What We're Eating - A Food & Recipe Blog » cranberry

Holiday Recipes: Chipotle Cumin Cranberry Sauce

Amanda — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:17:42 +0000

the often underappreciated cranberry sauce; don't ignore it this year!

This post begins a holiday series of posts that features Mexican influenced dishes for a slightly off-beat, yet still damn traditional, Thanksgiving fiesta!

I love the holidays. No… really. I. Love. The holidays. I mean, what’s better than the whole world cooking feast after feast and celebrating all that we’re thankful for and all of our loved ones. Did I mention the feasting?

This year for Thanksgiving T & I are going to be traveling up to San Francisco to share our holiday with some great friends, both new and old. The old being my hommie, Yvonne and her delightful sig other Drew; and the new being the utterly fabulous and f*cking hysterical food blogger, Leena & her hubby Adam. Now you know when you put two kickass food bloggers in charge of making a holiday meal something great is bound to happen. In this case, Leena threw out two suggestions. 1) a Mexican Themed holiday meal and 2)elevated spinoffs of holiday food. I promptly rejected option one since, well… I cook Mexican food all the time. Like every week.

Unforunately for Leena, she planted a seed in my brain about doing a Mexican holiday meal. That seed, mixed with the large container of homemade mole chillin in my freezer, sprung to life and thus we had a Mexican themed pre-holiday meal (where I didn’t have to make any gravy & used up my mole) with our awesome friends Nicole & Justin.

In my traditional lazy fashion let’s start things off with the easist dish at the party – the cranberry sauce! This element of holiday meals is soooo simple to prepare yet somehow people still reach for the canned version. We fused tradition cranberry sauce with some mexican flavors by adding in some pureed chipotle in adobo and cumin. I believe Tyler said something like “wow. that is an agressive cranberry sauce!” He then clarified that he meant spicy! I love spicy so of course I used 2 tbsp of chipotle but if you don’t like it that spicy just use one.

Recipes in this post:

Chipotle & Cumin Cranberry Sauce

Brined Pork Roast w/ Curried Cranberry Apple Sauce

Amanda — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:21:32 +0000

A trio of holiday-y deliciousness!

We’re eating juicy curry brined pork loin roast served with a wild rice, chorizo & dried cranberry dressing and curried cranberry apple sauce.

Why’s turkey gotta be the star of the show at holiday meals? Why not change things up a bit and do something other than a fowl? Both T & I readily agreed that we would rather be feasting on this juicy brined pork loin roast and it’s accompanying curried cranberry applesauce than dealing with a 15 pound monster turkey. Now, I’m not dissing turkey, as you can see we love turkey. We just like to keep things fresh and change it up every chance we get. Life’s too short to eat the same holiday meal twice a year, every year for the rest of your life.

Recipes in this post:

Holiday Recipes: Fresh Cranberry Sauce with Rosemary and Persimmon

Amanda — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:44:33 +0000

What? You didn't know rosemary & cranberry go together like PB&J?

Cranberries are the unsung heroes of holiday meals in my opinion. With sooooo many other really uber-rich dishes at the table, it’s the cranberry sauce that give your taste buds a break and brightens up the meal. It’s just like me – tart, with a touch of sweetness. (Alright, so maybe I’m more tart than sweet, but who’s keeping tabs?!?) For our pre-holiday feast, I made a fresh cranberry, persimmon and rosemary sauce. The addition of rosemary to the sauce added just the right hint of herbiness to really play well with the herb roasted turkey breast. As everybody knows, turkey and cranberry are BFF, just like me and pork fat.

Rather than having two cranberry sauces at the feast, Nicole made a cranberry applesauce with ginger. While I can’t say that apple sauce was ever a traditional holiday dish for for my family, I do love a good homemade apple sauce and the addition of the cranberries and ginger really set this one off. All and all I would say that we ate damn well at our pre-holiday feast. Geez, maybe we at too well… now the actual Turkey Day is going to have a lot to live up to!

*In case anyone hasn’t been to What We’re Eating in a while, this is part of a special Holiday series featuring recipes that Nicole, from Pinch My Salt, Tyler and I cooked and feasted on together! Here’s a list of all the dishes:

Stuffed Sweet Potatoes Wrapped in Prosciutto
Extra Creamy Mashed Potato Casserole
Sweet Potato Buttermilk Rolls
Herb Roasted Turkey Breast
Sourdough, Bacon & Apple Stuffing
Cornbread and Sausage Stuffing
Cranberry Applesauce w/ Ginger
Fresh Cranberry Sauce with Rosemary and Persimmon (you’re reading it!)

