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Friday, February 8, 2013

Persimmon Chutney

I just realized, 3 days shy of our 3rd blogiversary, that this post from 2012 hadn't yet seen the light of day. Oops! Let's travel back a few months, to the Thanksgiving holidays...

I was convinced that I had never seen nor tasted a persimmon prior to two years ago, when Cheryl Lee of Black Girl Chef's Whites made cookies with them and we noshed on them at Mudtown Farms. But my mother swears we had a persimmon tree  in our backyard growing up.

And that she hates them.

How could I have blocked that out of my memory? I remember the two lemon trees (we always tied our birthday piƱatas to them), the pomegranate bush (and the many clothes I stained trying to eat the seeds), the water feature smack in the middle of the yard, and my tetherball setup. But no persimmons.

Despite not being as foreign as I thought they were, they suddenly started showing up in our weekly fruit delivery at work. Lots and lots of persimmons. They're great in cookies, but 'tis the season for LOTS of cookies, so what else can be done with them?

Make a chutney, take it to Thanksgiving dinner along with the roasted squash puree, and watch it become the first dish to completely disappear. Everyone assumed it was a sweet potato dish. They were wrong, and still devoured it.

Guess what they're all getting for Christmas? Even mom, who actually loved this dish. Yay, we converted her!


The original recipe comes from Epicurious. The only change was to use a few tablespoons of the menjurje tea combination of honey and lemons instead of sugar. It worked really well. 

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