Spiced Cranberry Chutney

                                       (Photo from Em and Am's cooking blog)

I grew up in a household where every Thanksgiving meal included that weird, gelatinous blob of cranberry from a can. You know the one. It sat on a plate, still molded to the exact shape of the can it came from, often sliced into discs that you carefully slid onto your plate to eat with the turkey. Have I mentioned that I can't eat turkey without an accompanying spoonful of the cranberry for every bite of the meat? Canned or not, you were going to find cranberry on my plate.

Sometime after I moved out my mom converted from canned cranberry to the homemade variety. I suspect the big transformation might have come sometime during that long season when she and my dad were spending fall and winters with the West Virginia Becketts. I doubt my cooking cousins let canned cranberries grace their Thanksgiving tables!

Whatever the provenance of mom's conversion, she became a true zealot for homemade cranberry sauce. I distinctly remember being in the store with her one year when she was going on about how absolutely ridiculous it would be to buy canned cranberry sauce when the home made variety was such a cinch to make. And, in her case, it really couldn't have been much easier as she mostly just boiled the berries down with sugar to create a pleasingly tangy, sweet accompaniment to boring turkey.

Emily's recipe for chutney ups Mom's version a bit; adding the tang of orange to bring a more complex flavor profile. A great bonus is that the recipe can be made days in advance so it's one less thing you have to be frantically putting together on those often crazy holiday cooking days.


Spiced Cranberry Chutney
Recipe courtesy of em and am
Adapted from Williams-Sonoma Complete Entertaining Cookbook via Serious Eats

The main change I made was cutting the sugar in half.  I tried the dish both ways – with the recommended 3 cups and with 1 1/2 cups and found the second version still plenty sweet.  In addition to being less healthy, 3 full cups of sugar masked the other components of the dish too much for me. (This is Emily's note from her cooking blog but I followed her advice in halving the sugar. The dish was plenty sweet enough.)

Ingredients:
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 whole, thin-skinned oranges with peel
1 2-inch piece ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cups fresh cranberries
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves (or freshly ground, if possible)
1 cup raisins

Directions:
Finely chop oranges in a blender. (I don't have a blender so I used the food processor.)

Combine water and sugar in a medium pot and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.  Add oranges and ginger and reduce the heat.  Let simmer for 20 minutes, uncovered.

Add cranberries, cinnamon and cloves.  Simmer 15 minutes.  Sauce should thicken during this time.  Add raisins and cook for an additional 7 minutes, until sauce starts to bubble.  Let cool before serving.  Serve as is, or as a topper on a savory dish.

Sauce can be made up to a week in advance and refrigerated in an airtight container.