Well, I know this is a day early, but I'm a busy gal! To all of you who've surfed in from David's site, welcome!

When I first read about David's proposal for Prune Blogging Thursday, I must admit... I giggled.



You see, the first thing that popped into my head was a flashback from some episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when someone offered the honorable Klingon, Worf, a glass of prune juice. He sipped it, looked astonished, and exclaimed, "This... this is a WARRIOR'S drink!" (I suppose that's an accurate observation, as it does take a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to not only take part in mighty battles, but also to take in large quantities of liquid prunes...)



Anyhoo, I went to the Evil Sam's Club with eaturcheese and powerlibrarian, because that was really the only place in town where one could get more than seven plums in a package. (This is southern Indiana, after all... )

I got my bag-o-Sunsweet Prunes home, and started waxing philosophical on prunes. A much maligned fruit, I'd been conditioned from a young age to associate prunes with old people and digestive issues, but as I got older, I realized that they're no different than all of the other dried fruit that I like to eat.

I got to thinking... What could I make that would be worthy of a warrior?



After coming up empty at Klingonrecipes.com Klingonfood.com, I did a bit of stretching to come up with this recipe for Iranian chicken stew with prunes at fooddownunder.com. And, in an oh-so scientifically logical way, I thought, Iran used to be Persia. The Persians were a pretty hard-core bunch at one point in time. Therefore, this stew must be hard-core So, I peeled the skin off four chicken quarters (ewwwwwwww... every time I do that, it reminds me of my days as an anatomy lab instructor...) and threw the quarters in a slow cooker with the rest of the ingredients and ignored it for the entire day.

By mid-afternoon, however, I found it quite difficult to ignore any longer! The luscious smells eminating from my kitchen were heavenly - and I didn't even have to do anything! By the time it was all ready several hours later, everything had blended, the diced prunes were nice and squishy, and the chicken was literally falling off the bones (which I promptly tossed into my handy-dandy stock pot to start some soup)! The stew went perfectly in that chowder bowl that I hardly ever get to use:



I got to thinking about dessert - chocolate dessert, in particular. (It was only natural!) Over the weekend, I'd discovered a fabulous recipe for chocolate and prune mousse on the BBC food page. It was decidedly more girly than the stew, so I invited linguafranca over, and we decided to make a girly night of it.

I sauteed the prunes in some orange juice and then tossed the concoction into the food processor. Next, I heated up some cocoa powder and honey with some heavy cream to make the sauce.



All the while, linguafranca got to experience the fun of whipping cream by hand.



When all was done, I mixed the chocolate and prune mixtures, and folded that into the whipped cream. The result was wonderfully chocolatey and incredibly rich... and it went perfectly with a night of painting our nails and reciting along with The Princess Bride.



I still had quite a few prunes left, and so I consulted The Compleat Housewife to see what she had to say on the subject of plumb cakes:

Take five pounds of fine flour, and put to it half a pound of sugar, of nutmegs, cloves, and mace finely beaten, of each half an ounce, and a little salt, mix these well together; then take a quart of cream, let it boil, take it off, and cut into it three pounds of fresh butter, let it stand til 'tis melted, and when 'tis blood warm, mix with it a quart of ale yeast, a pint of sack, and twenty eggs, ten whites well beaten; put six pounds of currants to your flour...

Well, you get the picture. I'm not sure how many people Eliza Smith was cooking for, but I was just fresh out of ale yeast - and probably a few pounds short on the flour, as well - so I decided to go with this recipe for pepper cake with pumpkin and prunes from recipesource.com, instead. It was much less involved, and it would help me use up the last of my shredded pumpkin from last year's knife-killing gourd. (I mean, I had to make room in the freezer for this year's shredded pumpkin goodness!)

I threw all of the spices and flour into my grandmother's spring-loaded sifter and set to work. I even brought out my trusty textured gunmetal-grey KitchenAid mixer! After everything was blended together, eaturcheese and I cleaned up the mixing bowl...



After an excruciating hour and a half, during which time the entire flat filled with the glorious smells of spices, we had the results we'd been after:



It was soft and spicy, and quite unlike any spicecake I'd ever had! The prunes gave it an almost pungent flavor that countered the sweet fruitiness of the pumpkin.

This week, I've been bringing the leftovers to work and making my colleagues in the lunchroom jealous.

mmMMMmmmmmm... pruney.