Cranberry & Cherry Chutney

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian readers!  I hope you are spending lots of time celebrating with family, friends, and loved ones, and eating all the delicious things.

We had our feast last night, complete with turkey confetti, and I was so glad to bring this Cranberry & Cherry Chutney to the table as our cranberry sauce.

This sweet & sour chutney came from a confluence of factors:

Chutney Influence #1: Cheese & Chutney — so, I’m in another cheese class, working towards my fromager certificate, along with my friend Louise.  This class is all about complex pairings of cheese: cheese and booze, cheese and condiments, and learning how the flavours in cheese can be heightened by adding other foods and beverages.  We are working with another friend on our group presentation, and we are tasting cheeses with a variety of fruit chutneys.  So I have chutney on the brain right now.  I keep thinking about new chutneys that will make my favourite cheeses taste even more amazing!

Chutney Influence #2: Thanksgiving — for our Thanksgiving celebration, I really wanted a cranberry sauce that would go well with the traditional Thanksgiving foods (turkey & stuffing for the omnivores, and Mushroom Nut Loaf for the veggies in the crowd).  I love the sweet-tart tang of cranberry sauce along with the fall flavours of onions, mushrooms, sage, squash, rosemary & thyme (I think there’s a song in there somewhere).  I knew I’d add orange zest to this year’s cranberry sauce, and I was debating a splash of orange liqueur (from a cheese class suggestion) and adding some ginger (Louise’s suggestion).

Chutney Influence #3: Molly of Orangette — I stayed up way too late last week, tucked under the covers reading the fabulous food memoir: A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg.  Molly is famous for her food blog, Orangette, which will make you run out and buy whatever she’s got cooking.  Like Italian prune plums for jam or sour cherries for milkshakes.  Seriously.  I have laughed and cried at her stories in A Homemade Life and I am so looking forward to reading her new book Delancey — I’m just saving it to space out the Molly goodness.  I bookmarked almost every recipe in A Homemade Life, and as soon as I fell on her Cranberry Chutney with Crystallized Ginger and Dried Cherries (the night before we went to the market for all of our Thanksgiving supplies), I knew I had a plan coming together.

With all of these ideas in mind, I took Molly’s flavours, some of the base spices & ingredients from the Green Tomato Chutney I’ve been experimenting with, and came up with my new perfect cranberry sauce.  Well, really, it’s a chutney.  It’s got the sour tang from the vinegar, the sweetness of the brown sugar and maple syrup, a citrus zip from the orange zest and Cointreau, and the roundness of the cloves and cinnamon.  And at the end of it all, you get a sweet bite of ginger.  I am in love, and in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m happy to share it with you all.  Thank you for reading, commenting on, and inspiring my continuing KitchenOperas adventures!

Cranberry & Cherry Chutney
I love the sweet-sour-tart thing going on in this chutney. Inspired by Molly’s Cranberry Chutney with Crystallized Ginger and Dried Cherries at her blog, Orangette, and in her book, A Homemade Life.  Makes about 3 cups.

• 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
• 2 whole cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/3 cup Cointreau (or other orange liqueur)
• zest of 1 orange
• 1 bag (227g / 8oz) fresh cranberries
• 1/4 cup crystallised ginger, chopped
• 1 cup (165g) dried cherries

Combine vinegar, sugar, maple syrup, salt, cloves, cinnamon, and Cointreau in a pot.  Stir over medium heat for 10 minutes, allowing the sugar to dissolve and the spices to infuse into the liquid.

Add the cranberries, ginger, and cherries, and bring to a boil.  Turn down the heat and simmer for 15 minutes.  The cranberries will “pop”, and you can keep cooking them down into a thick sauce.

Remove from heat and let cool completely.  Transfer to an airtight jar and keep in the fridge.