Cherry Cocktails & Winter Compote Desserts

I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I love the calm, quiet coziness that settles in after the mad dash from Thanksgiving to Christmas and I love that the week begins and ends with champagne. What I don’t love is an empty champagne glass. It’s always a sad thing to reach the bottom of a glass of champagne, but I’ve recently discovered a way to mitigate that disappointment: Dried Tart Cherries. If you drop one of those perfectly plump little bits of brightness into your glass and then add the champagne, the cherry will languish there in the bottom, bubbling away and soaking up all that champagne-y goodness, so that draining the glass results in a tart, wine-infused treat rather than a sigh of regret.

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Fruit Butter Cocktails for Thanksgiving

Here are two things you may not know about fruit butters: 1) they don’t actually contain any butter and 2) they’re awfully good with gin.  Or bourbon.  Or champagne.  I haven’t always possessed such encyclopedic knowledge of fruit butters.  As I child I wrinkled my nose at the thought of apples mixed with butter and only later learned that fruit butters are so named because they’re silky and smooth and spreadable – like butter.

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Easy Entertaining with Fig Conserve

I spent last weekend in North Carolina visiting friends and family, walking barefoot on the beach, and eating Fig Conserve. I’d anticipated a weekend filled with shrimp and crabs and big game fish, and there was plenty of all that, but our late afternoon cheese and fig snacks were among the weekend’s culinary highlights. The Fig Conserve is one of my favorite American Spoon products. It’s filled with chunks of honeyed figs and their tiny, crunchy seeds, all accented with the bright notes of citrus. It’s completely divine — sweet and fragrant and just a teensy bit zippy — and I’d be content to just gobble it up by the spoonful. Of course, it’s generally considered impolite to sit around eating jam straight from the jar, which is where the cheese comes in.

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