Cranberry sauce & variations

Ingredients

• 12oz cranberries, rinsed & sorted
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• Orange peel, sliced into 1mm strips, aiming for 1cm long.

Variation: Coffee-poached pears

• 3cups strong coffee
• 1½cups sugar
• 3 pears, peeled & halved (rub with lemon to prevent browning)

Preparation

1. Place main ingredients in a saucepan over medium-high heat until the cranberries come to a boil.
2. Reduce heat to medium low, maintaining a fast simmer until the cranberries are mostly/all broken open.
3. Remove main sauce from heat once the sauce has thickened to the point you want (Temps TBD)
4. Optional: Prepare pears & combine; if not using the pears, skip to the last instruction.
5. Dissolve sugar in hot coffee, then bring pears to a fast simmer.
6. Simmer pears until they’ve mostly saturated with sugar, and have gone mostly-translucent, ~15 minutes. Flip regularly to improve saturation.
7. Strain out pears & let cool until you can handle them, maybe 4 minutes.
8. Cube pears, removing seeds/core & strings, then stir into sauce.
9. Cover, pressing a plastic wrap to the surface to minimize skin-formation, then refrigerate until chilled.

Notes

The pears can certainly be prepared before the sauce, but after is fine too. The sauce won’t set in that time unless your kitchen’s a refrigerator, that’s for sure.