Saturday, November 29, 2008

TIME AND TEMPERATURE...

...convert the prosaic into the marvelous.

Roast Turkey

Three hours at 450˚F changed a twenty-pound bird into the crisp-skinned, succulent marvel you see here.

Here’s a baking sheet loaded with (most of) the various ingredients for Saveur magazine’s Roasted Cranberry Sauce. You have here cranberries, sugar, cloves, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, kosher salt, orange zest, olive oil...and a sliced-up jalapeño pepper.

Roasted Cranberries - Raw.jpg

After a mere fifteen minutes of 450˚F heat, that pile of raw materials has become something New and Different. And delicious.

Roasted Cranberries - Cooked.jpg

Like everyone else, we have our Family Traditions. No Thanksgiving Day meal is complete without two - count ’em - kinds of canned Ocean Spray cranberry sauce: whole berry and jellied. There’s something about the way that stuff schhhhlurps out of the can in one solid, jellified, easily sliceable chunk that’s irresistible.

But we like to have a few Exotic Variations, too. For years, I’d make a cranberry-orange compote flavored with a shot of Cointreau...a nice change of pace. More recently, we have had peach-cranberry sauce (not bad) and blueberry chutney (excellent). The above Roasted Cranberry Sauce, with its many layers of flavors and its kick of hot pepper, is a welcome addition to our Palette o’ Cranberry-Related Condiments. Perhaps you will like it as well.

No comments: