Plum (Yum!) Sauce - No Sugar

Start with very ripe black plums. Our local “99 cent Only” store had them at two pounds for 99 cents, so I cooked six pounds. Remove pits.

Chop briefly in batches in food processor to break up the skins; do not puree.

Cook slowly in large pot (I used a six-quart stainless steel dutch oven) until the sauce reaches 165 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir frequently (every couple of minutes) to scrape up any fruit that catches on the bottom. Do not let it scorch or the whole batch will taste burned.

Let cool to room temperature. Add approximately one to two tablespoons Splenda for every pound of fruit. You could always sweeten with sugar while still hot, if you prefer.

Mix in thoroughly. A pinch of salt will enhance the overall flavor, but of course is optional.

You will have a gorgeous, ruby red, slightly chunky sauce. Refrigerate or freeze. I freeze in zipper sandwich bags; always thaw them in a bowl to ensure they don’t leak and make a mess in your refrigerator.

Enjoy as a topping for toast or biscuits instead of jam, or pour over ice cream, cheesecake, or angel food cake. Use in a fruit or yoghurt smoothie. With the addition of vinegar, brown sugar, dried minced onion, ginger (dried or fresh), garlic, chili flakes, and soy sauce to your taste, it makes a great plum dipping sauce for egg rolls, pork, or chicken.

Beef Casserole--Cooking

Next we sliced up a large onion and lightly browned it in the same pan, adding a little more oil as needed. Forgot to say: we did use a thin layer of oil to brown the meat. When the onions were slightly soft, we stirred in a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.

After that, we tied up a “bouquet garni”, with a small piece of muslin and some thread, containing three cloves of garlic, the zest of half an orange, five whole cloves, and a bay leaf. That way you can pull the whole bundle out when the dish is finished and don’t have to wonder who will bite down on a whole clove in their gravy!

We had three options for cooking the casserole: in a large “Dutch oven” on the stovetop, in a casserole in the oven, or in a crockpot. We chose the stovetop method, although the oven or crockpot would have required less tending. We also had a choice of cooking liquid: dark beer or full-bodied red wine. We chose the former: two bottles of Negra Modelo.


We used a little beer to deglaze the frying pan before combining the meat, the onions, the bouquet garni and the rest of the beer, along with salt and pepper, in a six-quart Dutch oven. Use something non-reactive (stainless steel, oven-proof glass, glazed ceramic, enamel-coated cast iron such as Le Creuset), whenever the dish contains an acid, like beer or wine or a vinegar sauce.

We brought it to a boil and then turned the heat down until the liquid was just barely simmering, and let it cook two to three hours until the meat was very tender. If you cook it in the oven, do so on slow heat (250 degrees F.), and on low if in a crock pot, for as many hours as a similar meat dish would cook.

When the chunks were tender, we fished out the herb bag and the bones. Then we scooped the marrow out of the bones, and stirred it back into the sauce to enrich it; the marrow melts right in. If most of the liquid has cooked away, and the onion turned to jam, you can thin it a little if you want a sauce or gravy. If it is too juicy, you can thicken it with a little cornstarch or potato flour mixed with a little water. Adjust salt and pepper to your taste.


The orange peel and cloves combined with the natural sugars in the onion produce a pleasant and slightly sweet casserole, which we enjoyed. If it doesn’t sound good to you, omit the orange and switch the cloves to juniper berries (the recipe called for these, but we didn’t have any on hand) or a splash of gin. For other variations, use red wine instead of beer, or add a little cognac or whiskey in the final sauce. Serve over noodles or mashed potatoes. We had it with noodles and green peas.

The wine you can’t quite see in the glass was a bottle that had been lost and abandoned in the hall closet “wine cellar”: a 1991 Marques de Caceres Rioja. Nothing fancy, like a Rioja Reserva. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t hold a Rioja like this so long, but it had been overlooked, and happily turned out to be in very good condition. It was a very good accompaniment to the casserole. Not bad for a $5.99 bottle from Trader Joes’!

Next, we’ll return to the rich beef stock. And then on to the pork pie.

Beef Casserole--Preparation

The first project was a beef casserole.  Now this was originally going to be an oxtail casserole, following the recipe in Frances Bissell's "The Real Meat Cookbook" (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992):

Nancy got the beef bones going for some stock.  At first she thought she would add one section of shank to the stock:

But then she changed her mind and decided that there was enough meat on the bones, and then kept the bones (for the stock) and the shank sections (for the casserole) separate:

The shank sections were cut apart and went in Nancy's favorite heavy cast aluminum pan to brown, in a thin layer of oil; she browned them in batches, and wound up with them all done, sitting in the Pyrex bowl at the bottom.  Notice the nice big portions of marrow in the shank bones:

Hint: make sure whatever pan you use to brown the meat will take very high heat – heavy cast aluminum or cast iron. And don’t play with the pieces in the pan: let them get a good brown crust on one side before turning them to brown another surface.

Now on to the cooking!

Shopping for Meat

Last week, we headed off to our favorite Hispanic supermarket with list in hand, intent on preparing some savory dishes for the holidays.  We knew the market had beef shanks and beef soup bones on sale, as well as a pork mix for making pozole.

We had thought about perhaps doing an oxtail casserole, a couple of types of scrapple, a pork pie, and had a few other things in mind, depending on what looked good at the market.  The tentative list looked like this:

up to 6 lbs. oxtails (only 3lbs. if only doing the casserole, more if also doing an oxtail terrine)
up to 6 lbs. beef bones
some pork bones
one trotter (pig's foot)
some beef, maybe shank, about a pound
some pork, maybe shoulder

The list lasted no longer than the trip to the carniceria counter!  They didn't have oxtails on display, but they did have some beautiful beef shank (shin, for our British friends) sections.  As our local butcher wanted $4.95 a pound for oxtails, we thought we'd adapt the oxtail casserole recipe and just use shank.  The beef bones looked good.  But so did an entire section of pork neckbones, which had lots of meat on them.  Pork shoulder was on sale, as well as the pozole mix.  So what we walked away with was:

3.37 lbs. beef shank at $1.99/lb.
3.55 lbs. beef soup bones at $1.59/lb.
3.36 lbs. pork neck bones at $1.99/lb.
2.21 lbs. pork pozole mix at $1.79/lb.
2.17 lbs. pork shoulder (butt) at $0.99/lb. (great!)
two trotters, split, 1.62 pounds at $1.49/lb.

In addition ,we picked up a lot of veggies; this market has a great selection and excellent quality at low prices.  Now we just needed to plan some dishes!

Getting Started

This blog is from two transplanted Mainers who grew up eating the common country cooking of Maine.  For the last thirty-three years, we've been learning a little about other types of cooking, and sometimes gettin' kinda fancy.

We hope you enjoy reading about our culinary adventures.