Fruit and Walnut Compote

1 c. pineapple juice (drained from a 20 oz can of tidbits--save the pineapple for some other use, not this recipe)
2 c. fresh squeezed orange juice (the oranges were more sweet than tangy)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cloves
1/2 c. currants
1 c. golden raisins
18 prunes (I used the soft/no-soak kind since that's all I could find. Hard dried prunes would probably require additional juice.)
18 black mission figs (ditto soft/no-soak, same reason as above)
7 "golden" Turkish figs (traditionally dried; that's all I had on hand but these were marvelous and next time I will use more of these and fewer of the black mission figs)
24 Turkish apricots
Walnuts--however many you want (I used about a heaping handful of halves)

Heat juice and spices lightly. Add the whole fruit (don't chop), bring almost to a boil, lower heat, and simmer gently 10-12-15 mins until juice thickens and is reduced. Turn off heat and let sit till temp drops to nearly room temp and then gently stir in walnuts. Serve. *OR* as I did since I had to cook a day ahead of Christmas, store covered overnight in fridge. The fruit continues to absorb the spiced juice and gets thicker to where there really is no juice at all evident, just a sticky mortar-ness. :)
I wanted to serve it warm, so all I did was give it a gentle stir from the bottom up (because the prunes will macerate if you're not careful) and put it in the warming drawer of my oven while I prepared the rest of the meal.
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All the traditional SAD recipes I looked at/adapted from called for soaking the fruit in water and then adding copious/gross amounts of sugar. The more recipes I read the more absurd it seemed to me to leach the sweetness out of the fruit with water only to have to add sugar to put sweetness back in. Why not use juice, I thought. And this with the mix of spices is probably the essence of the incredibly delicious melding of flavors. I assure you my recipe was sufficiently sweet to please any regular sugar-eater's palate, which was the whole crowd of non-paleos I cooked for.

By Theola Walden Baker. Posted to the PaleoRecipe Mailing List, Jan. 2003