A Saucy Holiday

Inspired by some Holiday Cheer over at We Wanted to be Writers, I decided to share one of my holiday recipes. I promise you’ll be able to understand it the whole way through as there are absolutely no bottles of alcohol involved. :}

Now get ready and gather up; 2 cups (or 8 ounces) of Roe berries, 1 cup of sugar, 1 orange, and ground cloves, oh and make sure you have water on hand, you’ll need that too. If you can’t find Roe berries in your grocery store don’t fret.

Roeberries are Cranberries, harvested from the Family Bogs on Cape Cod. My great grandpa Roe called them barrels of Gold and I never make my sauce without them. They just taste better than Ocean Spray and it’s like thumbing your nose at the company that put the independent growers out of business until this whole organic thing came about.

So, now that you know the importance of where your berries come from let’s sort them. Don’t worry it’s easy. Ripe berries bounce. (They float too, but water picked berries are only good for juice because they spoil too quickly.) Now, unless you want your berries all over the room I suggest bouncing them in a pot with high walls. You’d be surprised at the bounce the ripe ones have. If they go splat (yick), toss them out the window! Let nature compost them.

Once your berries are sorted, add them, the sugar, and 1 cup of water to a nice 6 quart pot. The more room above the water line, the better, unless you love having sticky red sauce splattered about the room. Who knows, it could be the next rage in Christmas decoration. You only want the tiniest amount of cloves, it’s a strong spice, I’d say no more than 1/8 teaspoon or it will over power the cranberries.

Now, we’ll get the pot set over high heat on the stove to get it boiling while we mutilate the orange.  What you want to do is slice it in half so you can scoop out the yummy sections (without any skin) to plop into the pot. Just treat the orange as if you were eating grapefruit, only feed it to the sauce, which ought to be boil at this point.

It’s time to turn down the heat, set the time and relax. But don’t relax too much you’ll want to stir the pot every now and again. The timer should be set for about 20 minutes. You know the sauce is done when the berries are all popped (listen, you can hear them) and the sauce is a nice gravy consistency.

And Voila! You now have about 2 and a half cups of Cranberry Sauce for a feast. It’s yummy, it’s easy, so who are you going to serve it too?

:} Cathryn Leigh