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.

Dragonfruit

Yesterday I bought one of these at the grocery store:

It's called a dragonfruit and every time I see them at Safeway I say I want one and Craig says no because they are $5 each (*$5* EACH!) and he thinks I will forget about it in the fridge like most other fruit I buy. This week I put one in the cart anyways. I'd been told they taste like a combination of a pear and a kiwi, and I love both of those fruits. How can I lose?! When I got home I Googled how to prepare it, and it seemed pretty easy...

According to The Internet, I only needed a few simple tools, and delicious dragonfruit would be mine!

Step 1: Cut your dragonfruit in half the long way:

To my surprise and delight it looked exactly like the picture on my dish soap:

So far so good! On to the next step!

Step 2: Run your big spoon along the outer edge to loosen the white part, and then scoop the whole piece out. It comes out fairly easily, you can see by my pic that one came out a bit different than the other:

Step 3: Trim off all the pink skin (according to the internet it's unhealthy to eat, no mention why but I dutifully trimmed mine), cut into cubes and put them back into the skin "bowl". I don't think you have to put it back into the skin but it sure looks fancy!

All that's left now is to eat it!

So what does it taste like? To me it has the texture of pears from a canned fruit cocktail, but the taste of a kiwi that's slightly less sweet than usual. The little seeds are the texture of kiwi seeds as well. It's delicious!