Cranberry Sausage Frittata

Cranberry Sausage FrittataYield: one 12-inch skillet, about 6-8 servings.Frittata method and proportions come from this very helpful post on Cookie and Kate. Ingredient combination is a blend of various recipes from a "cranberry quiche" Google search.

Ingredients
12 eggs
3 Tbsp. full-fat dairy (I used 2% plain Greek yogurt)
4 oz. pepper jack cheese, grated
1 lb. ground pork sage sausage (I used this one from HEB)
1/2 butternut squash, peeled and cubed (generous 2 cups; about a 1/2-inch dice)
1 cup fresh cranberries, halved

Directions
Prep the butternut squash first since that takes the longest. Grate the cheese.* Preheat oven to 475.

Crack your eggs into a bowl or 4-cup measuring cup; whisk well. Add dairy and whisk again. Add about half the grated cheese. Set aside.

Heat a cast iron skillet over high to medium-high heat. Brown the sausage, breaking it up into fairly small clumps as it browns. When the sausage is almost done, add the butternut squash to the skillet, and continue cooking until the squash is tender. Add the cranberries and cook for about another minute. Remove pan from the heat for a few minutes.**

Return pan to high heat; give it a minute or two to heat up, especially if you're using cast iron. Give your egg mixture another whisk and pour it in. Stir/jiggle everything just enough to get the egg mixture well distributed throughout the sausage-butternut mixture. Then let it cook for about a minute, undisturbed, until the edges start to lighten in color. During this minute(ish) sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top.

Transfer skillet to oven and cook 7-14 minutes, until egg is puffed and the center jiggles just a little when you jiggle the pan. (I would just like to point out that I've now used the word jiggle three times in two paragraphs.) Check it after 6-7 minutes. Then keep checking regularly. Mine took 9 minutes, and my oven was a little overly ambitious at 450 rather than 425.

Remove to a wire rack to cool. Optionally, drive through the snow to your friend's house. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Notes

*You get a better texture if you buy a block of cheese and grate it, since the pre-shredded stuff coated with anti-clumping stuff which can make for a slightly gritty texture.

**I don't know if this step is crucial. It was in the Cookie and Kate recipe. And I did it because it gave me a good chance to hurriedly get dressed.

If the sausage release quite a bit of fat or water while you brown it, drain some of it off before adding the butternut squash.

An alternate flavor profile I think would be yummy: use swiss, gruyere, or gouda cheese instead of pepper jack, and add some fresh thyme to the mix. I love cranberry and thyme together but wasn't sure how it would play with the pepper jack.

Winter Fruit Chutney Bites

For a recent slumber party with my foodie club, I was looking for a snack that was wintery, tasty (obviously), could be prepared ahead of time, and could play nicely with a cheese board. Enter fruit chutney. This appetizer met all those criteria. I made the chutney two days before the party, used storebought baguette crisps, did the onions the day of, then transported everything to my friend's house in jars, set the various elements on a tray, and invited my friends to assemble their own bites.

Most of the chutney recipes I looked at included onion in the chutney, but I decided to keep it separate, which frees me up to use the leftover chutney in a variety of ways. I imagine it'd be great served with ham or pork, dolloped atop french toast, stirred into pancake batter, mixed with butter and spread on toast, maybe even added to a citrusy smoothie or mixed into a drink.

Feel free to mix and match ingredients. Add some fresh orange juice or orange zest, use nutmeg or cloves instead of or in addition to the spices here, use thyme instead of rosemary, add a few cracks of black pepper to contrast the sweetness of the fruit, use different kinds of cheese ... basically, be creative and have fun with it!

Winter Fruit Chutney Bites
Yield: About 2 cups chutney and 3/4 to 1 cup caramelized onion
Adapted from Reluctant Entertainer; caramelized onion method from The Kitchn

Ingredients
1 Tbsp. butter
1 medium-large red onion, vertically sliced
Splash of wine, water, or balsamic vinegar (I used cheap chardonnay)

6 oz. fresh cranberries
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 to 1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon
3 allspice berries, ground
1 cup peeled and chopped pear
1/2 cup peeled and chopped Granny Smith apple
1/8 cup crystallized ginger, diced
Juice from 1/2 of one lemon
1/2 tsp. apple cider vinegar

Blue cheese crumbles
Bread slices, crackers, or toasted baguette slices
Fresh rosemary, minced

Directions
To caramelize the onions: In a medium to large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add the onions and stir well to get them nicely coated. Saute them for a couple of minutes, then reduce heat to low or medium-low, and let them hang out for a good 30 minutes or more, stirring every so often, until they're super soft and caramelized. Do keep an eye on them, because you don't want them to burn, but you do want them to caramelize. When they're looking good, increase the heat, add a splash of wine, water, or balsamic vinegar to deglaze the pan, and let it cook until the liquid has mostly evaporated. Remove from heat.