Recipes in this post:

Cranberry Sauce w/ Rosemary and Persimmons

Happy Untraditional Thanksgiving… Several Days Late

Us — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:33:19 +0000

Grits & Grillades

This year Thanksgiving took us a couple of hours northeast of San Diego to a cabin in the charming town of Idyllwild. Since we were spending Thanksgiving in an untraditional way (at least untraditional for us!) we decided to have an untraditional dinner. Thanksgiving dinner started with freshly-baked pretzels with a slightly sweet yet tangy and savory cranberry, feta, and cream cheese dipping sauce. After our pretzel appetizer came the main course: beef braised in veal demi-glace and chocolate stout with carrots, fennel, onions, red peppers, and celery. The beef was served on top of jalapeno-havarti grits with an accompanying salad of grilled brussels sprouts and asparagus tossed with sauteed portobello mushrooms, red bell peppers, minced garlic, crispy bacon, pepita seeds, and a tangy red wine vinaigrette. Several hours after dinner, we were able to make room for a delicious pineapple upside-down coconut cake with a layer of buttercream frosting and sweetened flaked coconut on the bottom.

A: weeks before thanksgiving it was suggested to me that it would be nice if we could do a simple and rustic meal rather than a big ol’ honkin’ turkey. so our dinner this past thursday was not typical of what one might think of when planning a meal for turkey day. it turned out okay though, i think. thoughts?
T: I thought it was delicious. The pretzels were really really soft and tasty. They made a fantastic appetizer. And I thought the main dish was perfectly rustic, warming, and just plain scrumptious. The salad was particularly good I thought. Mmm mmm with those little pieces of bacon… that stuff was good. It was probably the farthest from a traditional thanksgiving meal that I’ve had, but I have no complaints. You?

Cranberry, feta, & cream cheese dip

A: i agree. for the most part in the end everything turned out to be yummy. it’s always kind of frustrating using a small, unequipped, kitchen that is not your own. that was definitely true here. i kept feeling like i was f’ing everything up. anywho, i thought the pretzels turned out really well but there was definitely something different from the amish market pretzels i grew up eating… you know, the ones i was trying to reproduce. the beef braised in chocolate stout and demi-glace was good… but not quite what i was looking for when i set out making it. the jalapeno cheese grits were mega tasty. at least i didn’t mess those up! ooo, i also was really really into the salad. the bacon and red wine vinaigrette really set off the asparagus, portobellos, brussels sprouts and pepitas. mmm that was a good one! I’m going to have to give the meal overall a 3.99/5. it was good, really it was. i think it lost points for being so frustrating to make. i can’t hold that against the food though. if i were rating the pretzels by themselves they would get a 4.3/5 – i will definitely be making these bad boys again. The beef and grits together would get a 3.8/5 and the salad would get a 4.6/5. i don’t know why when i think of all the items together it adds up to a low score, but it does…geez! you should have shut me up about half a page ago!
T: I thought you were going for a record or something. Whew, that last “statement” was more text than the rest of our conversation combined!
A: a-hole.

Amish inspired soft pretzel

T: well, I’m sorry that it was so frustrating for you to make… my frustration level eating it was exceptionally low. I’d give the meal as a whole a 4.65/5. The beef and grits really hit the spot as a nourishing rustic meal, and the salad. my god that was a good salad. YUM. And, I’ve never had a real Amish pretzel, but those pretzels that you made were the best pretzels I’ve ever had. Seriously good. Yummy yum. And we haven’t said anything about the cranberry/feta/cream cheese dip, but that stuff was really good as well. You gotta put up a recipe for it- it was a great twist on a classically-thanksgiving ingredient. So thank you Amanda for giving our bellies and mouths and noses something to be happy about on thanksgiving. Mmm.
A: no prob bob! you know, i think my biggest regret with the thanksgiving meal being untraditional is that we don’t have a ton of leftovers to feed us for the next week! i could really go for some leftover turkey hash right about now!
T: yeah, leftover turkey would be a good thing. Hmmm… we could go around begging for leftovers from our neighbors.
A: ooooor we could go hit up some of the post-thanksgiving grocery sales, buy a cheapy turkey they need to get off the shelves and roast one this week! woo hoo! week-after-thanksgiving turkey here we come!
T: Wooo hoo!!

Asparagus salad enhanced by bacon

Recipes in this post:

Cranberry Feta Cream Cheese Dip