I remember as I was growing up, Thanksgiving time was the only time that I ever really saw cranberries other than the dried kind or juice kind. And I never really gave cranberry sauce a chance.
In my mind jellied cranberry sauce that had been dumped out of a can, and sliced (how it was served at our dinner), seemed awfully similar to pickled beets. Now I never gave the beets a try either. But pickled beets, were one of those foods that I just figured from the way my cousins would talk about them, that they had to be nasty.
Well last year, my husband wanted to bring sweet potatoes to the Thanksgiving feast we were attending. Well I've never been a big fan of sweet potatoes either. I have a hard time with something that looks like it should taste like a dessert, but doesn't. Anyway I told him I wanted to try a different sweet potato recipe and see how I liked it. We found a recipe that was a crock pot recipe, that had orange juice, cranberries and brown sugar in it. I think it might have had apples too. Well I like cranberry juice, and I like dried cranberries, so I decided I would give the recipe a chance. It turned out pretty good. But only used a small part of the bag of cranberries I bought. Then I noticed a recipe on the bag. Cranberry Orange Bread.
That sounded pretty good, so I decided I would make it. It was yummy. However it called for a cup and a half of chopped cranberries. I started out with the cutting board, and decided that wasn't practical, so I put the in the blender. That did a much better job, except it reached a point that it would just push everything to the outside, and not chop any more. Which left me with some whole berries. I've decided that I need to get a chopper to more effectively make this dish. Then I forgot about the hard part of making it, and just remembered how good it tasted. So when I saw cranberries on sale at Costco, I bought a 3 pound bad, and made my bread yesterday. It still tasted yummy, but was definitely a lot of work. So I'm writing this post to let you know, 1 1/2 cups of chopped cranberries without the right kind of equipment, is a crazy task. It is possible, but quite time consuming. Now that I've written it, maybe I'll remember that little fact myself.
2 comments:
You are too funny! I wish I could have been there. ;) How is your pregnancy?
Shawn never really liked cranberry sauce until he tried my families homemade. They are so yummy! If you have any left over it would be a good way to use them up. All you do is boil them in a pan with a little bit of water until they are soft. Then you dump them into this special pan called a food mill. It has a handle that you turn in a cicle and it takes all the skin off the berries. Kind of like how you'd make applesauce. Then you just sweeten to taste with sugar. You can find one at Kmart. I have an old one that was my grandmothers. We found one for my mom at a thrift store. super cheap! If you want to borrow mine and try it I could show you how to use it. Sorry for the long comment!
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