Cranberry Curd -- Thinking Outside The Can!

I'm thinking outside the can with all my cranberries!

It's so fun to have lots of cranberries to play with. I'm going to do something savory with them tonight for dinner -- still in experimental stages -- but I also juiced a few cups this morning so I could try my hand at cranberry curd:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the color is red, but not as vibrant as the berries or the juice because the color of the egg yolks is tempering it a bit. It is delicious and smooth as silk, though. Curd is supposed to freeze well, so one jar will be going in the freezer for Christmas, just because it's the right color. 

Addition: I got chastised for not including the recipe. I used this lemon curd recipe as the model, but switched the lemon juice for freshly-squeezed cranberry juice. I also added a pinch of salt because I thought I needed to add some pop to make up for the lack of zest.

Cranberries In Photos

I am a little sore and a little sunburned, but I'm ok with that because the cause was a glorious afternoon of cranberry picking! As I mentioned yesterday, the two Oregon counties to our north grow many delicious cranberries. We got to go pick the edge of a bog that is waiting its turn for a flood and harvest.

On our way to "our" bog, we got to see the tail end of the harvest of a flooded field. Such amazing colors!

It's hard to tell size from this picture, but the berries are HUGE compared to the tundra cranberries I picked in Alaska. But you CAN see how plentiful they are.

Picking into a white, slightly translucent bucket on a sunny day leads to the illusion that these are free cranberries, all huddled in a circle. They're not! This was my half-full bucket.

Our food crew, showing off our harvest. All told, the three of us picked about 29 pounds of cranberries in just over an hour.

I wasted no time. An hour after I got home with the berries, there was a cranberry crisp bubbling away in the stove, another assembled and frozen, and some sliced berries simmering in balsamic and sugar to go into a roasted beet salad.

Now I just need to finish cleaning and drying the rest and I can go to bed!

Cranberries!

Really, I should wait until tomorrow to post about this because I'll probably have pictures, but I'm excited, so I can't wait.

I didn't know this until we moved here, but the two Oregon coastal counties to our north produce about 5% of the national cranberry harvest. Because the growing season here is so long, the berries get to stay on the bush longer than in other cranberry-producing regions, so they get bigger and redder and sweeter.

And I get to pick some tomorrow!

A friend/colleague leads cranberry gleanings in bogs near Port Orford. Gleaners get to keep half (I think) of what they pick, with the other half going to support the Port Orford Co-op. I'm hoping my fingers remember their cranberry-picking lessons from Alaska so I can come home with lots of berries to play with.

One Up, One Down

So just in time for us to move to a different temporary place of residence (before moving to our permanent place of residence in a week and a half), Michael has come down with what Darcy had. So they're both in bed, she because a fun, active day after being sick wears a girl out, and he because being sick wears a man out.

And I'm here blogging about it, hoping that Michael recovers as quickly as Darcy did and that I don't get it.

Darcy and I drove up the coast today, to one of her favorite places: Bandon, OR. We had a good time, as the sun was shining, we didn't need coats, and we hit all the hot-spots, which now include a new cheese maker. I got a significant amount of Christmas shopping done at non-chain stores, which feels good despite the need to move the gifts a couple times. In speaking to a merchant, I actually built a great work connection and got a lead on a regional funder I didn't know about -- so yay for networking. 

The one downside was that we learned that our favorite beach-trash art group (and yes, we have one!) has opened a new and beautiful venue in downtown Bandon, but they are closed on Sundays! We could only peek in the window and dream of our next visit. The Washed Ashore Project is amazing and you should all check out their website to look at pictures. They collect trash from beaches (and accept donations, so I need to figure out a storage system so I can keep the stuff we pick up to take to them) and then sort it by color and material before making amazing sculptures out of them. The photos online do not do these things justice, but they're still worth checking out.

I'm hoping tomorrow brings us three healthy people, continued sunshine, and speedy packing.