Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–glad you’re here!
Today, we’re taking a closer look at the once and future fruit, the cranberry. For such a tart, little orb, cranberries have a pretty dominant place in everyday life, whether it be in the form of juice, dried and added to salads, oatmeal, breads or cookies, or sliced from raw into salads or pilafs. I tend to think of cranberries mostly when the holidays roll around and I make cranberry sauce for the big meal, at which time I add loads of sugar to them, probably counteracting any food value they have.
But the truth is, that cranberries are very good for you. They boast 4 grams of fiber, 25% of you daily requirement (DR) of vitamin C (sailors used to eat them to prevent scurvy!), 9% of your DR of vitamin A, 8% of vitamin E, 6% of your DR of vitamin K, 16% of your DR of manganese, 7% of copper, 8% of B-complex vitamins and 2% of potassium. They are also loaded with anti-oxidents which may be related to prevention and slowing of cancer and tumors. And cranberries can improve your digestion and help prevent UTI’s. A lot of folks view cranberries as a “super-food.” And if you can eat them raw, they probably are. As I said earlier, the amount of sugar necessary to make them taste really good is a lot, so…
For Thanksgiving, cranberries are traditionally served as a cranberry sauce alongside the main event, the turkey:
But to can or not to can–that is the eternal question! A friend of mine won’t sit down at a Thanksgiving table that doesn’t offer canned, jellied cranberry sauce–WITH the can ridges, thank you (which is the trickiest part of the canned cranberry sauce, in my opinion).
Since Mr. Stone Soup prefers sauce made from fresh cranberries, I don’t bother with the canned unless my buddy is coming over. And in true Stone Soup Cook tradition, the recipe for my fresh cranberry sauce couldn’t be much easier–but it’s got a nice kick of port to give it a little depth of flavor.
Enjoy the cranberry sauce and tune in tomorrow for my favorite jello salad…actually, the only jello salad I make!
Until then.
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
