Plum jam with cinnamon and star anise

Here is one more canning recipe ! This was done for Christmas 2009, to give to the guests attending our annual Christmas meeting. I can't remember exactly what triggered me on the path of canning, but I know it happened totally unplanned, an evening I was cooking some cranberry sauce. I suddenly felt the urge to can the recipe, and got around to improvise some canning equipment.

I found old mason jars, got water boiling, sterilized everything and followed instructions for hot water bath canning that I had in one of my books. I didn't have a safe pair of grips to lift the jars out of the water, so Guyuk proposed that we use a small rope around the rim of the jar, to lift them out, and we kept the other end out of the cauldron.

 

 Chopped plums, cinnamon sticks and star anise

Spiced pears chocolate cake

I'm so excited ! This Friday, I'll be going with my mother-in-law to the Canard du Lac Brome (Lake Brome's duck) to buy whole ducks directly from the producer. What are we going to do with all those ducks ? They're going to be slowly and patiently transformed into canard confit ! I'm SO excited !

Duck confit eaten at Guyuk's birthday 

Bread pudding

What's better than have a sweet bowl of steaming dessert in your hands, when the weather gets colder ?

Maybe knowing that this bowl is made with love AND stale bread that you forgot about on your counter. No spoilage !

Winter is there already !

Gosh, I feel like time goes by so fast ! Just yesterday, I think I remember that the top of one particular tree around where I worked just had started to be yellow-ish... then BOOM ! snow came, with the sub-zero temperatures, along with the end of the year festivities. It has been an awful lot on me. Since I changed departments at my job, I knew christmas would be a busy time, but I never realized it would be THAT busy. I litterally came home some days, and never got around to eat before I crashed and slept until the next day.

We had a birthday to celebrate (Guyuk's uncle), for which I made an almond paste cake, along with some honey-pear icecream. Also, we had a wonderful christmas eve supper with my dad and my in-laws, where I cooked a lamb leg, that we had with fresh diner rolls, roasted winter vegetables and some cranberry sauce I had canned earlier. I got compliments from my mother-in-law about the lamb... wow, was I proud !

The christmas eve table