Enough is enough! For the last three years, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I’ve dug through the blog archives for that recipe for cranberry relish/sauce that I love. And I always come up short, because I’ve never blogged it. Until now…

And this year, for the Baltimore turkey, I’ve made three sauces. Recipes below. Audience reaction will follow in a few days.

Sauce 1: Cooked cider-cranberry sauce [link]

Ingredients

• 6 cups fresh (or fresh-frozen) whole cranberries
• 1 1/2 cups apple cider
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 2 or 3 long strips of orange zest
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice

Instructions

1. Combine all the ingredients in a large, nonreactive saucepan or medium-size covered casserole. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat and cook at a very low boil for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature.
2. Transfer the sauce to a serving dish. Cover and refrigerate (it thickens as it chills) until serving. Test Kitchen Tip: If the sauce seems too loose at serving time, spoon off a little of the liquid. Makes 10 or more servings.

[Chilled for 24 hours before thanksgiving dinner.]

Sauce 2: Raw cranberry-apple relish [link]

Ingredients

• 2 cups washed raw cranberries
• 2 skinned and cored tart apples
• 1 large, whole (peel ON) seedless orange, cut into sections
• 1 to 2 cups granulated sugar (depending on how sweet you would like your relish to be)

Instructions

1. Set up the grinder with a medium-sized blade on the edge of a table with a large roasting pan or bowl to catch the mix as it grinds. These old fashioned grinders tend to leak some of the juice down the grinder base, so you may want to set up an additional pan on the floor under the grinder to catch the drips. If you don’t have an old-fashioned grinder you can use a grinder attachment on a KitchenAid mixer, you can chop by hand (though that will take a lot of work), or you can chop in a food processor (be very careful not to over-pulse, or you’ll end up with mush).
2. Run fruit through a grinder. Use the entire (seedless) orange, peels, pith and all.
3. Mix in the sugar. Let sit at room temperature until sugar dissolves, about 45 minutes. Store in the refrigerator.

[Chilled for 3 days before thanksgiving dinner.]

Sauce 3: Raw cranberry-ginger relish

Ingredients
[nb: I doubled the cranberries and ginger but not the lemon and eyeballed the sugar to a little more than 1 c]

• 1 bag fresh cranberries (12 oz.), rinsed, sorted and patted dry
• grated peel from 1 lemon
• 2/3 c. sugar
• ½ c. crystallized ginder, coarsely chopped
• ¼ t. ground ginger

Instructions
Put everything in the food processor. Whirl just until finely chopped. Cover and chill at least four hours. [Chilled for 24 hours before thanksgiving dinner.]

And, if you’re still reading, here are some Week 2 pics of the sleepy little cranberry.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under food, parenthood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.