{"id":830,"date":"2009-11-26T17:45:38","date_gmt":"2009-11-26T17:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2009\/11\/26\/a-special-midweek-recipe-ad-libbed-cranberry-chutney\/"},"modified":"2009-11-26T17:45:38","modified_gmt":"2009-11-26T17:45:38","slug":"a-special-midweek-recipe-ad-libbed-cranberry-chutney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2009\/11\/26\/a-special-midweek-recipe-ad-libbed-cranberry-chutney\/","title":{"rendered":"A Special Midweek Recipe: Ad-Libbed Cranberry Chutney"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> It&#8217;s not saturday, but I&#8217;ve got a recipe that I needed to write down before I forget it, so you&#8217;re getting an extra bonus.<\/p>\n<p> I usually make a simple cranberry relish for thanksgiving. But it needs to be made a couple of days in advance. This year, I completely forgot about the cranberries until this morning. So I figured I needed to do something else. A good chutney sounded nice. I went hunting online, but couldn&#8217;t find anything that sounded good, so I went ahead and ad-libbed. And the results were amazing &#8211; this is definitely the new cranberry tradition in the Chu-Carroll household. Sweet, tart, and spicy &#8211; it&#8217;s a perfect compliment for the turkey. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><b>Ingredients<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>12 oz cranberries.<\/li>\n<li>1 1\/2 cup sugar.<\/li>\n<li>1\/3 cup red wine vinegar.<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 large onion, finely minced.<\/li>\n<li>1 clove garlic, finely minced.<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 granny smith apple, peeled and chopped.<\/li>\n<li>1 dried serrano chili, finely minced.<\/li>\n<li>1 cup water.<\/li>\n<li>pinch salt<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 teaspoon fenugreek seed.<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 teaspoon cardamom seed.<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Instructions<\/b><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Toast the spices in a dry pan until fragrant. Transfer to a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, and grind to a fine powder.<\/li>\n<li>Put a tablespoon of oil into a hot pan on medium heat.<\/li>\n<li>Add the onions, garlic, salt, and chili pepper to the oil. Cook until the onion becomes translucent.<\/li>\n<li>Add the apples and the ground spices and stir until the apples start to soften.<\/li>\n<li>Mix the water, the vinegar, and the sugar, and add to the pan. Stir vigorously, to get the sugar to dissolve.<\/li>\n<li>When it comes to a boil, add the cranberries. Cook until the cranberries have all popped, and the liquid has reduced. (It will thicken more when you chill it, but don&#8217;t leave too much liquid in the pan.)<\/li>\n<li> Remove from the heat, and chill for a couple of hours. The natural pectins from the cranberries will help thicken it up.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p> My son ended up eating four helpings of this. Even my wife, who usually doesn&#8217;t eat cranberries, actually ate a full helping!<\/p>\n<p> A few notes about it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Looking at it, it might seem like 1 1\/2 cups is too much sugar. It really isn&#8217;t &#8211; between the vinegar and the cranberries themselves, there&#8217;s a lot of sour and bitter in this, and you need to counterbalance it. It really doesn&#8217;t come out too sweet.<\/li>\n<li>  The spices in this are a sort-of haphazard blend. They&#8217;re things that I thought would blend nicely with the cranberry flavor, and which I happened to have in my spice cabinet. You could definitely vary them quite a bit &#8211; add a bit of turmeric, yellow mustard instead of the brown, some ginger. The one that I think is most important to the final flavor was probably the fenugreek. You can definitely taste all of them &#8211; but the fenugreek has a special flavor and fragrance which really made it work with the turkey.<\/li>\n<li> For the cardamom, I used cardamom seeds. I absolutely love cardamom &#8211; it&#8217;s by far one of my favorite spices. But working with whole cardamom pods is a pain. There&#8217;s a lot of flavor in the husk of the pod &#8211; but it&#8217;s so tough and fibrous that it&#8217;s very hard to break up. Even going through my turkish coffee grinder, you still get big fibrous hunks which are unpleasant. So I&#8217;ve taken to using just the seeds for things like this; I use the whole pod when I&#8217;m cooking it in something that will get strained later, like an ice-cream, or the milk that I use for making bread pudding.<\/li>\n<li> Cooking cranberries in fun. They really do pop. When you put them into a hot pan, the insides start to expand until the skins crack open. <\/li>\n<li> The only tricky part of this is getting the liquid balance right. Mine came out a bit too runny. But you don&#8217;t want it to come out too hard either. Cranberries have a lot of natural pectin in them, so when you chill it, it will thicken up as the pectin starts to set. If you cook it until it&#8217;s the texture you want it, it&#8217;ll end up too hard when you chill it. But don&#8217;t count on it thickening too much &#8211; there&#8217;s not enough pectin for it to set like a gel from a runny liquid.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Anyway &#8211; I&#8217;m really delighted with and proud of this recipe. I&#8217;m honestly amazed at how well it turned out. Give it a try, and let me know if you like it as much as I do!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not saturday, but I&#8217;ve got a recipe that I needed to write down before I forget it, so you&#8217;re getting an extra bonus. I usually make a simple cranberry relish for thanksgiving. But it needs to be made a couple of days in advance. This year, I completely forgot about the cranberries until this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recipes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-do","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}