Mango and Friends Chunky Fruit Salad Sauce

A warm welcome to Isabel, a new subscriber (and fine baker) from the Facebook side!


With warm weather on the way, it’s a good time to gather up recipes for dishes that not only taste great, but that are also cool and refreshing. In the past I’ve been able to share a recipe for my favorite cold, tangy gazpacho. Today we have Mango and Friends Chunky Fruit Salad Sauce. (It’s a pity something that tastes so good ended up with such an awkward name, but even after much thought I just couldn’t come up with a better one. If anyone makes this and, after tasting it, can suggest a better name, I’d be happy to consider it.)


Mango and Friends Chunky Fruit Salad Sauce is something like chunky applesauce, except it’s made from a lovely-tasting combination of mango, pears, cantaloupe and peaches. What do you do with it? Anything you do with applesauce: enjoy it as is, especially with a bit of sharp cheddar cheese (as seen in the photo); bake it into cakes and muffins; spread it on potato pancakes; use it to glaze chicken…you get the idea.


As recipes go, this one is both easy and delicious. If you’ve never cut up a mango before, you may find that part of it a little challenging at first, but you’ll manage it. (Cutting up your first mango is something like cutting up your first whole chicken. You’ll turn it over and around a lot, cutting where it seems to make sense to, wondering how in the world people on cooking shows can do it so neatly, and eventually finish with a pile of pieces, no two of which look alike. Don't worry; they'll work just fine.)


Another recipe note: you’ll see that all the fruit used in this recipe is fresh, except the peaches. You can make this with fresh peaches if you like, but I chose canned here for the same reason cooks generally use canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones: consistency. Great peaches, like great tomatoes, are available for about two and a half minutes a year; the rest of the time, you take your chances as to how they taste and feel. (Okay, the two and a half minutes is a bit of an exaggeration, but you know what I’m getting at.)


Something else worth pointing out: the fruit mixture is seasoned using, among other things, salt. The salt and fruit combination may strike some people as strange, but one of the best bits of cooking advice I ever got was never to underestimate how nicely a bit of salt can bring out the flavor of fruit.


This recipe makes 4 to 5 cups, depending on the size of the fruit you use and the thickness to which you cook it down.
Prepare the fruit by peeling and coring 4 pears, and slicing them into ¼” thick pieces; peeling and slicing ½ a medium cantaloupe into ¼” thick pieces; peeling 1 mango and cutting into bite-size pieces; and cutting two well-drained 15 ounce cans of sliced peaches in juice into bite-size pieces.


Combine the pears, cantaloupe, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, the juice and zest of 1 lemon, 1/3 cup orange juice, ½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon, ½ teaspoon of kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon of ground nutmeg in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer.


After the mixture has simmered (uncovered) for about 10 minutes, add the mango and peaches. Stir to combine, bring the heat up again until the mixture boils, then lower the heat to a simmer. Simmer until the mixture has a “chunky applesauce” consistency, about 1 hour. (Use a masher after about 50 minutes, but be sure to leave the overall texture chunky.)


Refrigerate overnight in a sealed container, then use anywhere you would applesauce.
You can’t get fresh-made good taste much easier than that!


For a cookbook-style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other Kissing the Cook recipe, just drop me a line or a comment, and include your e-mail address. It will be yours before you know it!


See you next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Cantaloupe-Pear Tart with Apple Glaze

The origins of this cantaloupe-pear tart with an apple glaze began some years back, when a friend mentioned a wonderful cantaloupe pie she’d had at a bed-and-breakfast when she was young. That sounded good to my wife, but she doesn’t bake pies.


Then she remembered. “Wait a minute,” she thought. “I have a husband who bakes pies.”


That being the case, I was given the happy task of putting together a cantaloupe pie, and it worked out pretty well. When the cantaloupe I was making it with one day was a bit too small, I supplemented it with a similarly sliced pear, and found it became even better. Before long it became my go-to recipe for "everybody bring something" events. People seemed to like it because it not only tasted good on its own, but had the added appeal of being just a bit unusual. And so when I received a tart pan as a gift this past Christmas, I knew what my first tart had to be.


Like many tart recipes, then, this one also adapts very easily back to a double-crust pie, either solid-top or lattice-top, if that’s what you prefer to make. The biggest difference here is that the tart version also has a glaze made from a Granny Smith apple, with a gentle tartness that contrasts nicely with the sweetness of the filling.



This recipe makes one 9-1/2” tart. 
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and blind bake a pastry shell in a 9-1/2” tart pan. (Clicking on the links will take you to previous posts featuring a tutorial video on blind baking and a pie crust recipe.)


Place a small glass plate in the freezer. (This is a technique borrowed from the world of jelly-making that will be useful when we make the glaze.)


Slice a cantaloupe into ¼” thick slices and cut off the rind. Peel and core a pear and cut it into similar ¼” thick slices.


Put ½ cup of brown sugar (firmly packed), 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, ½ teaspoon of ground nutmeg, and ½ teaspoon of kosher salt into a sealable plastic bag. Add the cantaloupe and pear slices and toss to coat.


After the pastry shell is blind-baked, arrange the fruit in the pastry shell in two layers, dotting each layer with about 1 teaspoon of butter substitute. Bake till done, about 60 minutes. (Similar to when you bake a pie, keep an eye on the crust and cover the edge with aluminum foil if it starts to get too brown.)


While the tart is baking, prepare the glaze as follows. (If you prefer, simply warming your favorite preserves to a brush-able texture would work too, if you don't mind the glaze being a bit sweeter than the Granny Smith apple version.)
Peel, core and coarsely chop a Granny Smith apple, putting the pieces in a bowl with the juice of one lemon and tossing to coat as you go to prevent the apple from oxidizing.


Put the apple pieces and the juice into a food processor and puree until liquid.


Put the pureed apple into a small saucepan with 2 -3 tablespoons of sugar and cook over low heat to a jelly-like consistency, checking the readiness of the hot liquid by putting a few drops on the frozen plate and seeing if it gels.


When the tart and glaze are ready, and while the tart is still warm, gently brush the glaze onto the fruit filling to finish the tart.


Hope you like it! If you prefer a cookbook-style, notebook ready copy of this or any other Kissing the Cook recipe, just let me know in a comment or e-mail and I'll send it right along.


See you next week with another kitchen-tested, user-friendly recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)