Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Adventures in Leftover Relish, Part 2

Having mostly gotten rid of the cran-apple-orange relish, I was still faced with a tub of the yummy but soon-to-be-fermenting cranberry salsa.

No tips online for using that up.

And, oh, by the way, the avocados I'd bought to use on the Thanksgiving salad but forgot to use were sitting on the counter, turning very, very ripe.

avocado. cranberry salsa. avocado. cranberry salsa.  hmm...

Spouse 1.0 used to love the cranberry salsa at La Salsa.  He'd eat it on food that had avocado in it.  The food might be soft tacos, which were made with corn masa, which is kinda like cornmeal, which is kinda like blue cornmeal.

Sounds like blue cornbread to me!

Except, with green avocado, blue-gray cornmeal, and cranberry-red salsa, what color would it really be?

Was I insane? Desperate? I don't know. But, Spouse ate it and liked it. And, coworker Nick said, "Yummm" when he ate it. So, maybe it's not quite as weird as it looks.

Nah, it's pretty weird.  I think I'll need to keep thinking about ways to use up leftover cranberry salsa.

Ack. Bad lighting.  It actually looked a lot rosier than this.


Adventures in Leftover Relish, Part 1

I won't speak of the half turkey Spouse 1.0 and I were left with after our Thanksgiving guests had departed.  That's another story.

Instead, let's talk about cranberry relish.

There are probably at least 100 ideas for using leftover cranberry sauce out there. Many of them say something like, "Pour relish over goat cheese for a lovely appetizer."

Sorry, cranberry sauce over goat cheese is one of the myriad leftovers I'm trying to use up.

Or, "Use it in muffins". Did that. Last year. Didn't like it.

And, all the recipes talk about ways to use up normal cranberry relish.  Well, one of the tubs of leftover relish is kinda normal: Raw cran-apple-orange relish. 

But.

None of the 100 ways to use up leftover cranberry sauce talk about what to do with a tub of leftover cranberry salsa.  Yummy, yummy stuff. But, even Spouse 1.0's love of cranberry salsa can't get it used up before it rots.

So, I was on my own for what to do with my two tubs of leftover relish.

I decided to make jam bars with the tub of cran-apple-orange relish. 

Funny thing about jam bar recipes: When I had absolutely no interest in making jam bars, it seemed like every GF cookbook, magazine, and blog had a GF jam bar recipe.  But, when I went to look through my dozens of cookbooks & mags, and hundreds of printouts from blogs, no jam bar recipe. Except for dear old Roben Ryberg's cookie cookbook.  But, her recipe didn't use oats.  I wanted a jam bar recipe that used oats.

So, I pulled out my trusty, albeit glutenacious, Better Homes cookbook. And, there it was: A nice, oaty bar cookie recipe that was exactly what I was looking for.  Started converting that bad boy to GF. Yeah.

And. I couldn't find the GF oats.  I'd kind of re-arranged and tidied and generally hidden things for Thanksgiving. My GF oats were somewhere underneath and behind who-knows-what. Luckily, the quinoa flakes were handy. So, Quinoa Flake Cran-Apple-Orange Doncha-Just-Relish-Them Jam Bars it is.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cup leftover cran-apple-orange relish
About 1-2 tsp potato starch
100 grams GF blend flour of choice (about 3/4 cup)
28 grams cashew meal or blanched almond meal (about 1/4 cup)
110 grams quinoa flakes (1 cup)
160 grams organic cane sugar (2/3 cup)
3/4 tsp xanthan gum
1/4 tsp baking soda
4 oz butter, softened (1/2 cup)
Optional: 1/4 to 1/3 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350 and lightly spritz a 9" square pan with coconut oil spray.
  2. Heat relish in a small saucepan until it starts to boil a little. Remove from heat, let partially cool, and sprinkle on the potato starch. Stir and let cool while you do everything else.
  3. Make crust by mixing dry ingredients, then working in the butter with your fingertips. 
  4. Reserve 1/2 cup lightly packed of the crust mixture.
  5. Press remaining crust mixture into the pan.
  6. Spread the relish mixture over the crust mixture.
  7. Add nuts to the reserved crust mixture, then sprinkle over everything.
  8. Bake about 1/2 hour until the top is golden. Cool, cut into bars, and enjoy.
Heavily adapted from the Fruit-filled Oatmeal Bars recipe in Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, 10th edition.
 
They went fast.