The only thing I couldn’t reconcile, I told her, was a lone bag of cranberries left over from the fall. One bag really isn’t enough to play with in any kind of fun way but, as far as I knew, the cranberries would keep a while longer. Keep or toss, I wanted to know. While my meager tendencies toward thrift and orderliness battled, she calmly walked to her own freezer, took out a package of cranberries and held it up as an offering. “Want them?” she asked. “I won’t use them and will just keep them until they need to be thrown away.” Score! (Aside: this is why you should always share the minutiae of your life with friends and internet. You never know when someone will give you a bag of cranberries in response.)
Two bags of cranberries is enough to make a smallish amount of very delicious chutney, which can be canned or refrozen in a labeled and dated container so you know what it is when the memory of having made it inevitably fades (which it will, even for you young and chippy types). Even more fun, a perfectly lovely chutney can be made with the little bits of whatever else you encounter during freezer cleaning. A cup of raisins? Check. A few tablespoons of candied ginger? Oh, my, yes, yes, yes double check. Some chopped jalapeno? I didn’t, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t.
And that’s one reason I adore making chutneys. There are no real requirements, no chemical reaction to prompt and pray for, virtually no rules outside of minding your sugar and acidity in the event you plan water bath processing. My recipe originally came from my dear college friend Kate, with whom I now speak only twice a decade or so but for whom I would gladly and with no questions asked traverse the world if she called out of the blue and requested it of me, and she in turn learned it from someone named Sabra. That’s what it says at the top of the dot-matrix printed page (hello, old Mac SE and your adorable double-floppy arrangement!), “Sabra’s Cranberry Chutney”. Sabra’s version tends toward the more tangy and sweet, while over the years I’ve cut the vinegar and ancillary fruit but upped the spice and citrus. That’s the way of chutney, friends, and I recommend it heartily.
This time I used those two bags of berries, the juice of the last orange (no more oranges until winter comes again – this last one wasn’t looking to hot but was just fine for juice), some raisins, chopped candied ginger, two cups or so of sugar, and about a half cup of leftover rioja from the night before for an added peppery kick. Cranberries cook down easily and thicken well. Too well in this case, so I added another half cup of o.j. on the back end and called it good. If I wanted to be more authentic I’d have added some vinegar or something pickled, but I’m not totally wedded to authenticity here and I like the final product so that’s that.
Now, as I said, this didn’t make a lot – three cups, maybe. It can be canned and processed in a hot water bath, if you’d like and, if I went that route, I’d have done it in quarter pints and processed just in a largish saucepan - no need to fire up the ginormous canning kettle for such a wee bit of processing. I’d say fifteen minutes after return to full boil ought to do it and there you go. For my part, I placed two well-marked freezer containers back into my newly cleaned and tidy freezer to await use.
And what use might that be?