Quice, Pears, and Jam-o-rama

October 13, 2009

What you are seeing above, my friends, is a quince turnover that I made this weekend. Quince! How exciting! I've never used/bought/tried a quince before! For the unitiated, a whole quince is pictured below:

They're a strange little fruit that's described as a cross between a pear and an apple. This might be true, with the exception that they are hard as rocks and must be cooked down before you can do anything with them. Taste wise, they're a little more tart than a pear or an apple--really delicious and really interesting.

I was able to enjoy this quince thanks to Jaime at Wayward Seed Farm. When I picked up my share this past weekend, we got to talking about the end of the season (sob!) and what to expect for our last week. One thing led to another and she offered me one of the quince (quinces?) that she had recieved from a friend. (Thanks again, Jaime!!!) After taking the quince home and contemplating it for a few days, I decided what I would do--one quince isn't really enough for jam or jelly, and I wanted to do something that would really let me taste the fruit. With a sheet of frozen puff pastry in the freezer, the game plan fell into place: turnovers.

A brief sidebar here--frozen puff pastry is awesome, and I can't really ever picture a need to make it from scratch. Seriously, Pepperidge Farm does such a great job making it themselves, why go through all the hassle yourself?

Prepping the quince was fairly easy (I say fairly because they are extremely hard to cut--apparently quince related finger injuries are not uncommon)--I peeled, cored, and chopped it into pieces then threw them into a sauce pan with about 1/4 c. of sugar and one-third of a vanilla bean. I let it simmer down for about 10 minutes, to the point where there was hardly any liquid left and the quince was the consistency of apple pie filling.

While that was going on, I preheated the oven to 400, defrosted the puff pastry, rolled it out so that it was about 12" square, and cut circles out that were about five inches or so in diameter (I used a small bowl). Then, I just spooned the quince filling (remove the vanilla bean!) onto the circles, and sealed them using an egg wash (you can see it in the picture above). Fold, press, seal, and into the oven they went for about 15 minutes....Et voila!

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Pear-stravaganza!

This past weekend, I also stopped over at the Ham Sandwich parental homestead. While there, I was informed that the neighbor's pear tree was inundated with pears, and we were encouraged to go pick some:

So we did, probably 30 or so pounds worth:

I hope everyone likes canned pears for Christmas!

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Finally, capping off a rather fruit-filled weekend, I made a couple jars each of apricot and pear jam.

Most of my canning recipies have been from Well Preserved, which has lots of really lovely small batch canning recipies and ideas. I just used her standard apricot jam recipe, and tried the gingered pear jam one as well--both were quite delicious. For the gingered pear jam, the recipe just calls for 1/4 c. chopped crystallized ginger to be cooked with the pears, as well as some whole cloves and a cinnamon stick tied up in a cheesecloth bag. The resulting jam was a heady mix of sweet and spicy, and will be delicious on some buttermilk biscuits in late December and January...