Pineapple-Mango Tartlets

This was the dessert I made for our Chinese New Year dinner a couple of weeks ago.

I originally intended to make my own crust but as I ran out of time, I made do with a ready-made crust.  The filling, however, is homemade, as I made it ahead a day before.

The fresh pineapples that I bought from the market was a bit on the sour side, the pineapples not being fully ripe yet.  I seriously did not want a ton of sugar in the filling, so I used some over-ripe mangoes that lola N's brother gave us (they have several trees and this year's harvest was more than they could handle!!!)

150 grams ripe mangoes (about 3/4 cup mashed flesh)
250 grams pineapple chunks (about 1-1/3 to 1-1/2 cups chunks)
about 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar
large pinch of mixed spice
1 teaspoon calamansi juice

Put everything in a thick saucepan and cook (over low to medium heat) until thickened.  (while the filling was cooking I felt it was still a bit sour so I added about half a tablespoon honey to take the sour edge off).  The recipe makes about 2 cups "jam" or filling.

Yum!!!

Inihaw na Pinya

or, Grilled Pineapples, over charcoal.

Barbecuing over charcoal is a cooking method that  I've often felt to be tedious and too time consuming, such that we've always bought barbecued food and just brought them home to eat.

Don't get me wrong, I love barbecued food.  I think that barbecuing food gives it such an interesting depth of flavor.  It's just that I'd rather someone else do the grilling than me!

Recently, however, after recovering our charcoal grill, I got inspired to use it... the first thing I made?  Inihaw na Liempo (Grilled Pork Belly) followed by Inihaw na Puting Mais (Grilled Native Corn)

Then this -

Inihaw na Pinya (Grilled Pineapples)!

A long time ago, we had the pleasure of being served this dish.  And I've longed to make it at home.  Now that the grill is out, half the battle is won.  The other half?  What to glaze the pineapples with...  (off I went to find one in my library of cookbooks)

I found a recipe for the glaze in this book... at the very last page!  A similar (if not the same) recipe can be found here.

But, as always, I made a couple of adjustments.  Like, using coconut sugar instead of honey... and using my homemade apple pie spice instead of cinnamon... and reducing the rum in half (hubby is not a fan of alcohol)... and adding vanilla... anyway, here's what I did for my glaze -

Melted 1/4 cup butter then added 2 tablespoons coconut sugar, juice from 1 small lemon, 1/4 teaspoon apple pie spice and a pinch of nutmeg.  When the coconut sugar was almost melted, I took the pan off the stove and added 1 tablespoon of gold rum and 1/2 teaspoon of my homemade vanilla-rum extract.

The pineapples were absolutely delicious!