Bosnian Appetizer
CRANBERRY SAUCE
INGREDIENTS
1⅓ cups sugar
½ cup orange juice
¾ cup water
1 pound cranberries
Mason jars for unused sauce
Makes 3¼ cups. Takes 1 hour 30 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add sugar, orange juice, and water to pot. Simmer at low-medium heat for 5 minutes or until sugar dissolves completely. Stir frequently. Add cranberries. Cook at medium heat for 15 minutes or until cranberries crack open and sauce is dark and thick. Stir frequently. Remove sauce from heat. (Sauce should thicken more as it cools.) Leave in refrigerator for 1 hour or until sufficiently cooled. . Goes well on poultry, pork, beef, and fish. Store excess in Mason jars.
TIDBITS
1) Cranberries are good for you in all sorts of ways. I forget some of them. Apparently, cranberries don’t help the memory much.
2) The Picts and Celts in Ancient Britain were fierce warriors. They got their energy and stamina from eating cranberries. If the these ancient fighters ate too many cranberries they got tummy aches. They also found oodles and oodles of excess energy coursing through their veins. They became too hot. The Picts and Celts had to let some of their escape or they’d collapse.
3) So the first Britons took off all their clothes to cool off. Being nude, they painted their bodies blue for modesty’s sake. Then they charged the opposing army with a ferocity that’s never again been equaled. But they didn’t wear hats or paint their heads. The skin on their heads turned red under the hot unforgiving sun. The invading Romans thought the Britons’ skulls, crania, looked as red as the cranberry that the natives ate. So, the Romans called this red berry, the cranberry.
4) I almost forgot, a Roman chef, Quintus Cato, looked at the cranberry sauce in his Mason jar and thought, “The Mason jar is much taller than it’s wide. Is it possible to build like that as well?” He wrote of this idea to his pal, Emperor Vespasian of Rome. The energetic Emperor immediately ordered construction of the Colosseum, so named because it’s colossal in size. Now you know.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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