I used to think beets tasted like dirt. But as with many taste sensations classically vilified by children – olives, onions, mushrooms, stinky cheese – I’ve come to love these most intensely purple of vegetables, freaky as they are (some have hairy rat tails, you know).

I lived in Australia for a few years and grew accustomed to having them on burgers (along with egg and pineapple – I know: weird). Slices of slightly sweet, pickled beet add deliciousness to any sandwich. How much do I love thee, beets? Let me count the ways: Borscht is the bomb and so is Russian beet salad. Also, any salad involving beets, goat cheese and walnuts. Roasted beets as a side dish are as comforting as mashed potatoes, only with more vitamins. And the beet goes on.

Here’s a little beet-y thing I canned yesterday that turned out awesomely: beet, cabbage and horseradish relish.

I basically followed a recipe from my New York Times, Craig Claiborne-edited cookbook from 1961, which I seem to have on high rotation lately (I partly based my Coronation grape and walnut conserve and cranberry and toasted walnut conserve on recipes from its pages, with updated instructions on canning with a boiling water bath).

This relish turned out tangy, earthy and slightly sweet, with the faintest bit of heat from the horseradish. Also, it’s very sexy in its fuchsia-ness. Looking forward to smearing it on sandwiches, roast meats and burgers.

Beet, cabbage and horseradish relish

4 cups finely diced or grated peeled beets

4 cups shredded cabbage (I used a combo of green and purple)

1 cup grated horseradish

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 3/4 cups vinegar

3/4 cups sugar

4 tsp salt

One ingredient at a time, process the beets, cabbage and horseradish in the food processor, then mix together in a bowl. Finely chop the onion by hand and add to vegetable mixture. Add salt and stir. Dissolve sugar in vinegar and add to vegetables. Boil for 15 minutes, then pour into hot, clean jars and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Behold the Flemish Beauty.

Round these parts we call her Beauté Flamande. She’s an extremely hardy type of pear, which makes her one of the few pears that grows happily in Quebec. I’ve been buying them all fall at the market and recently decided to transform a few  into butter.

Here’s what I did: I looked over this recipe for spiced up pear butter from the blog Simply Recipes and this recipe for caramel pear butter (brown sugar provides the caramel-ness) from epicurious and then I went and did my own thang.

I call it spiced caramel pear butter. The star anise is somehow both pronounced and subtle and some bites provide a surprise hit of crystallized ginger. It’s a yummy, somewhat sophisticated fall-winter toast topper that would pair real nice with some high-quality vanilla bean ice cream.

Spiced caramel pear butter

4 lbs pears

1/4 cup unfiltered apple juice

1 lemon, juiced

2 cups brown sugar

1 tsp minced crystallized ginger

1 star anise

1/4 tsp cardamom

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp cinnamon

OK, pour the lemon and apple juices into a heavy pot. Peel pears and chop, adding them to the juice as you go to prevent them from turning brown. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently for about 20 minutes or until the pears soften and release their juices.

Remove from heat and put the mixture through a food mill. Add sugar and spices and cook over medium heat for another 30-45 minutes, or until it reduces to a nice, thick, buttery consistency. Pour into hot, clean jars and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. There you have it.

OK cran fans, we’re back talking about our flame-coloured, bog-grown friends again. In part one, I gushed enough about the lil’ ruby fruit, so let’s get down to next recipe.

It’s a little something I found in the oldy-but-awesomely-goody New York Times Cookbook edited by venerable food writer Craig Claiborne and published in 1961.  I partly based my Coronation grape and walnut conserve on the concord grape conserve in this book. It’s a fine upstanding tome.

This time I made the cranberry conserve but I halved the amount of raisins called for and toasted the walnuts. The result would make a great holiday gift. It’ll transform a ho-hum leftover-turkey sandwich into a dazzling, crantabulosa lunch extravaganza, and it’s just as yummy on buttered toast for breakfast.

Cranberry and toasted walnut conserve

4 cups (1 pound) fresh cranberries

1 1/2 cups water

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup raisins

1 apple, cored and chopped

1 orange, zest and juice

1 lemon, zest and juice

1 cup toasted walnuts, chopped

Cook the cranberries in water over medium-high heat until the skins pop. At this point I like to turn the heat off for a moment and crush the berries with a potato masher, then stir the mixture to make a nice, uniformly thick texture. Return to a simmer, adding all remaining ingredients except the nuts. Bring to a low boil and cook for about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, toast the walnuts by placing them in a frying pan, and shaking or stirring them continuously over medium-high heat until they begin to darken in places and their fragrance rises. Then chop them, add them to the cran mixture and cook for one of two minutes more. Process in hot, clean jars in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes.

