Makin' Mincemeat!

This year we are having two dinners, a traditional ukranian dinner on the Sunday before Christmas, for which I am making a mountain of perogies, and a traditional Southern dinner on Christmas day for which Craig is frying a whole turkey (expect pictures!) and for this dinner I have been charged with making an old fashioned, real, from scratch mincemeat pie. Not sure how that came about, seeing as I have only ever tasted mincemeat once or twice and have never made a pie beyond the "canned filling frozen crust" type. But I will try my best, the mincemeat lovers (Craig) are counting on me! The filling got made yesterday and of course I took pictures of the process.


Here are all the strange and wonderful things that go into the mincemeat, not including of course...





The meat! How many people out there knew there was real meat in mincemeat? Not me! We bought some beef and I cut it into rough pieces and browned it in a pan with a bit of water. Then I drained it and let it cool, and then chopped it up pretty fine. There was some extra when I was all done, Buster got that.


Buster is always around to help with the cooking.

Next came the fruit prep, which was the most time consuming part. The recipe required 4 cups of chopped apple and a large orange to be peeled and diced.



For those keeping track at home, that's a TON of apple chopping to do.

All of that gets put into a big pot with a bunch of strange and seemingly unrelated ingredients...

Raisins...


Sweet pickle juice and pineapple juice...


Spices, beef broth and molasses.

Everything got combined and looked like this:


Then got cooked down for about two hours into this:


Craig came home and tasted it and said it was great, I don't have much experience with mincemeat so if he was impressed I guess I did alright! Now just to pack it up and put it in the fridge until next week. According to The Internet, it gets better if it sits for a little while.