The ShellyBeach

After stopping home for a shower after the race, I went to my friend Allison’s house to can cranberry sauce.   We had to go to the grocery store and get cranberries and jar lids before we could start.  We had a recipe from pickyourown.org and some tentative plans on how much we wanted to make and what not….we bought 6 bags of cranberries, whole cloves, and some lids (and took a slow look at the crafty aisle).

We started off washing the cranberries and picking out the bad ones.

We asked Tessla to find us a cranberry sauce canning recipe, and she consulted the Ball Blue Book like any good canner:

When you cook the cranberries, they pop, which is entertaining.  You can see the cracks in the cranberry skins in this picture:

The first recipe we followed was basically boiling the cranberries and adding sugar.  We followed their directions about how much water to cook the cranberries in, and we ended up having to spoon liquid out, as we had ended up with cranberry soup:

Here’s a picture of the cranberries as they are getting saucy:

While we were making cranberry sauce, we had to sterilize the jars.  If you look carefully in this picture, you’ll see the edge of Alli’s BabyBump.

After our first batch made with just white sugar, we decided to try/tweak the recipe from the comments on the canning website page…we ended up using 1 cup orange juice, 1 cup brown sugar, a little cinnamon, 3 cups cranberries, and we put 6 whole cloves in Allison’s loose tea strainer thingy and added that to the mix.  This made 1 jar of cranberry sauce that was quite delicious, and we did this 6 times.

Here’s a photo of our finished cranberry sauce product:

When Allison’s husband Brian got home from school, he went to Meijer for us and got us some more OJ, brown sugar, and cranberries.  While we were waiting for him to get back, we made the weirdest cookies in the world.  Here’s the recipe:  Mix 1 egg and 1 cup of sugar together.  Add one cup of peanut butter, bake cookies for 12 minutes at 375 degrees.  NO FLOUR!  So weird.  The cookies were delicious.

We were helped greatly all day by Allison and Brian’s cat Tessla: