Spicy Fruit Preserve

Spicy Fruit Preserve 

(The Treat that we never get tired of eating)

At Halloween,  children are treated with candies or chocolates for the trick or treat festivities. In Burma, when we were little, the candies and chocolate were imported from overseas and were expensive. As for me, I love the Burmese traditional fruit preserve.
The fruit preserves are always available at school snack shops and movie theatre.

Last month, because of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday celebration, the cranberries are available at groceries till now. It is quite similar to the prunes and it tastes sour. One of my friends made that fruit preserve once and it made me tempting to try out.

In Burma, there are also tropical fruits available so sour fruit like mango, prunes and Marian plum are our best choice of fruit preserves as snacks. Most of them are made with chili powder and brown sugar or plum sugar. In Burma, mangoes are available everywhere. There are a lot of traditional Mangoes related food and salad are also fun to have as side dishes.

Every summer time, my mom made salted dried mango for a year-round supply of kitchen ingredients. We use dried Marian plum are also used in meat dishes. Dried sour fruits are suitable to cook with pork as Burmese traditional meat curry.

As I have some dried Marian plum and cranberry this year, I am going to make two types of spicy fruit preserve with cranberry and dried Marian. I am thankful to my Mom in law for bringing dried Marian plum as she knew that I am very interested to cook and try the new recipe. Cranberry is also very tender and soft as compared to prune preserves.

Cranberry Fruit Preserve Snack 

Ingredients

1 lb.  Cranberry
1 lb.   Brown Sugar (or) Jaggery
1 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Red chili powder
1 tbsp   Cumin powder
1 tbsp   Curry powder (or) Masala Powder
1 cup   Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice
2 cup  Water

Instructions

1. In the 4 qt. size dutch oven, add sugar or Jaggery and water, then heat with high heat till it boils and is bubbly.
2. Stir till the water evaporated and add orange juice and salt.
3. Stir it till thicken the syrup. When the syrup starts to thicken, add the cranberry together with chili powder, cumin and curry powder. We may skip the curry powder since we are using the cumin powder.
4. After adding the cranberry, it may be a little watery but stir until all the water evaporated and the fruit preserve thicken.
5. Taste it then add salt or chili powder to adjust our own taste.
6. We may also enjoy this fruit preserve with cracker and cheese as the appetizer condiment too. Enjoy it with the green tea also great.

(Note: We may use the same procedure to make the Marian plum or Maprang plum( Botanical Name: Bouea macrophylla)