Cherry Barbecue Sauce Recipe & Giveaway!

I’m happy to once again be participating as a Canbassador. I received some sweet dark red cherries that are as delicious as the season is fleeting. Preserving them is the best way to savor them a little bit longer. Last year I canned some cherries with bourbon. I can’t find the recipe I used and frankly I put the jars so far back in my pantry that I forgot about them until a couple of weeks ago. I just opened the first jar and they turned out to be delicious. I probably got the idea from SweetPreservation.com . This year I used my cherries to make one batch of cherry pie filling and jars of cherry barbecue sauce. I looked at a couple of recipes, but mostly my recipe is adapted from a recipe from Taste of Home magazine. While the technique is the same, I switched up the seasonings, decreased the sugar and blended it smooth. The sauce is really good on pulled pork. You can try it with this super easy  recipe I developed for preparing it in the slow cooker. But it would a......

Continue reading

Parsley Pesto Recipe

Eating on a budget is possible, but it's not exactly exciting. To be honest, despite my success with recipes I developed last year during the Hunger Challenge I didn't make any of them again after the Challenge was over. They were too plain, sad reminders of a week of limitations. My desire this year is to coax maximum flavor out of inexpensive dishes and not rely on my old standbys, bacon and parmesan cheese. The Challenge seems to be turning me into a vegan. One recipe I've been trying to rethink is pesto. In this version I replaced basil with parsley, took out the cheese and olive oil, used pumpkin seeds in place of pine nuts and used a bit of bread to give the sauce some texture. I credit cookbook author Sally Schneider with that idea. She uses a mixture of bread and water to create creamy texture that tricks you into thinking you are eating something made with oil or fat. The nice thing about this sauce is that in addition to using it on pasta, you could also serv......

Continue reading