First things first: Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen. It’s been pouring rain all morning and not showing any signs of letting up, so those cute little candy-crazy ghouls will be slipping and sliding their way along sidewalks painted with soggy yellow leaves tonight. Be careful, kids!

In other news, I’ve just whipped up a couple of crackerjack cranberry creations. So let us consider the cran.

It grows on a shrub-like vine in highly acidic bogs and it’s produced in several Canadian provinces and northern states. Though cranberry sauce is a time-honoured staple on Thanksgiving and Christmas spreads, for years folks have been buying the canned (not home-canned!) stuff, despite cranberry sauce being the easiest thing in the world to make (cranberries+water+sugar: heat + stir for 10 minutes).

The tart, taut crimson fruits are also great to bake with and are perfect for fall and holiday season jams and conserves. Plus, their extra high pectin content means they gel very easily. The best thing to do if you live in a cranberry-producing region is to forget about those flown-in plastic bags at the grocery store and head to your local farmer’s market for some local berries at great prices. I recently bought a basket of Quebec crans that weighed almost five pounds for $13. Here’s an action shot of cranberry harvest time:

Yep, for the past month I’ve been crushing on the cran, big time. For Thanksgiving I made this incredible vodka-spiked cranberry sauce I found on Epicurious. Then I made a cranberry-orange jam (see below). Then, last night I concocted a batch of cranberry and toasted walnut conserve. When cooked with a little water, they make a lovely pop corn-esque popping sound when their skins split open, and that colour! A rich, velvety, sexy, lipstick, boudoir red. When the little orbs boil down, they look like a burbling cauldron of planet Mars. And, of course, there are the health benefits – they’ve nearly reached super-fruit status. But I don’t want to overwhelm you with crantabulousness, so stay tuned for cranberry madness part two.

For now, let’s start with that jam.

Cranberry-orange jam

4 cups (about 1 lb) cranberries

2 cups sugar

1/4 cup water

1 orange (zest and juice)

1 tsp orange flower water

Stir together cranberries, water, orange juice and zest and cook over medium-high heat for about 10-15 minutes, or until the berry skins begin popping open and the fruit softens. At this point I like to turn the heat off for a moment and use a potato masher to squash the berries into the liquid, creating a more uniform consistency. Return to medium heat, stir in sugar then orange flower water and continue to cook at a low boil for five or 10 minutes more, until you’ve hit the thickness you prefer.

Pour into hot, clean jars (it’ll be quite thick so watch out for air bubbles) and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Canada created the Coronation table grape, its name a nod to our dusty old royalist roots (which do not extend into Quebec), in the 70s, but they’ve only become widely available (in southern Ontario and Quebec at least) in the past five years or so. The Coronation grape is very similar to the American Concord grape and not just because they both start with the letter C. They also look and taste very similar, except the Canadian version is seedless.

Anyway, here’s what they look like doused in sugar:

I caught the tail-end of the season last week and made some grape and walnut conserve, substituting Coronation for Concord, inspired by Eugenia Bone’s Concord grape and walnut conserve recipe from her book Well-Preserved, and by a recipe from The New York Times Cookbook published in 1961 and edited by Craig Claiborne. The result was rich and not-too-sweet, something to go with brie and Carr’s water crackers by a crackling fire. you know, WASPy and wintry.

The old version is simply called grape conserve though it specifies Concord as the grape to use and walnuts as the nuts and includes raisins (the old definition of conserve meant fruit with nuts and raisins). I omit the raisins as Eugenia does but go with the NY Times amount of sugar (two cups less than Eugenia). So, here goes:

Coronation grape and walnut conserve

8 cups Coronation or Concord grapes (4 pounds)

4 cups sugar

Zest of one orange

2 cups finely chopped walnuts

Combine the fruit and sugar with a little water (to dissolve the sugar) and cook over medium heat, crushing the grapes with a potato masher then stirring frequently for 20-25 minutes until the skins have loosened and the insides have softened and the mixture becomes a kind of soup. remove from heat and run the soup through a food mill to remove skin and any seeds, then add orange zest and return to a simmer and cook, stirring frequently, for another 25 minutes or more, until it begins to reduce and thicken. Add walnuts and cook for another five minutes. Pour into hot, clean jars and process in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes.

I was getting bored of showing snaps of my jars in front of my black and white tiled kitchen backsplash, so here’s this conserve puckering up in front of a piece of needlepoint by E.’s maternal grandmother (I like how they kind of disappear into darkness at the bottom…):