November 26, 2014

Cooking Day

Today is cooking day so that tomorrow is entirely free for enjoyment and eating. Along with our personal traditional Thanksgiving foods of roasted marinated green beans, roasted butternut squash and arugula salad with apple cider vinaigrette, and some sort of wild rice pilaf, I'm making cranberries three ways.

Why three ways? Well, fresh cranberries are packaged in 12oz bags. I want to have Cranberry Orange Quick Bread (recipe at the end of this post) which uses only 1 cup of chopped cranberries (approx 3oz). For the remaining cranberries, I thought I'd scale down this recipe for cranberry orange ginger chutney. But, the Hubs is a fan of fresh cranberry orange relish to go with his personal (11 pounds this year!) turkey. So, cranberries 3 ways to use the entire 12oz bag.
While the bread was baking, I calculated an 1/8 recipe of the chutney. The scaled down four oz. of cranberries came to about about 1.25 cups. The required liquid in the pot with the cranberries came to only 1Tbs water and 1/2 Tbs orange juice. I added more water and juice to cover the bottom of the pan and simmered as instructed. I used 3/4 tsp balsamic vinegar, 1.5 Tbs granulated sugar, 1 Tbs brown sugar, 1.5 tsp minced ginger, and 4 sections of the orange. Plus a bit of salt and pepper.
I licked the warm chutney off my finger after transferring it to a lidded container. It is gingery deliciousness. That's it pictured on the left. The remaining 5 oz. or so of cranberries I combined with the remaining orange sections, about 2/3 of the orange, and whirred them in the food processor. To this mix I stirred in 1/4 cup of sugar to finish the relish, on the right. It is pretty darn tasty, too. The relish amounted to a generous cup and the chutney is about 3/4 cup.
And after clean-up, the bread was ready to come out of the oven. It smells so good.

Happy thanksgiving, friends!

4 comments:

  1. Yum!! That quick bread looks fantastic, as does the chutney. What a successful day in the kitchen. Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you and your loved ones enjoy a wonderful day.

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  2. Troubleshooting a bug with the comments, bear with me please.

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