Homemade Fig Jam

There’s something magical about fruit trees. In our experience, which admittedly is very little, they don’t require much work and reap many benefits. Our fig tree produced a great harvest, more than either of us expected between early August and mid-October. In case you missed our other recipes, we had a lot of fun creating Chicken and Fig Tagine, Cider-Braised Boneless Short Ribs with Figs, Arugula and Fresh Fig Salad, and Fig Coconut Yogurt.

Today, even though we’re away on vacation, we bring you another fig recipe: homemade fig jam. It is great on rice crackers; you might also enjoy it with a soft cheese like brie (if you can tolerate high-quality dairy) or Kite Hill almond-based Cream Cheese Style Spread. Brent’s mom used it with almond butter on sprouted bread (a new twist on PB&J!) and plans to use it instead of store-bought fruit spread in her Linzer cookies for Christmas. Whether you have your own fig tree or find them at the store, we hope you’ll enjoy making and eating this fig jam or any of our other fig recipes. Let us know what you decide to do—we would love to hear from you!

Spicy Baba Ghanouj (Spicy Eggplant Dip)

As you may have noticed from our posts on social media, we bought a house in December and that house came with wonderful things growing in gardens all around the yard. In addition, quite a few of our neighbors have plots at a local community garden. A couple of weeks ago, our neighbors harvested more tomatoes, jalapeños, eggplants, and other vegetables from their plot and they kindly shared their bounty with us. I cannot explain to you how delicious the tomatoes were! That said, this recipe is all about the eggplant and jalapeño.

As soon as we saw the eggplant, we knew we wanted to make something special with it. Brent loves the heat that jalapeños add to any dish, so of course we had to incorporate them. We hope you enjoy this twist on the traditional eggplant dip, Baba Ghanouj, as much as we did!

AIP-Friendly White Barbecue Sauce

On Saturday, our friends Stacy and Matt of the Paleo Parents, hosted their annual Halloween party. Brent and I have a habit of inadvertently bringing foods to their parties that Stacy can’t have (she follows an autoimmune protocol, AIP), and I always feel bad about it. Plus, we knew another AIP friend, Sarah Ballantyne, aka The Paleo Mom, was going to be attending. So this time, I was determined to make sure we brought something that everyone could enjoy.

I began experimenting a couple weeks in advance, and the result was this AIP-Friendly White Barbecue Sauce. It is tangy and smoky, but you won’t find a multitude of nightshades that are present in traditional barbecue sauces. In fact, the only pepper is white pepper. It’s optional because some people following AIP can tolerate it (Stacy and Sarah both can), but others cannot.

Lastly, I want to point out that I made this white barbecue sauce using our homemade mayo recipe. Some folks can tolerate eggs when following a modified AIP. However, if you’re following a strict AIP, you’ll want to use egg-free mayo. Melissa at The Clothes Make the Girl has an excellent egg-less homemade mayo recipe that we’ve linked to in our ingredients list for you all to try.

After tasting my AIP-Friendly White Barbecue Sauce, Brent crafted our AIP-Friendly Game Day Wings recipe—Also live on the blog today!—and the two are a match made in heaven. Everyone at the Halloween party enjoyed the wings and sauce. We hope you will, too.

Homemade Ketchup

Lately we’ve been experimenting with making our own condiments at home and we’re happy to share with you our recipe for homemade ketchup.  Whether you call it ketchup, catsup (South-Eastern US), tomato sauce (Australia/New Zealand), or red sauce (Whales/Scotland), we can agree that this condiment is fairly ubiquitous and a worthwhile thing to keep in the refrigerator.

This is a straight-forward recipe that takes about 30 minutes start to finish; the longest part of the recipe is waiting for it to cool in order to dip in your sweet potato fries or use it as the base for our amazing barbecue sauce.  We know you’ll love it.

Homemade Mayonnaise

A big part of many recipes we come across or think up call for homemade mayonnaise.  Once upon a time, I would buy it at the store and Heather actually thought it was gross—homemade or not. Now, we both shudder when reading the labels but Heather has come to enjoy our homemade stuff.  This is definitely not the first recipe for homemade mayonnaise out there; but we’ve been playing with this for a few months, and are finally happy enough with the results to share with you.

The best part of this recipe is that it only takes about 10 minutes to make from start to finish.  It will keep for a few weeks, and is a great condiment to have in the house for all kinds of fun recipes.  It’s a perfect binder for crab cakes and a great base for creamy salad dressings, vegetable dips, and more.