What can I bring for Thanksgiving dinner?, I asked my mom.
Hmmmm, how about the cranberries, she said.
Cranberries? Ugh, I thought.
I’m not a big cranberry fan, let alone cranberry eater.
Cranberries are bitter. I think they taste like pink-colored
acid.
Even the name sounds awful when you say it:
“craaaaaanberries.”
Double ugh.
Now did I stop to consider for a minute that Grandma was doing
all of the cooking for our annual feast? That she was hosting our
family get-together?
Family and friends were coming. All I had to do was bring one
little dish of cranberries. Was that really such a big deal?
Yeah.
I decided I better refocus.
How hard would it be to make a simple cranberry dish? I mean,
you just buy a bag of cranberries and put them in the blender,
right?
I can do this, I thought.
I got some cran-attitude. I’ll take those cranberries and show
them who’s boss, I said.
I would become a cranberry connoisseur. This would become my own
version of a Project Runway challenge. I’ll call it “The Cranberry
Episode.”
I started doing cranberry research online. At one website, I
found the mother of all cranberry recipes. It called for something
like 14 ingredients. Yikes. I wanted to cook cranberries, not do a
dissertation.
I thought of visiting MarthaStewart.com for a cranberry recipe,
but I was afraid of what I would find there. Martha would probably
have me head to the nearest cranberry bog to personally pick my own
berries.
My mom called. She may have sensed my cranxiety.
Another guest had asked if she should make cranberries, my mom
said. Are you still bringing them?
Hey, no poaching my cranberries, I said. I got the berries. I
got the recipe. I am on it.
OK, she said.
While my as-yet-fruitless search for a recipe continued, I had a
moment of weakness where I considered chickening out by buying a
can of cranberries. You know, the kind that comes out like a gel
with the ridges from the can. A colleague at work told me that’s
the kind she prefers. Maybe there are others like her out there.
Maybe I would be doing everyone a favor by bringing
cranberries-in-a-can.
Rallying, I Googled “easy cranberry sauce.”
Aha, here was something. A cranberry sauce calling for just four
ingredients, one of them being sugar. Plus I could add other items
for “additional flavoring.”
To combat the bitter cranberry taste I opted for blueberries,
strawberries and plenty of sugar. My cranberry sauce would be
sweet. So sweet that our dinner guests would think of it as a
prelude to dessert. I envisioned it tasting something like a fruit
compote, although what a compote was, I wasn’t exactly sure.
On Thanksgiving morning, I started cooking my cranberries.
Adding the sugar and other fruit, I also tossed in some chopped
pecans for the heck of it. A taste test of my sauce confirmed the
sweetness factor. Ahhhhh…. now this was a cranberry sauce I could
be proud of. Sweet. Not too tart. A little nutty. Perfect.
Normally I’d pass on the cranberries at Thanksgiving, but not
this year. Sitting down at our dinner, I pushed those cranberries
like I was the president of PR for Ocean Spray.
“Have some cranberries,” I said to one of guests. He paused as
if to say no, but from the tone of my voice I think he could tell
it wasn’t an option.
Sure, he said weakly.
Pass the cranberries around, I said loudly.
Girls, give me your plates for some cranberries, I announced.
They knew better than to refuse.
Digging in, I tasted a piece of turkey, then mashed potatoes,
and then the cranberry sauce. Not bad, I said to myself. Not bad at
all. Could this be the beginning of a new cranberry-based
relationship? What’s next, cranberry juice? Some cranberry
cookies?
The next day, as I congratulated myself on my newly evolved
relationship with cranberries, I made up a plate of Thanksgiving
leftovers, including a big drop of my sauce.
I popped in a mouthful. My mouth puckered on something tart. My
tongue wanted to retreat. Ewwww, what was that sour taste?
Oh jeez, it was my cranberries. Yuck.
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