Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Fresh Cranberries!

Dear friends,

I stopped at the new Aldi grocery store today to pick up milk and decided to grab a few extras for Thanksgiving.  They had fresh cranberries for only 99 cents per 12 ounce bag.  The instructions for making sauce seemed simple enough, so I decided to give it a try.  Basically, rinse the berries and then dump them into a boiling mixture of 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar.  Soon the skins will split open.  I mashed mine a little but that isn't necessary.  Now you can take them off the burner and let them cool.  You can keep them on the heat a little longer if you think they need to thicken up more, but they will also set into a decent gel the referigerator.

About this time, Naomi was making a cherry pie with canned filling and frozen pie crusts.  I realized that I had purchased deep dish crusts and that there weren't enough cherries to fill it.  So Lydia had the great idea of adding some of my cranberry concoction.  I mixed in some honey before spooning it over the cherry layer.  Then Lydia and Naomi cut the extra crust into strips and made a lattice top.  I'll try to take a picture of our fully baked CranCherry pie tomorrow.

I blended the remaining cranberry sauce with more honey, a lot of ginger, and a can of jellied cranberry sauce.  It looks lovely and tastes quite zesty!

I've always been intimidated by fresh cranberries, but they're pretty "user friendly" after all.  I guess this will be a standard on our holiday table from now on!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Virginia,

    A standard at our Thanksgiving table is my homemade cranberry compote. Basically same recipe as cranberry sauce, but add in some peeled/cored/chopped red delicious apples, orange segments, a handful of raisins and finish it off with some spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and ground clove. It's yummy and definitely better (and healthier) than canned sauce (although my father-in-law prefers the jellied stuff, so we keep that on hand as well). Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

    Cousin Deb

    ReplyDelete

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