Mixed Fruit Butter

 It's that time of year. The fruit at the farmer's market and at the grocery store looks unbelievably good. I know I need lettuce or potatoes and the next thing you know there are plums or peaches or nectarines or cherries following me home.

It doesn't matter that I've already got peaches in the fridge. And then I eat the newer ones because they look better than plums that I bought four days ago.

Then what?

Slightly overripe fruit has plenty of uses. It's great for cooking and baking. And that overripe fruit tends to be sweeter as well as a little softer, which is a big bonus for some cooking applications.

I ended up making a mixed fruit butter using some ripe fruit and some that was a little overripe, and it needed absolutely no extra sugar.

I used grapes, peaches, plums, pluots, and cherries.

Now all you need is an English muffin. Or, if you must, go ahead and spread it on toast.

Mixed Fruit Butter

1 quart mixed fruit
1 cup water
Pinch of salt
Sugar, as needed

Wash the fruit and pit the fruit that is easy to pit. I pitted the big fruit - peaches, plums, and pluots, but I left the pits in the cherries.

Put the fruit in a saucepan along with the water and salt. Simmer slowly with the pot covered until the fruit is very soft. Stir as needed to keep it from sticking, and add water as needed to keep it from burning.

When the fruit is very soft, pass it though a food mill or fine strainer to get rid of the skin and any pits that you left behind. Continue cooking the strained fruit, stirring often, until it's very thick and is about 1/4 the original volume. Yup, I started with a quart of fruit and ended up with a cup of fruit butter.

Taste and add sugar, if needed and cook long enough to melt the sugar.. The fruit I had was sweet enough without any added sugar.

Let the fruit butter cool, transfer to a storage container, and refrigerate.

Quick-Pickled Cucumbers

When I was a kid my mother used to make pickles quite often. The pickled beets, pickled herrings, and bread and butter pickles all had one thing in common - they all had onions in them. And the one thing I always told her was that she should have used more onions.

Yep, as a kid, I was hooked on pickled onions.

When I make pickles, I tend to get a little over-enthusiastic about onions, but you can adjust the quantity of onions in this recipe any way you like. Or leave them out entirely. I suggest adding some - they do add flavor to the pickles - but that's entirely up to you.

These pickles remind me a little bit of bread and butter pickles, but they're a lot quicker to make. They're refrigerator pickles rather than preserved pickles, so these are best made in small quantities.

And ... if you prefer, these don't have to be peeled, if you don't want to.

Quick-Pickled Cucumbers

1 quart, combined: Picking cucumbers, peeled and sliced, and onions, sliced
1 cup water
3/4 cup white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon mustard seed
1 teaspoon salt

Layer the cucumbers and onions in a quart jar (or two pint jars, if you refer).

Combine the remaining ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil.

Pour the hot liquid over the pickles.

Poke skewer or thin knife down the sides of the jar to get rid of any trapped air bubbles. Add more of the liquid, as needed, to cover the vegetables in the jar.

Cover the jar, let it com to room temperature, then refrigerate. These are ready to eat as soon as they're cool, but I like them best after they've rested for at least a day.

Frozen wine - yes or no?

I was sent some samples of the new Arbor Mist Frozen Wine Cocktails. Sweet!

No, really, they're pretty sweet.

I tried three different flavors, Blackberry Merlot, Strawberry White Zinfandel, and White Pear Pinot Grigio. They come in pouches that you're supposed to freeze for 5 hours, then you massage the pouch ad squeeze into a glass.

When I tried that, my drink was a lot more like a granita, which I guess isn't a bad thing, but it wasn't really sippable. I had better success when I let the pouch thaw for a while before I massaged and squeezed into a glass. Maybe my freezer's too cold.

Flavor-wise, they were sweet. Yeah, I said that before. The ingredients list wine, water, high fructose corn syrup and natural flavors, among other things. That explains the sweetness, I guess. The Merlot Blackberry tasted like a sweet red fruity wine drink. Sort of like a sangria, I guess, but sweeter, with less citrus.

The Pinot Grigio White Pear has a discernible pear flavor as well as a white wine flavor. That was my favorite, but I tend to prefer white wines over reds in general. The White Zinfandel Strawberry reminded me of a Jolly Rancher candy for some reason.

This is probably not what you want to serve your wine-snob friend, but I could imagine a whole bunch of these in a cooler next to the beers at a barbecue or some other casual gathering. And for sure, they seem like a summer drink rather than a winter one.

I'm thinking this could be used as a dessert if you served it as a granita.

So ... what do you think? Are you going to try them?

This post was sponsored by SheSpeaks.