widely in how much vinegar they add; I want this to be tangy because it isn't jam, so the Bon Appetit Apple Butter doesn't sound vinegary enough. Other possibilities considered that are also low on vinegar, from Food in Jars: Low-Sugar Apple Ginger Not-Quite-Butter, or another deep, multispiced Apple Butter along the lines of Spiced Apple Butter. 

For spices you'll taste and adjust toward the end, when flavors have concentrated. I started with less than what I list here and increased.

• Cooked-down apples put through a food mill, or applesauce: 4-5 cups
• Apple cider vinegar: 1/2 c.
• Maple syrup: 1/4 c. (I might increase this next time)
• Brown sugar: 2/3 c.
• Ginger: If you didn't cook the apples with a few slices of fresh ginger, stir in 2 t. ginger paste from a tube, or add 1 t. powdered ginger
• Candied ginger: 1/3-1/2 c., chopped fine
• Cinnamon: 1 t.
• Cardamom: 1 t.
• Cloves: 1/4 t.
• Allspice: 1/8 t.
• Pepper: 1/4 t.
• Salt (sea salt or pickling salt preferred): 1-1/2 t.

I used the slow cooker set on low and cooked all day, stirring and tasting occasionally. As it darkened and thickened I decided it was still a bit bland so I increased the vinegar, added brown sugar, and increased the spices to bring the amounts up to what I list above. By 10:00 p.m. I had canned the Apple Ginger Jelly along with a batch of Tomato Chutney (8 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints). I turned the cooker off, went to bed, and started it up again the next morning to cook for another hour or so. 

Before jarring it up for canning I used the immersion blender to break down the candied ginger and a few stray bits of fiber that had made it through the food mill. That worked okay but it isn't silky smooth; a pickier or more careful cook might want to run it through a blender or mill it again, although at this point it was hot and I didn't want to handle the blender business with a thick, hot paste that's likely to backfire.

Yield: 1 half-pint, 4 quarter-pints

Not made yet, but keeping the link handy in case another bag or two falls into my hands:

• Rosh Hashanah Apple Jam with Rosewater: Very fitting since apples are a member of the rose family. I'll be careful if I make this one because I've had some dishes with rosewater that were so heavily floral it was a bit like eating hand lotion