I was looking for something I could make as gifts for family on Christmas Day. Every year I buy cranberry sauce from the supermarket - but I prefer to know exactly what I'm eating so thought I'd try making my own.
I tweaked a recipe for Cranberry Relish for the slow cooker and an eight pack of 120ml jars from K-Mart turned out to be the perfect fit for the amounts of ingredients I have listed below.
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large red onion, finely chopped
2 tsp minced bottled ginger
400g pack of dried cranberries (these are usually pre-sweetened - I bought mine from Aldi)
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup rapadura sugar (you could use brown sugar or more honey)
1 cup red wine
1 cup cranberry juice
4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
3 dried bay leaves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
METHOD
1. Cook the onion and ginger in the olive oil on a lowish heat until onion is soft.
One of my go-to kitchen gadgets is a Breville Multi-Cooker. Using the saute setting, this appliance gave me the ability to cook the onions and ginger in some olive oil first before adding the rest of the ingredients and switching to the slow cook setting. You could achieve the same result by using a small frying pan to cook the onion and ginger in oil and then adding these to the slow cooker with all the other ingredients.
2. Add all ingredients to the slow cooker and stir to mix. Set the slow cooker to HIGH for two hours.
3. When there is half an hour to go, remove the lid and allow it to continue cooking uncovered until the time is up.
While the relish is cooking, you have time to sterilize your jars. I preheated my oven to 130 degrees and then washed my jars in hot, soapy water. Instead of letting them drain I placed the jars and the lids separately onto an oven tray and left them in the oven for 30 minutes. You can time your sterilizing so you can fill the jars with the relish as soon as the jars and lids come out of the oven.
4. When the cooking time is up, turn off the crockpot and use a stick blender to partially blitz some of the mixture. This thickens it slightly and gives a variation in the texture which looks good when the relish is spooned onto the meat.
5. Carefully spoon the mixture into the jars and add the lids straight away - you will likely need oven gloves for screwing the lids onto the hot jars well, achieving a tight seal.
When I first tasted the relish warm from the slow cooker, I must admit to wondering if the end product was a little too sweet. However, once it was room temperature and added to some cold sliced turkey on Christmas Day, no one else seemed to share that opinion - and I had to agree.
If you were looking to reduce the sweetness anyway, there are several options. You could replace the cranberry juice with water, or you could add just 1/2 cup of honey and leave the rapadura/brown sugar out altogether. I wouldn't do both as I think you'd end up with an entirely different product.
All in all I was pretty happy with the end result and at one point wished I'd had more turkey so I could polish it off. But of course you can do more with it! It's lovely with cold meats such as silverside, beef, poultry, lamb or salami, or you could add it to sandwiches, wraps or burgers.
I'll definitely be doing it again next Christmas - or sooner!
Given so many of us are on holidays and have a little more down time, I have chosen a longer clip to accompany this post. This is a TED Talk by one of my favourite singer/songwriters Paul Kelly, as he shares of how he came to write his Christmas song, How To Make Gravy. And of course he performs it too.
Happy New Year to all my lovely readers - thank you for taking the ride with me. I hope you'll leave a comment to say hi.
Blessings
Tracey 🍗
With thanks to the YouTube Channel of TEDxTalks for TEDxSydney - Paul Kelly - How to Make Gravy.
Looks delicious.
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