To make the chutney: Pour cranberries into a colander, rinse and drain, and pick out any that look suspicious. If your cranberries are frozen, no need to thaw them. In a large saucepan (tall sides are your friend; this will splatter), combine brown sugar, water, salt, cinnamon, allspice, and cranberries. Bring to a boil, ensuring the sugar dissolves. Then reduce heat and simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Many of the berries will burst while simmering, so use a splatter screen if if you have one; otherwise, loosely cover the pot with a lid that's tilted to let steam out.

Add the pear, apple, and crystallized ginger, and continue simmering for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and add the lemon juice and cider vinegar. Taste, and if it's too puckery sweet, add just a bit more cider vinegar.

To serve: Spread some of the cranberry mixture on a your bread or carb of choice, top with some caramelized onion, sprinkle with blue cheese, and finish with a sprinkle of fresh rosemary.

Notes
You can assemble a whole bunch of these and arrange them on a tray, or you can set out the elements and let guests assemble their own. Personally, I like the latter approach because it leaves me available to interact with people instead of fussing over food, and leftovers are easier to pack up and reuse (i.e., no soggy pre-assembled bites that sit out for two hours and get gross).

Mulled Cranberry Apple Cider

For quite some time now, one of my coworkers and I have been planning to make some warm, festive beverages to share at the office. Originally the plan was to do pumpkin cider in celebration of autumnal weather. Buuut we didn't manage to make it happen until after December 1, so something more Christmasy seemed like the way to go.

Enter cranberries. I've shared before, I always associate cranberries more with winter than fall, even though they're mostly mostly in the stores around Thanksgiving. They look festive, and their tart flavor is perfect for brightening up sometimes-dreary winter days.

So last week I whipped up this mulled cranberry apple cider, my friend whipped up some hot cocoa, and our coworkers rejoiced. I've made this cider once before and love the flavors and the ease of prep.

Mulled Cranberry Apple Cider
Adapted from Rachael Ray
Yield: 12 servings (3 quarts total)

Ingredients
2-inch piece of ginger root
1 orange
4 whole cloves
4 cinnamon sticks
2 quarts cloudy organic apple cider
1 quart cranberry juice
1-2 cups fresh cranberries, rinsed (frozen is fine)
Slow cooker

Directions
Peel the ginger and cut it into 3-4 smaller pieces. Cut 2-3 slices out of the center of the orange. Then use a paring knife to remove some of the peel from the "heels" of the orange that didn't get sliced. Try to get as little of the white pith as possible, but don't stress about it. Stick the cloves through the piece(s) of orange peel. This basically just makes it easy to fish out the cloves later. (Alternatively, you could just throw in some orange slices and some loose cloves.)

Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker (4-quart capacity or larger). Cook on high for 2-3 hours, checking it after an hour or so. If it's hot enough, turn the slow cooker down to warm. If it's getting too spiced, then fish out some or all of the ginger, cloves, and cinnamon sticks.

Tips

• If you need to expedite this, then warm the apple cider and/or cranberry juice in the microwave before adding to the slow cooker. I warmed my apple cider in the microwave, and after an hour on high in the slow cooker, everything was piping hot. If you're really in a hurry, follow Rachael Ray's stovetop directions.
• I bought a gallon of cider and roughly a half gallon of cranberry juice. I used half of each to make one batch of this cider. Since I don't normally drink either of these things on their own, I poured the leftover cranberry juice into the cider jug and stuck it in my freezer. I'll pull it out for round two when my family is in town for Christmas later this month. 
• The above tip sounds frighteningly like a story problem from math classes of yorn: If Karissa has 4 quarts of cider and 2 quarts of cranberry juice, then pours half of it into her slow cooker, how many quarts of juice are left?

