Monday Recipe - Cranberry-Orange Preserves

This weekend saw the last of my canning enterprises for the year. I've previously made apple butter and pumpkin butter, and was talking to one of the members at the gym about it. She mentioned she'd seen a recipe for a spicy cranberry relish, which intrigued me. So I went looking for recipes last week. Online, I found a recipe for a cranberry, onion, and serrano chili relish. But I also just got a jelly/jam/preserve cookbook last week from one of my coworkers, so I looked up in there and found a cranberry-orange preserve. I decided I wanted a sweet preserve to put on toast, but the idea of the chilis sounded good as well. So I decided to add some chili pepper to the cranberry-orange preserve. I pretty much came to this conclusion at the store while looking at the red onions, and decided I didn't really want an onion relish. So I grabbed a bunch of oranges instead.

I got home, and even though I'd gotten more oranges that I thought I'd use, it turned out I didn't have enough for the recipe. So I added the juice of two limes and hoped that because these oranges were enormous, they'd be considered more than the average orange. Next time I make the recipe, I'll try adding a little more chili, because while there's a very faint faint hint of it, you can really hardly taste it at the quantity in the recipe below (though that could be because I didn't include the seeds). The recipe below made 9 jars of preserves.

Cranberry-Orange Preserves
3lbs fresh cranberries
3lbs sugar (6 cups)
juice of 6 large oranges
zest of 6 large oranges
juice of 2 limes
T serrano chili, minced finely

Put the cranberries (whole) and citrus juice in a large pot and heat on medium until cranberries around very soft (about 15-20 minutes). Add sugar, zest, and chili and turn up heat on high. Stir occasionally (and be wary because every time I stirred, it would start to roil and pop and hit my skin in blazing red bites) until it sets to the consistency you want. This could be 5-10 minutes if you want it to be very loose and runny, or it could be an hour if you want a really thick jam-like consistency (I went for the latter, but next time will probably do a little less).

Follow the proper canning procedures (listed here), unless you're going to eat it right away.