I'll be honest: this wasn't one of those "I'll take a recipe and give it a new twist" type of thing. I just happened to have clementines in the fridge and not the traditional oranges that you would normally find in cranberry sauce. And it ended up delicious! Which is good because we always have clementines and rarely have oranges in the winter. Mainly due to the fact that Jake likes how easy they are to peel (I happen to like them, too). We could have oranges sitting in the fridge for weeks untouched but the clementines disappear. All because of the skin. Can you peel a clementine in one shot?
Of course, most people would eat cranberry sauce with a spoon during the holidays, but I wanted to pair it with brie because a) it isn't the holidays anymore, and b) you can pass it off as more of a "meal" when you add cheese and crackers. And being so busy with a little one growing up fast, we have lots of these "meals" now-a-days.
Cranberry-Clementine Sauce Printer-Friendly Version
3/4 cup granulated sugar 1/4 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup clementine juice 4 cups fresh or frozen cranberries 1 tablespoon clementine zest
Rinse cranberries with cold water. In a medium saucepan, add sugars, water, and clementine juice. Stir until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and add cranberries and zest. Return to a boil and then reduce heat to medium low. Cook until cranberries start to burst, about ten minutes. If you like the sour burst of biting into a whole cranberry then let them stay whole. If not, crush them up.
Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. Pour sauce into a serving bowl and chill in the refrigerator (unless you want to serve it warm over brie!).
Source: adapted from Two Peas and Their Pod
