Cranberry Salsa Cheese Spread

This is a special appetizer that my dad makes for Thanksgiving every year. He first learned it from his brother, my Uncle John, and then reinvented the recipe at home. So, this is a very Thanksgiving dish for us, but you could make it for Christmas too.

I do think the fresh cranberries taste better than using cranberry sauce, but it’s still pretty good the way I make it here. Isn’t it funny that the North American version has pineapple and the Asian version doesn’t? That’s because we don’t have canned pineapple and pineapple season is in the summer.

Hello to my family celebrating Thanksgiving in Kansas City! I hope you ate some of this cranberry cheese spread too. Miss you guys.

Passion Fruit and Its Flower

James is trying to grow a different variety of passion fruit in the garden. Up here in the mountains, we have a small variety that tastes great, but doesn’t make a lot of juice. This is the larger variety of passion fruit, which grows in Vientiane.

So far, our vine has produced less than 10 fruits and some flowers that might turn into fruit. Aren’t the flowers crazy beautiful?! We hope our passion fruit vines will give us lots of passion fruit juice!

Plum Torte

I know this picture looks sort of like burnt pepperoni pizza, but it isn’t. It looks like that because the cinnamon on top of the plums darkened in the oven. The plums were fine though and the torte was a success.

After turning most of the plums from our trees into plum jam, I used the rest to make an Original Plum Torte. This recipe comes from The Splendid Table which is a National Public Radio show “for people who love to eat”.

Apple Galette

I love that galettes are like pies, except less fussy.  You don’t need a pie pan or any skill at shaping a pie crust.  This probably works with a variety of fruits, but I know that it works with peaches.

Peach Galette

Something like a peach is in season right now.  It doesn’t look like a peach very much because it’s greenish on the outside and pale green on the inside.  I think it’s just that no one lets them get at ripe as we would like them.  It’s okay if you use them in baking though – they turn orange and taste peachy!  I might even like them better than a normal peach in baking because they have a nice tartness to them like a green apples does.  This galette was delicious, but I don’t have the proportion of crust to fruit right yet (too much crust).  So I’m going to try this again with apples and then post the new and improved recipe!