Cranberry Orange Cinnamon Rolls

Do you ever get on a kick with a certain food or ingredient? I seem to get a bit obsessed with cranberries every winter. Even though cranberries are in season in the fall, I always associate them with winter. Maybe because they're red, which I associate with Christmas, which goes with snow, which goes with winter. Or maybe it's because their tart flavor is perfect for brightening even the dreariest of winter days. Besides, pumpkin keeps me plenty busy all fall, so a girl's gotta have something to obsess over when it becomes less acceptable to put pumpkin in everything.

So when my mom and I were discussing cinnamon rolls the other day while plotting to make some in our respective homes, and when I started thinking about what kind of twist I could put on them, cranberries sprang to mind. (I had just made pumpkin oatmeal cinnamon chip cookies the previous weekend so didn't think I could get away with making pumpkin cinnamon rolls that weekend.)

I poked around on Google to get a feel for good ratios of cranberries:sugar:dough. By far, Smitten Kitchen was the best version and most informative I came across, though I added some embellishments of my own. For the cranberry filling, I added a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, with inspiration from the cranberry crostini from a couple years ago. I also used butter and cream cheese in the filling, since I think cream cheese adds a delightful extra gooeyness factor to cinnamon rolls. And I sprinkled in some almonds as well.  I was also tempted to add a bit of fresh thyme, since the cranberry thyme scones recipe I found a few weeks ago was superb. That may still happen the next time I make these rolls.

For the dough, I wanted to let my bread machine do the mixing and kneading, so I used the cinnamon roll dough recipe from the little book that came with the bread machine, but added some orange zest per Smitten Kitchen's recipe.

My other adjustment to the dough was to leave out the yeast. No, this was not intentional. No, the dough did not rise very well at all without it (funny how that works). An hour into the rising time, the dough didn't seem any larger, but I attributed it to the cold weather. After a couple more hours, I started thinking through what could be wrong, and it finally hit me: I had no recollection of getting the yeast out of my fridge and measuring any into the dough. So I worked some yeast into the dough, and after another 2-3 hours of rising time, it finally puffed up a bit. So if you make these rolls, do yourself a favor and add the yeast at the beginning like a normal person.

Cranberry Orange Cinnamon Rolls

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen and my bread machine's recipe book
Yield: 12 rolls (more if you cut them a bit thinner)

Note: Plan to prepare the dough and shape the rolls the night before, then let them rise overnight in the fridge, then bake the next morning

Dough
Zest from 1 orange or 1-1/2 clementines - use about 3/4 in the dough and 1/4 in the filling
1/2 cup water
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. oil
1-1/2 tsp. salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
2-1/4 tsp. active dry yeast

Filling
3 Tbsp. butter, softened
2-3 Tbsp. cream cheese, softened (I used reduced fat)
1 to 1-1/2 cups fresh cranberries (thawed, if frozen)
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 of the orange zest from above
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. cloves
1/16 tsp. nutmeg
A couple handfuls of sliced or chopped almonds (optional)

Icing
2 cups powdered sugar
About 1/4 to 1/3 cup water (or orange juice)
Smidge of maple extract (or vanilla)

Directions
Make the dough and let it rise: Following your bread machine's directions, measure all dough ingredients into the bread machine, then use the dough cycle. (Alternatively, if you don't have a bread machine, just use your preferred yeast dough making method. Smitten Kitchen's recipe and instructions are great and include directions for those who have a stand mixer and those who don't.) Place dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover with a towel, and let rise until doubled in size. Punch down before rolling out and shaping into rolls. (Note: many bread machines include this rise time as part of the dough cycle. If yours does, you don't need to let it rise twice before shaping.)

Make the filling: If they're not already out on your counter, get out the butter and cream cheese to let them soften. When they're soft, stir them together in a small bowl; set aside. Pick through your cranberries and discard any suspicious ones. Use a food processor to pulse the cranberries until they're pretty finely chopped but aren't a puree (or just chop them finely by hand). Scrape out into a small to medium bowl. Then add the brown sugar, orange zest, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Stir to combine well. Set aside.

Go ahead and spray a baking pan. I think the pan we used was an 11 x 7 glass baking dish.

Roll and shape the dough: When the dough has risen, punch it down and work out any large air bubbles. At this point, you may need to let the dough rest for 5-10 minutes before rolling out. On a well-floured surface, roll the dough into a rectangle about 18 inches wide by 12 inches deep. Spread the butter and cream cheese mixture evenly over the dough. Then spread the cranberry mixture evenly over the dough. For both the butter/cream cheese and the cranberry mixture, I used a basic soup spoon to scatter dollops of filling around the dough, then used the back of the spoon to spread it around. It doesn't have to be perfect. Sprinkle in the almonds, if using.

