Late Thoughts On Cranberry Sauce
Having not made a test batch of maple syrup sweetened cranberry sauce - Hey, I made five different variations on the recipe with one of those being a double batch - I will say first that I am well pleased with my recipe. Secondly, the orange blossom honey variation is better than the sugar-sweetened type. But I don't think it's necessary to use a scant cup as I did. 3/4 of a cup, an equal measure of the sugar in the original, is all that's needed. However, I once again add that the better the quality of orange blossom honey you can find, the better it will work with the sauce.
On Saturday night I had dinner with friends who served a ham and I'm not being modest in telling you that the cranberry sauce works as well with ham as it does with turkey.
My one note on the cranberries themselves is that the Ocean Spray bags that are sold in supermarkets everywhere are great to use. I wash them and pick over the berries as I don't want to use mushy, going-bad berries in the sauce. I only had to toss about 8 berries per bag.
Finally, as Christmas nears, I am going to make a batch with maple syrup and I will post a note on how it turns out. And it's likely that with that batch I'll use up the orange flavored sorta-brandy so next year's change will be the use of Cointreau, as I noted below. As is my wont, I'll post about that when the time rolls around.