cranberry sauce and other thanksgiving preparations

as i may or may not have mentioned to everyone i know, this year garret and i are hosting thanksgiving - it's our first thanksgiving with family visiting our home!  garret's parents, his aunt laura, his grandma, and his aunt rusty are visiting us.  and vermont couldn't be a prettier backdrop to such a holiday! i know this is something we'll remember forever.  i'm just hoping we remember "oh, the great thanksgiving we had in vermont our first year" instead of "the time we ruined thanksgiving" aka "the disaster of the century" aka "thanksgiving 2011: a comedy of errors".  here's hoping we pull it off!

in my newfound quest towards preparedness i've been baking/cooking a lot today - two days early!  being prepared and cooking in advance is literally something that would have been a foreign thought to me as recently as six months ago.  i didn't do much by way of preparing anything in advance in my tiny brooklyn kitchen (where would the prepared stuff have gone? also, when would i have done that - on the subway?) and by "didn't do much by way of preparing" i pretty much mean that i never prepared anything in advance.  as in... there was one time when we had friends coming over for dinner and i was walking down the street with groceries for that dinner no more than 30 minutes before their arrival.  yikes!  

i don't know what changed, but at some point i realized - if you want to serve quiche for breakfast, make it a day early and you won't have to get up at 6am to make a mess and cook that day.  novel idea, me.  so, today i made two loaves of bread (banana and cranberry, for breakfast on friday) and homemade cranberry sauce.  now, i'm usually a big fan of the canned stuff (seriously - it's delicious and the shape is charming) but i felt like "real" cranberry sauce seemed more appropriate (read: grown up?) so i went for it.  it was really quite easy and the result is delicious.  it's chilling in my refrigerator waiting to be consumed two days from now as i write.

in case you want to try it out, here's the recipe:

1 12 oz bag of cranberries

1/3 cup of white sugar

2/3 cup of brown sugar

3/4 cup of orange juice

the zest of one orange

the juice of one orange

directions: put everything in a pot on medium high.  let it go!  as the liquid starts to cook off, you may want to turn it down more - maybe to medium low or so.  the cranberries will burst from time to time - the skins will crack open as the sauce forms.  the total cooking time is around 25 minutes.

i was amazed at how quickly it became something resembling cranberry sauce!! here's a (rather unpoetic) picture of the finished product... though i swear that in real life it's citrusy delicious cranberry stuff and not zombie guts, which is what it looks like here.