COINTREAU CRANBERRY RELISH

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Due to some surgery, I found myself with some extra downtime pre-Thanksgiving this year. Naturally, I binged on cooking shows, Thanksgiving specials in particular. I garnered some great ideas to try for next Thanksgiving since I couldn’t cook this year.

However, with some help from my sister, I was able to try out Ted Allen’s Cointreau Cranberry Relish and it was amazing! I always make fresh cranberry sauce, but is has always been very standard (i.e. basic) and often I’m the only one who has any. That is now forever changed with this cranberry relish, which has amazing depth of favor and fantastic texture. It has a perfect balance of sweet, tart and spice from the cinnamon. Even my sister, who always passes on the cranberry sauce, had this adorning her Thanksgiving plate and every subsequent plate the rest of the weekend.

This is really so good you’ll want to make it all fall and winter! I want it in the fridge all the time - great with turkey (of course), roast chicken, pork chops and in sandwiches. I am even tempted to heat it up and use it as an ice cream topping! As I write this I realize little jars full of this tasty relish would make fantastic hostess gifts this holiday season. Awesome.

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Cointreau Cranberry Relish

Adapted from Ted Allen’s version, as seen on The Kitchen, and recipe on The Food Network.

Ingredients

12 oz organic Cranberries

1 finely diced Granny Smith Apple

3/4 cup of sugar

1/2 cup of Cointreau

1/2 cup water

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon (generous 1/4 teaspoon)

Grated zest from one lemon and orange

Directions

Combine one 12-ounce bag cranberries, 1 diced Granny Smith apple, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup Cointreau, 1/2 cup water and 1/4 teaspoon each ground cinnamon in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the berries start to pop and continue cooking about 20 minutes. Off the heat, stir in the grated zest of 1 each lemon and orange. Taste. If you feel it should be a little sweeter (I decreased the original amount of sugar) add a little more, if it needs a little more cinnamon, add now; cook for a few more minutes. Set aside to keep at room temperature if using shortly for a meal or chill to keep for longer. It is even delicious straight out of the fridge.

Enjoy!

Notes:

  • Always buy organic if you can, especially important when using the skin of items, like the lemon and oranges you zest for this recipe.

  • The original recipe calls for a peeled and diced apple. We left the skin on the apple, why not? It’s less work and the skin is where most of the nutrition is. But worth mentioning, is that the skin will not breakdown so if you don’t want that texture in your relish, then peel the apple before dicing it.

  • Ours seemed a little too sweet when we followed the original recipe, so we added a little more cinnamon and cooked it a little longer. After it was chilled it was no longer too sweet but I reduced the sugar in this version to tame the sweetness a bit more.

  • I specified finely diced as the original recipe didn’t specify. Without direction from the recipe, we thought a dice similar in size to the cranberries made the most sense. However, in hind sight, a smaller dice would have been better as the cranberries break up much more easily than the apples so in the end the apple pieces stood out.