Holiday eating from The Gluten-free Chicano

Michael Sedano

Condiment Par Excellence: World's Best Cranberry Sauce, Naturally Gluten-Free

The day before preparing a roasted bird, or a simple pork loin that you want to make into an elegant banquet, or frying up a quotidian passel of pork chops à la Mammy Yokum, or a savory dish of stir-fried vegetables, make an essential condiment that is so delicious you serve it as a side-dish: fresh cranberry sauce.

Canned cranberry sauce is a time-honored feature, jellied or whole berry. That's a pale imitation of the real thing, but it's satisfactory. Really, it is; only satisfactory. 

Once you and your guests dig forks into this fresh cranberry and citrus dish, you'll abandon thoughts of picking a can when you're provisioning that meal. Pick up fresh berries and make your own. This recipe makes enough delicious cranberry sauce for numerous meals and snacks.

My granddaughter, who's graduating high school this year, has been preparing this with me for most of her life. Early in our kitchen experience, the 8- or 9-years old girl wrote down the recipe so she would never forget how to do this. 

This is how we do it:

A zester should be on your "all I want for Christmas" gift list, if you don't already own a zester. A zester's a wood rasp with a Ph.D. Keep the plastic sheath around it when you're not using it. Reaching into a drawer with a hidden naked zester will zest the skin right off your knuckles!

Rub the washed outside of your citrus with the tool, filling the zester with just the cascara's goodness.

Use your cocido/menudo pot. Pour three bags of fresh cranberries into the pot and set the fire on low-medium. Add the zests as you do each fruit. The berries begin to pop with the heat. Don't add a lot of sugar; you can always make it sweeter but you can't unsweet the too-sweet concoction. A cup is a good start.

Work diligently to get the fruit cut up and into the pot. The juice from the fruit adds essential liquid. Cut the fruit into spoon-size chunks and don't worry about membranes, but do remove seeds.

There's no rule for how many fruit to use, nor the varieties. You can use one toronja, one orange, one limon, or two of this and one of that. Every year's cranberry sauce can have its own character.

With the zest, sugar, fruit in the pot, let the popping fruit signal it's time to get the potato masher and push the fruit into the hot bottom where the low boil works magic.

Texture is up to you. With a lot of smashing you get a more jellied product. 

We enjoy whole berries mixed up with the jellied texture.

Get a gentle boil in the pot and cook on low heat fifteen minutes. More time, if you want a more jellied finish. Let the cranberry sauce cool and put into two containers; one for the meal, another for later. 

You'll enjoy this condiment slathered on a turkey sandwich, as a spread on gluten-free breakfast breads, or puffed rice cakes. Home-made cranberry sauces is naturally gluten-free, so bon apétit and buen provecho.

The Best Part of the Holiday Banquet: Turkey Soup the Day After 

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If your turkey gets roasted without bread stuffing inside the cavity, likely it's a gluten-free carcass you have after the meal. That platter of bones that once held meat, and still has lot of slivers and hunks of flesh, makes a perfect beginning to the post-holiday's economical and absolutely delicious soup, a wondrous gift of the season.

Órale, here's an idea for you singletons who get invited to the holiday feast then have sobras loaded up when you leave. 

Ask for the turkey carcass. Take home the bones and make the soup. 

Celery, carrots, papas, onion, garlic, a tomato if you will. Get them all chopped up into more or less equal sized bits. 

Get a lot of water into that menudo pot, put the carcass into the water that start it boiling. Almost instantly the aroma of rich turkey broth-in-the-making starts filling the air.

Cook at as hard a boil as pleases you and when the meat begins falling off the bones, use a fork or tongs to remove what meat you can. Then pull all the bones and the cola out of the broth.

Given a pot of broth with minimal bones and fragments--nor skin if gente don't appreciate the most flavorsome tidbits of a carcass--add the chopped vegetables, a half a lemon or both halves, and cook until the carrots and papas are fork tender. Maybe that's twenty minutes, and voilà. Hay 'stas. Caldo de turkey.

An Asian flat rice noodle--gluten-free--added for five minutes or so converts this simple soup into a really elegant noodle caldo that will have friends asking for seconds. You can dilute the broth once, or twice, to make the pot of soup go a long way.

Buen gluten-free provecho.