Fruit-tea-sauce with candied ginger and dates

Everybody buys too much on Christmas

I’m sure you know this too. Christmas is a time for fancy food, which means buying a lot of groceries. Usually too much. So what do you do with too much?

This year, I was determined to create a dessert for New Year’s Eve with some of the leftover food from Christmas that I already had in the house.

I had lots of leftover Christmas fruit tea, dates, and candied ginger.

The result was a very nice, slightly spicy, fruit sauce. I used grape jam to sweeten it, which gave it that certain something.

You can use this sauce for different things. Over vanilla ice cream, for example, or vanilla cream. I made a cream to go with it that would actually be for tiramisu. But instead of mascarpone, I made it with cream cheese and quark. This made it a little lighter and slightly sour. Our guests on New Year’s Eve liked it.

By the way, I got the idea to cook with tea, from Alessandro. He is the chef at the Ristorante ” Missultin” in Vira Gambarogno. He is very creative and in his restaurant, you eat great food! He always surprises me how he uses the different spices and teas he gets from me. Try his cuisine, it is worth it.

Here is the recipe for the fruit tea sauce with candied ginger and dates

Fruit-tea-sauce with candied ginger and dates

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Prep Time 10 mins

Cook Time 35 mins

Total Time 45 mins

Course Dessert, Sauce

Ingredients

  

• 2 lt water
• 4 tablespoons Christmas fruit-tea or other fruit-tea
• 1 tablespoon jam of your choice
• 1 handful of candied ginger
• 1 handful of pitted dates
• 2 cm fresh ginger

Instructions

 

• Bring the water and fruit-tea to the boil and boil for 5 minutes, then sieve.
• Add the jam and the grated fresh ginger and bring everything to the boil again and let it boil for about half an hour. The liquid is reduced to half.
  
• Cut the candied ginger and the dates in quarters.
• Puree half of the ginger and the dates with fruit-tea and add to the rest of the tea.
• Add the rest of the candied ginger and dates to the tea and boil for another 5 minutes

Notes

Instead of dates, you can also use dried apricots or figs.

Keyword fruit-tea-sauce, sweetsauce