Ode to a Cranberry

So yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I spent it with the family of my wonderful friend from church.  She has three kids, nine grandkids, and a bunch of cousins and nephews who all make their way to her house for a delectable feast and, apparently, a lot of bourbon.  It was very festive and merry and delicious to say the least. 

The thing about going to friends' houses for Thanksgiving, though, is that you don't get your own Thanksgiving.  That stuffing was delicious, but it wasn't our stuffing.  Those candied yams were to die for!  But they didn't have toasted marshmallows on top like Mom's.  However, last week was the departmental potluck Thanksgiving luncheon, so happily, I did get some of our family's stuffing.  Even if it was amongst the food of strangers.  So I've decided that this year I will have my family's traditional Thanksgiving, but a bit more spread out.  Christmas gets twelve days, right?  Why not spread the Thanksgiving love around too?  Stuffing last week, cranberries today, maybe a pie tomorrow! 

And since the pressure of serving this food to other people, and getting it to all come out at once is no longer an issue, I've become a bit experimental with it.  Admittedly, using a crock pot instead of the oven for the stuffing last week wasn't that much of an experiment, but today's cranberries got a little bit of a twist.  I have all this honey, you see.  Like six pounds of it.  There's this certain little honey store in Beatty, which is this little town we drove through one year going to visit my brother at Christmas.  And it has the best sage honey I've ever tasted.  And my dad, the last time he drove through Beatty, kindly bought me the aforementioned six pounds of honey.  (That sure was fun packing up to put into my luggage!)  So I have all this wonderful honey...except that one of the jars doesn't taste like sage honey.  I'm not sure what it tastes like.  At first I thought it was just my memory playing tricks on me.  I remembered a mild, almost creamy tasting honey.  This was...metallic?  And when I finally tasted the other jar, it was exactly as I had remembered!  So now I have this giant jar of perfectly good honey that just doesn't taste quite right enough to put into my tea every morning.  I've been cooking with it here and there, and when I decided to make cranberries, I thought to myself, "Aha, here is another excellent way to use up a whole cup of the weird honey!"  And into the pot it went.  The result?  Cranberries that taste like weird honey.  Apparently the lovely tartness of cranberries isn't sufficient to cover up the odd metallic taste of this funny jar of honey.  

Now, I think there are two types of cooks out there.  The first type would hit this point, admit defeat, and toss the whole thing out.  The second type--I fall into this category--starts raiding the pantry, the spice rack, the fridge, to see what can we add to this to tweak it enough to make it better.  Sometimes this is how great recipes are born--case in point: my delicious Tossed Creamy Chicken Fettuccini .  Sometimes this is how you end up eating Chai Tea Tapioca Pudding and wondering why.  Luckily for me, today, the bag that the cranberries came in was sitting by the stove still, and next to the recipe for regular cranberry sauce was a recipe for light cranberry sauce.  It used Stevia instead of sugar, and called for 3 tsp of cinnamon.  So I grabbed the cinnamon and into the pot it went.  The result?  A warmly spiced, mildly sweet cranberry sauce that's just begging to be ladled generously over a turkey drumstick.  And actually, with that cinnamon in there, it seems like it might be just as at home in a baking dish bubbling away with flour, sugar, and butter, becoming a wonderful new Thanksgiving Cobbler.  Perhaps that will be my one of my next Thanksgiving experiments!  In the meantime, I have about a pound and a half of pureed turban squash that's either going to be turned into a pie or some cookies. ..

Cinnamon Spiced Cranberry Sauce:

Ingredients:

12 oz fresh cranberries

1 cup water

1 cup honey (need not be oddly-flavored, reject honey)

3 tsp cinnamon

Directions:

Throw everything into a pot, and cook, stirring to work the honey in, over high heat until it starts boiling and the cranberry skins start to pop.  Turn heat to low and simmer a little while to let it thicken up just a bit.  Suggestion:  do not get distracted and turn your back on it, and then  turn around to find an astonishingly tall mountain of pink foam emerging precariously from the pot.  That's not a necessary step.