This cranberry sauce is relatively easy to prepare (although this really does depend on your skill with knives, graters, and interpreting obscure measuring units such as '
dash'). This is somewhat to be expected, I suppose, given that one of the starting ingredients is itself
cranberry sauce.
Ingredients:
1 apple, peeled, diced
½ cup or so of apple cider
1 can cranberry sauce (any style)
1 orange (for zest)
2 dashes cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg
Preparation:
- In a medium saucepan, simmer the apple bits in enough apple cider to nearly cover them. They may try to float a little so don't force the issue. You don't want soggy sauce, anyway.
- De-zest the orange.
- Once the apples begin to lose their firmness - but are still semi-crunchy - add the canned sauce, and stir over the same heat until the apples are well mixed in. You want kind of an apple-cranberry sauce colloidal suspension, here.
- Stir in the zest and spices.
- Continue to intermittently stir until the apple cider has been mostly absorbed by the other ingredients, or the sauce starts to burp.
- Chill for a couple hours.
- Serve with a shiny silver spoon in a fancy bowl. Hopefully someone thought ahead and prepared a main course!
Yield: approximately 1 mason jar's worth.
The apple bits, orange zest, and other sundry spices all stand out on their own, making this a good sauce for almost any roast meat, stuffing, or other carbohydrate-based food you'd find on a Thanksgiving table.
You may want to start simmering the apple cider before you dice the apple to save some time. I suck with knives, so I tend to prepare the apple beforehand to avoid evaporating away all the liquid.