Alternative Cranberry Sauce

For a Thanksgiving holiday some time ago, we had wanted the typical cranberry sauce used to go with poultry.  The commercial canned stuff was not available in Italy, nor were there any fresh cranberries to be found.  But... we did have some packages of dried cranberries we had brought over for Queen Bee to use in salads.  So I made an attempt to change dried cranberries into sauce.  It turned out surprisingly good.  In fact we now prefer it to the normal versions.

As usual, I did not write it down at the time (actually I did "tweet" the list of ingredients but not the amounts).  So for this Christmas I experimented a little to replicate it.

Required time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

Dried cranberries - 10 ounces 

Port - 1 and 1/4 cups

Allspice - 1/2 teaspoon

Brown sugar - 1 and 1/2 tablespoons

Place cranberries in a small sauce pan.

- Add 3/4 cup Port and simmer on low

- Add Allspice and brown sugar and stir well

- Monitor and stir occasionally, adding more port as needed to keep the mixture moist.

- When the remaining port has been absorbed by the cranberries, the cranberry sauce is ready to serve.

Serve warm or chilled.  It is good either way.

Return from Italy

It has come time for Queen Bee and I to return home from Italy.  Sad to say.  Our six year experience has been a wonderful opportunity.  But all good things come to and end, and so it is with our Italian adventure.

I will continue to issue posts on this blog in any case.  There are a lot of places we have seen that have not been documented here yet.  I want to use the blog as a why of capturing the things we have done.

I will also continue to use this blog to document some of the food oriented experiences we had and continue to have.  Travel and food certainly go together, with each inspiring the other.

I received a great cook book from my group before I left.  I plan to explore it and note the more interesting results.  We also accumulated a good number of Italian cook books that I will also explore as time allows.