Now, use a knife or pastry cutter to cut your rectangle in half, into two 9 x 12-inch rectangles (this will make it easier to roll. Starting with one of the 9-inch edges near you, roll the dough up and away from yourself, rolling as tightly as possible. There will be some cranberry juice leaking out. Embrace it. Using your knife or pastry cutter, cut the log into 6 or 7 slices, each about 1 to 1-1/2 inches thick. Carefully transfer each slice/roll to the prepared baking pan. Repeat the process with your other 9 x 12 rectangle.

Rise again, then bake: Cover your baking dish with plastic wrap, then place in your fridge overnight. The next morning, remove rolls from the fridge about 30 minutes before you want them to go into the oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Make the icing: While the rolls bake, measure powdered sugar, water, and maple extract into a medium bowl. Use an electric mixer to mix until well combined and smooth. Start with less water; add more as needed to reach your desired consistency. When the rolls come out of the oven, drizzle with the icing.

Notes

• If you have a favorite cinnamon roll dough recipe, just use that but add orange zest.
• I was a little worried that the fresh cranberries would release too much juice and result in soggy rolls. But that wasn't the case at all! To quote from Smitten Kitchen, "that puddle of cranberry juice run-off jams into a gooey brown sugar cranberry caramel and winds around and through the buttery, tender yeast-raised spirals." Yes, please!
• These rolls were quite sweet, but not quite too sweet for my taste. I think they would have been equally good with about 1/4 cup less brown sugar in the filling. 
• For the almonds, I used a very light hand. So they were barely there but didn't add a whole lot of taste or texture. I think walnuts or pecans would also be good.
• I made my icing with water, but orange juice would have been lovely. Also, the quantities above yielded more icing than we used; you may prefer to use more icing than we did.

Cranberry Crostini with Goat Cheese and Brie

As we approach Christmas day, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite recipes I've made in a while. Though I made these crostini for Thanksgiving, the sauce smelled just like Christmas! I thought it was the perfect way to celebrate Thanksgiving and look forward to putting up Christmas decorations the next day.

These crostini are wonderfully simple to make, but look and taste fancy. I think the blend of spices was pretty much perfect. No single flavor took over the dish, but instead created a symphony of sweet, spiced, tart, rich, creamy, and crunchy.

I made some of mine with goat cheese and some with Brie, and I can't decide which I liked better. If doing small, two-bite bread slices from a skinny baguette, you're probably good either way. If doing larger slices from a fatter loaf, Brie might be a bit rich.

This recipe is very portable and easy to make ahead. Toast the bread slices and, once they're cool, store in a large zip bag until ready to serve. The cranberry sauce can be made days in advance and stored in the fridge. Just warm it up a bit in the microwave right before serving. I traveled with all my components separate, and let people assemble their own crostini. That way each person could choose which cheese(s) they wanted, the bread didn't get soggy from sitting too long, and any leftovers were easy to take home.

Speaking of leftovers, they do well on crackers, leftover turkey, leftover dinner rolls, and pretty much anything else you can think of. One of my friends says the cranberry sauce is good on pancakes, and I may or may not have made french toast topped with leftover cheeses and cranberry sauce.

Cranberry Crostini with Goat Cheese and(or) Brie

Adapted slightly from Cookie and Kate
Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients
1 baguette or small loaf of artisan whole grain bread, sliced into 1/2-inch thick slices
Olive oil
Salt
12-oz. bag fresh cranberries
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. allspice (or equal parts cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg)
Zest of 1/2 an orange
10 oz. (total) goat cheese, Brie, ricotta, or cream cheese, or some combination thereof - at room temperature

Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly brush both sides of bread slices with olive oil, and arrange them in a single layer on a baking sheet or two. Lightly sprinkle with salt. Toast the bread in the oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden on both sides, turning them halfway. Set aside to cool, and turn off the oven.

Rinse the cranberries and throw out any bad ones; set aside. In a saucepan, whisk together the honey, water, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. Bring to a gentle boil over medium to medium-high heat, whisking often. Add the cranberries and cook, stirring frequently, until cranberries have popped and the sauce is the consistency you like. The longer you cook it, the more saucy and less chunky it will get. Beware that the cranberries may try to attack you while they're popping. Remove from heat and stir in the orange zest.

To assemble the crostini, spread each slice of bread with cheese, then top with cranberry sauce.