Spiced Whole Cranberry Sauce

If you don't like cranberries or cranberry sauce, you should be sodomized by a hundred violent criminals, be disfigured and covered in feces and paraded around town in public humiliation, be tortured daily for three months, rolled up in fat-soaked pelts and set on by ravenous wild animals, have your entire extended family disinherited and tossed into lifelong sentences in labor camps, and your corpse left to hang from poles in public until it becomes a skeletal wind chime. That's how much I like cranberries; my aunt would have to pry the bowl of it out of my hands every Thanksgiving. This is a prototype recipe I've been wanting to work on for years:

Today's Speicimen

Ingredients

• 12 oz. whole cranberries


• 1 cup cold water


• ⅞ cup cane sugar


• 1 tsp. lemon zest


• 1 tsp. ground fresh ginger


• ½ tsp. ground cinnamon


• ½ tsp. ground nutmeg


• 6 whole cloves

Directions

1. Add everything but the cranberries, lemon zest, ginger, and cloves to a small pot on medium heat.


2. When the mixture comes to a boil add the cranberries, lemon zest, ginger, and cloves and stir while reducing the temperature to low.


3. Keep stirring the sauce until it begins to simmer, then cover and let cook for thirty minutes.


4. Turn the temperature off and leave the sauce to sit for an hour to cool down and allow the cloves to infuse into it before serving or transferring to the fridge for storage.

Next Time in the Lab

That turned out pretty well! Not only that, but I learned a way to zest without using a zester or having to wrestle with a paring knife. All you do is cover a regular stand-up grater with plastic wrap or (if you're ghetto) a plastic bag and rub the fruit on the plastic covering the smallest perforations. This prevents the teeth of the perforations from tearing into the pith and causes most of the zest to either grate off or cling to the plastic. I used the same technique with the ginger to get a good fine mush. Still, as good as it was, I would do a couple things differently next time:

• Double the lemon zest and ginger to two teaspoons each and see if they overpower the cranberry flavor


• Add a quarter teaspoon of cardamon


• Reduce the number of cloves down to four

Basic Black Beans & Brown Rice

We all get poor, right? Well, beans and rice is probably the ultimately healthy and energy-packed way to cut corners in your monthly grocery expenses. Beans provide protein, the brown rice provide complex carbohydrates, and they both provide colon-scrubbing fiber. I use brown rice instead of white rice because white rice is gooey useless blandness, whereas brown rice not only has more nutrients but has a pleasant nutty flavor.

Today's Specimen

Ingredients

• 2 15 oz. can black beans


• 2 cups long-grain brown rice


• 4 cloves garlic, brunoise dice


• 1 medium yellow onion, large or medium dice


• 2½ cups water


• 1 tbsp. olive oil


• 1 tbsp. ground cumin


• 1 tsp. black pepper


• 1 tsp. chili powder


• ¼ tsp. salt

Directions

1. In a medium pot heat olive oil on medium heat and add garlic and onion, cooking until the onion is slightly translucent.


2. Add water, rice, beans (including juice), and spices and raise temperature to medium-high to bring mixture to a boil.


3. When the mixture has come to a full boil lower the temperature to medium again and allow to cook uncovered for ten minutes.


4. Lower the temperature to low and cook covered for twenty minutes then remove from burner, stir, and allow to sit covered for ten to fifteen minutes.

Next Time in the Lab

This is just a basic black bean and brown rice recipe for a reason, meaning from here you can make all sorts of variations. This is a list of a few that come to mind.

• Add one or two poblanos or a green bell pepper, large or medium dice


• Add a large tomato, large or medium dice


• Add about 2 cups carrot, fine julienne cut in half


• Add a can (15 oz.) of whole kernel corn


• Substituting butter for the olive oil can really bring out the nutty flavor of the brown rice

If you want to make a sort of Southwest Chili gulash out of this, add all of the above (cooking the pepper with the garlic and onion) with an additional half cup of water, two or three tablespoons of tomato paste, oregano, basil, some fresh cilantro, and a bit of cayenne and nutmeg, with a couple tablespoons of chili powder instead of the one teaspoon.

This Is Not Enchilada Sauce

Sometimes you run into a recipe that has rave reviews spilling off its coattails and it turns out to be awful or there's something fundamentally wrong with it that causes it to not turn out right. That's what happened when I ran across this enchilada sauce recipe on Allrecipes.Com, which looked pretty good to me on casual inspection, though I did wonder about the thickness of it since I saw neither hide nor hair of any flour or cream. My misgivings turned out to be well-founded, proving yet again that a culinary mad scientist should pay heed to instinct and at least do some research and compare different recipes. Here it is, with my on-the-fly modifications:

Today's Specimen

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp. olive oil


• 3 cloves garlic, finely diced


• 1 tbsp. onion, finely diced


• ½ tsp. dried oregano


• 1 tbsp. chili powder


• ½ tsp. dried basil


• ¼ tsp. ground cumin


• 1 tsp. dried parsley


• 1 pinch ground black pepper


• 1 pinch dried cayenne powder


• 1 pinch salt


• 6 oz. tomato puree


• 1½ cups water

Directions

1. Saute the garlic and onion in the olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat until the onion turns soft and translucent and before the garlic starts to brown.


2. Add all the other ingredients and stir until the mixture is evenly distributed. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat and allow the sauce to simmer uncovered for thirty minutes, stirring occasionally.

Next Time in the Lab

The flavor turned out to be pretty close to what I was looking for, though it was a little overwhelmingly pungent. The only major drawback to it was watery it was, even after I tried to reduce it down. Also, it looked a bit funny, with all the leafy particles floating around in it. This sauce definitely calls for a thickening agent, some sweetener, and the application of some vigorous whisking or a food processor.

• Substitute eight ounces of tomato sauce for the six ounces of puree


• Reduce the chili powder down to 2 teaspoons and omit the cumin


• Add a teaspoon of cocoa powder and a pinch of nutmeg


• I'll probably omit the parsley, too, since that seems a bit like overkill


• Maybe toss in a teaspoon of paprika for coloring


• Slowly whisk in ground flour while the sauce simmers until it attains the desired thickness


• Beat the sauce to hell with a whisk or a food processor so as to remove the unsightly chunks of oregano and basil