For condiment month, I really wanted to make a barbecue sauce. I’ve tried a handful out here on the west coast, but nothing I’ve loved. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve had a favorite in years, except for the family secret sauce of my old neighbor. And since he isn’t giving it up, I was thinking maybe I don’t need one favorite. Maybe I need that six pack of possibilities you get at a BBQ restaurant. This is one of that six pack.

I’d set out to make a mustard-y sauce, though I ended up at a different destination. That’s how sauce works! I made a crock pot of caramelized onions (if you like onions and you’re not doing this, you really should!), and before I could freeze the extras, I realized that they would be an excellent base for a sauce. We used this on pulled pork (also done in the crockpot) and it was an excellent match. I think this sauce would also be good on chicken, though I haven’t yet tried it. I would personally want a more tomato-based and acidic sauce for beef.

Basically you puree this sauce and then thin it down to your desired consistency. My onions had only olive oil and salt in them. I did use prepared mustard and ketchup — Maille Dijon is my go-to mustard (mainly because I visited one of their stores in Paris in 2010, where they have mustard on tap and it was amazing. I find mine at most grocery stores, both here in Seattle and back in New Hampshire.) For ketchup, we just buy one of the organic lines that uses sugar rather than corn syrup. If corn is one of your allergens, likely you haven’t found safe ketchup or mustard, but you likely have learned to make them. As with all recipes, make sure your ingredients are safe-for-you.

The only other interesting ingredient in here is the michiu, a Chinese cooking wine that’s close to 20% alcohol, but more importantly, about 15% salt. You can replace this with any rice wine, or even a rice vinegar, but then taste it and add salt to your taste. This is the primary salt in of this sauce.

So, I’m still working on a corn-free, dairy-free, and coconut-free safe-for-me caramel that doesn’t have dates in it because (a) sourcing wheat-free dates can be hard, and (b) I freaking hate dates (I know, that’s weird). In the meantime, I’ve been making do with this Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter that I canned up in the fall. It’s amazingly amazing. However, for those of you who aren’t into canning, making 7 eight ounce jars of something that you need to store in your freezer may not be the way to go. So I’m cutting back the recipe for you, so that you can store it more easily, if you can keep from eating it that long. If I weren’t canning it, I’d freeze it up into some of those large silicone ice cube trays (no affiliation with Amazon) which hold about half a cup.  That way, once they’ve frozen, you can pop them out into a safe-for-you zip top freezer bag and you can grab a cube to defrost whenever you need it.

It’s unbelievable on chocolate cake, or any other dessert that just needs a bit of caramel sauce. I may or may not have just eaten a couple of spoonfuls when I needed a treat, since candy is nonexistent for me unless I make it. I suppose I could make some claim about it being “healthier” because it’s fruit, but it’s still got a fair bit of sugar in it, so that negates that idea. Also, it’s for dessert. Live a little.

Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter

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Great caramel sauce desserts

• CourseCondiments

Servings	Prep Time
1.5 pints	20 minutes

Cook Time	Passive Time
20 minutes	6-8 hours

Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes

Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours

Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter Print Recipe Great caramel sauce desserts CourseCondiments Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 pounds pears peeled, cored, and chopped
• 1/4 cup water
• zest of half a lemon
• juice of half a lemon
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I make my own with vanilla beans and vodka made from potatoes, as most commercial extract contains corn)
• crock pot

Servings: pints

Instructions

1. Place pears, water, lemon zest, and lemon juice in a nonreactive stock pot. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Once you’ve reached a boil, reduce the heat and and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until the pears are soft (about 20 minutes).
2. Using an immersion blender, blend until you have a texture like apple sauce. Don’t complete liquefy the pears.
3. Place the pear mixture into a slow cooker. Add the brown sugar, and mix until the sugar is dissolved. Prop the lid of the slow cooker open with a wooden spoon, and let the mixture reduce on low. Depending on the size of the slow cooker this will go faster or slower, it make take as long as 8 hours. Check it every two hours to see how it’s doing and stir it. The finished pear butter will be thick and hold its shape on a spoon. Stir in vanilla extract.

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Welcome to May! Here at Surviving the Food Allergy Apocalypse, it is condiment month. A great condiment be tailored to your food allergy needs and can make the difference between an okay meal and an awesome meal. Check out our condiment category to see what we’ve posted before (a personal favorite of mine is the Thai dipping sauce — it’s amazing), and stick around this month for some great new flavors.

There’s a place in Massachusetts — Life Alive! — an old-school vegetarian restaurant that Jack and I discovered back a few years ago. It was a great place to go with food allergies, as everything was made in house, everyone who worked there knew what was in each sauce, everything was made to order and modifiable. What I loved about it, though, was that it was a ton of veggies over grains with a sauce and the bowls were terrific.

Grain bowls are the ultimate easy meal. They can be modified no matter what you have in the house — so long as you have vegetables. When I lived alone, I used the grain bowl meal at the end of the week to use up leftovers, bits of veg, everything left in the fridge. Jack and I make them on purpose now, though, and make extras for leftovers.

There are two keys to a great grain bowl — a combination of warm and cool/raw ingredients (e.g. cook the sweet potatoes, lightly steam the kale, leave the celery raw) and a great sauce. You can use commercial dressings, if you have safe-for-you dressing. But a good sauce really takes it over the top, and it is easy. This version is based on my vague memories of the lemon sauce at Life Alive, as well as being a finally-measured version of the sauce I’ve been making for a few months. You can definitely mess with this — mix up the nut or seed butters, play around with the herbs, even change up the citrus if you’re feeling bold! But mostly, enjoy.

One note — if you want this to be a salad dressing instead of a sauce for a grain bowl, consider adding a bit more lemon juice and olive oil to thin it out some. Also keep in mind that if you make this ahead of time, it’ll need to come to room temperature so the olive oil isn’t solid. (Okay, so maybe that was two notes.)